When Bad Cabling Decisions Lead to Better Ones

In earlier posts, I mentioned that part of the slow progress during my studio redesign came from trying to force ideas to work that simply weren’t going to work the way I was approaching them. One of the clearest examples of this was my original cabling plan.

At the time, it was wildly overcomplicated.

I had a patchbay mounted on one wall, cables running across the room to the opposite wall, a compressor sitting at one end of the synth wall, and the patchbay sitting at the other. All of this was happening during a period when audio cables were expensive and hard to find due to supply shortages—yet the very plan I was coming up with guaranteed I would need more cables, not fewer.

Which, of course, defeated the entire purpose of the plan.

The Pattern I Only Noticed in Editing

This video series, which I released in 2025, documents my studio’s evolution from 2022 through to the end of 2025. That four-year stretch included a big burst of work in 2022, a slowdown due to an increased teaching workload, and then a renewed push in late 2024 into 2025.

It wasn’t until I started editing the finished series that I noticed something interesting—at least interesting to me.

I would mention an idea, a piece of gear, or a possible direction early on in the redesign. Then I’d completely abandon it, go down another path, and seemingly forget it existed. And then—sometimes dozens of videos later—that original idea would quietly reappear in the studio.

Not because I was following a plan.
Not because I was intentionally circling back.
But because the process itself kept nudging me there.

The Value of the “Wrong” Decisions

That original, overly complex cabling idea never survived in its original form. But it did give birth to something far better: a much more practical, controlled, and sensible cabling setup that I still use today.

I don’t think I would have arrived at my current solution without first going through those bad decisions.

Not every choice I made was wrong—some parts of the early cabling plan stuck and remain in place—but others had to fail first so I could see why they weren’t working.

I wouldn’t have bought power conditioners if I hadn’t run into audio noise issues.
Those power conditioners led to rack mounting.
The rack led naturally to a patchbay.
The patchbay made outboard gear practical.
The outboard gear reshaped how signals moved through the studio.

Each decision fed the next.

A Studio That Evolves in Loops, Not Lines

When you watch the 2025 series from start to finish—from video 1 through video 140—you start to see a looping pattern rather than a straight line. Ideas appear, disappear, and resurface later in more refined forms.

It’s easy to miss unless you’ve lived through a long studio evolution yourself.

But I suspect anyone who has documented their own studio over years—not months—has experienced the same thing. You don’t move cleanly from A to B. You spiral. You double back. You test things you already suspected wouldn’t work, just to confirm it for yourself.

Looking Back

What stands out to me now is that the studio didn’t evolve despite those poor decisions—it evolved because of them. The refined cabling system I have today exists precisely because I wrestled with an unworkable one first.

That seems to be a recurring theme in this redesign:
bad decisions shaping good outcomes, provided you’re willing to keep working through them.

It’s messy. It’s inefficient.
But at times, it’s also very real.

And sometimes, that’s exactly how studios—and ideas—actually grow.