Presenting a brief tour, from left to right:

First you’ll see a guitar stand, sans guitar. Ignore the green bag, it’s full of spare cables and bits & bobs. I’ll find a less obtrusive hole for it somewhere. Up above that, there’s my trusty Alesis QS6 which I’m using as a MIDI controller and extremely occasional sound source. It does those twinkly 90s digital synth textures really nicely, but I don’t have much use for those any more, so it’s mostly VST land. The music stand and mic stand are pretty self explanatory I hope.

Behind those, you can see an old Dell slimline desktop case, a 34cm TV, and a bookshelf speaker (I actually have two of those, for glorious stereo). The desktop box is my web broswing, email checking, word processing (etc. etc.) general purpose type PC. It’s also got a TV out card in it, so I can chuck a movie or something on if the desire takes me. My Digidesign Mbox is sitting on top of the telly – it’s not hooked up at the moment, the new EMU having taken over primary audio interface duties. I’ll probably hook the Digi up to the Dell PC and use it as a glorified DAT machine at some point. Maybe… The last thing I want to do is run Pro Tools on it…. *shudder*

Oh, there’s also a little webcam sitting on top of the TV which I bought on a whim and have yet to use.

The 21″ beige monitor is due for replacement with a nice flatscreen at some stage, but for now it does the job. Under that is my cheap & cheerful Behringer UMX49 MIDI controller, which has the dubious honour of posessing the worst feeling keybed of any instrument I’ve ever played. It’s truly horrible – I seriously can not stress enough how unpleasant it is to play. Thank god I don’t use it for that. Instead, I’ve got keys, knobs and sliders mapped to various functions in REAPER (my audio software of choice) so it functions as a bit of a poor-man’s control surface. It’s not quite touch sensitive motorised faders, but I can get around a lot faster than with the mouse alone. The key/control mapping is a bit of a work in progress there…

Skipping down past the mouse and keyboard, you can see the bottom half of a Sansui amplifier that I’m using to drive my monitor speakers, a custom built 4 channel mic pre amp that Curtis built, and a DBX 162 stereo compressor. Jumping back up the top again (because I forgot before) there’s a vertical rotation fishy lamp which I think is broken (last time I switched it on it made a disconcerting creaking noise, then a SNAP, and now it doesn’t rotate any more, which is a bit sad), a baby halogen desk lamp, some miscellaneous pens and stationery, and a small monkey in a chair (without which no home studio would be complete).

The beige box at the bottom right is my music PC. Not much to tell there… it’s a PC. Woo. On top of it is the input/output box for the EMU, and it’s very pretty. Flashy lights and such.

So there you go. That’s what I did with my Saturday morning – debaucherous rock and roller that I am.