Why I Started the Illustrious Sound Studio Series

A few of my students began asking questions about my studio—what I was using, how it was set up, and how everything worked together. Around the same time, I found myself in the middle of a studio redesign. That overlap made the decision easy: this felt like the right moment to start documenting the process.

Rather than waiting until everything was finished and polished, I decided to begin a video and blog series that captures the studio as it’s being built. Not just the end result, but the thinking behind the decisions, the mistakes that were made, the compromises, and the unexpected turns along the way.

What makes this series different—and important to me from a teaching standpoint—is that I had never set up this type of studio before, which made this series an interesting educational experience.

Starting From Familiar Ground

Historically, my workflow was very simple and very “in the box.”

A computer, a keyboard controller, and a pair of reference monitors—that was it. That setup served me well for years, especially for teaching and composing, but it never went beyond the essentials.

This series begins at a point where I’m stepping outside that comfort zone. I’m working with limited knowledge, limited resources, and very limited access to materials. At the time of filming, the world was just beginning to emerge from the 2019 COVID pandemic, and even basic things—like cables and equipment—were surprisingly hard to find where I live.

In the first episode, things actually go quite smoothly. I know how I want my main studio desk to function, and that part comes together fairly confidently. Later episodes, however, tell a different story. As the studio grows, issues start appearing with monitors, cabling, layout decisions, and overall signal flow—problems I didn’t fully anticipate at the beginning.

Before getting into those details, it helps to clarify two things: the goal, and the problem.

The Goal: Building a Synth Studio

The original goal was simple: I wanted to develop a synth-focused studio.

Like many people, I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole. I started watching videos of studios filled with synthesizers, racks of gear, knobs, buttons, blinking lights, and layered keyboards. There was something about that environment that immediately inspired me. It looked tactile, exciting, and—most importantly—fun.

This was not something I had ever seriously considered before. I had no idea what I was getting into, and I certainly didn’t realize how far it would expand when I first started in 2022. At the time, it was just curiosity, a few pieces of gear, and some inspiration pulling me forward.

The Reality Check: Space and Constraints

The biggest challenge with this studio’s layout is that it has to do many jobs at once.

Since COVID, this room has primarily been my teaching studio. It needs to support live online lessons, daily teaching operations, and focused student interaction. At the same time, it also has to function as a legitimate home recording studio.

The room itself doesn’t make things easy. It’s almost perfectly square—about the worst possible shape for mixing and monitoring—and because the house is a four-level split, only two walls can be used fully from floor to ceiling for shelves or storage.

There are also infrastructure limitations. The house was built in the 1950s, and the studio has only two electrical outlets powering the entire room. Anyone who’s worked with audio equipment knows how quickly power requirements add up.

Every decision—where gear goes, how it’s wired, what stays and what doesn’t—has consequences. As the series progresses, more equipment gets added, creating more problems, more audio and electrical routing along the way. The new equipment creates an environment which is entirely new to me, and creates at times more questions than solutions.

What This Series Really Shows

This studio series isn’t a tutorial and it isn’t a “perfect setup” showcase. It’s a real-time record of a space evolving under pressure: limited space, limited power, limited materials, and limited prior experience.

What I didn’t expect was how much the studio would develop in directions I hadn’t planned at all. Some ideas worked immediately. Others looked good on paper and failed in practice. A few mistakes turned into long-term solutions simply because they solved a problem in an unexpected way.

That’s what this project is really about—showing the studio from the inside as it grows, adapts, and occasionally fights back.

If you’re watching the videos alongside these posts, this blog is meant to slow things down a bit: to explain the thinking behind the decisions, the problems that weren’t obvious on camera, and the lessons learned as the studio takes shape from the very beginning.