This episode archive includes gear deep-dives, synth setups, MIDI puzzles, wiring disasters, and the occasional small victory. Each year is organized into a season. Click any title to watch the episode and download companion PDFs when available.
Power, Cables, and Staying Sane in a Small Studio When my studio was still fairly simple—a computer, two video monitors, a set of audio monitors, and a keyboard controller—there wasn’t much to think about in terms of power. Everything plugged in easily, and...
Powering a Home Studio: Caution, Reality, and Practical Considerations This is a slightly uncomfortable topic for me to write about—not because it isn’t important, but because it is. Powering a studio safely is a serious matter, and it’s also an area where I want...
Chasing Ghosts: Learning to Understand Noise in a Hardware Studio This is probably the most uncomfortable entry for me to write in the entire studio redesign series—because it deals with a mistake that cost me a lot of time. That said, it’s also one of the most...
When Experimentation Becomes the Biggest Growing Pain Looking back, the desire to experiment was probably the single biggest growing pain I experienced during my studio redesign. It all started when I decided to build a synth-focused studio and went down what I can...
Planning, Not Planning, and Everything in Between In earlier posts, I’ve talked about the importance of having a plan when designing a studio. In others, I’ve suggested that sometimes plans don’t work out—or that not having a plan at all can lead to good results...
Creativity in the Studio: Music, Gear, and Everything in Between When I think about creativity in a music studio, I tend to think of it in two main ways—maybe even three. The first is the most obvious: being creative with music itself—composing, producing,...
The Chain Reaction Problem: When One Change Affects Everything Else One of the biggest challenges I ran into while redesigning my studio was realizing that no change ever happened in isolation. Every adjustment—no matter how small—tended to set off a chain reaction...
A Bit of Context: Why This Studio Redesign Unfolded the Way It Did When I look back at this video series, I sometimes feel the need to offer a bit of a defense—not as an excuse, but as context. The studio redesign didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened during a...
Discovering the Patchbay: The Utility I Didn’t Know I Needed In earlier posts, I’ve mentioned that my original studio setup was extremely minimal. At the time, it consisted of a computer, a set of video monitors, a pair of audio monitors, and a controller keyboard....
From “I Don’t Need a Rack” to Building One Anyway In a previous post, I talked about my slow realization that a patchbay might actually be useful—followed by the much stronger realization that I couldn’t imagine my studio without one. It was a funny progression,...
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