My First MIDI Studio

By the Fall of 2008 I had been away from the recording scene for quite a while. All of my kids had grown to adults and moved out. It was just me and my wife in the house alone, again, finally. I had developed the need for another musical workspace.

This time I had much less room to work with. We had down-sized our house, now that we were no longer raising kids. So the small downstairs bedroom would have to do. My needs were much simpler this time around. I wanted to put together a MIDI studio. No live instruments, no microphones just sequencers controlling rack-mount synths.  I was going to go back to my roots and reexamine my love of Techno and Electronic music.

I purchased one of those office workstation kits that comes to you in a huge, very heavy box. When you open it up 80 or so pieces, some small, some large land on the floor along with a big bag of hardware. Some assembly required as they say. Man, that thing was a pain-in-the-ass to build. But when it was done I had the foundation for a great electronic music workstation.




The cadenza to the right in the photo had a space that was perfect for a 3 bay 12U rack. That was my first construction project.

After cruising eBay for 3 to 4 months I had all of the basic equipment that I needed to begin the build. The workstation was divided into 3 areas. The rack behind me, the mixer to my left and the desk-top rack, computer and monitors in front of me.

The 3 bay rack housed the synth modules, the patch bay, the MIDI router, an AKAI 4 track digital hard-drive recorder and my Fostex 4mm DAT mastering deck. The AKAI recorder had a MIDI card in it so I could time-lock it with the sequencer. It was great for adding an occasional guitar or vocal track as needed. This rack ended up being a very compact and functional grouping of the equipment employed.

I hung a goofy slanted shelf off of the wall to my right that housed the mixer and the drum machine with my primary MIDI controller below. This placed the equipment right at eye-level and within arms reach. This worked well as I am constantly fiddling with the mixer when I am working.

The mixer was a Behringer MX4264A and the drum machine a Roland DR-550.




There was a 10U desktop rack between the computer and the mixer on the wall to my right. This rack housed the master power switch, most of the effects devices, the synth primary mixers and the monitor power amp.


From top to bottom I remember it being:

• Alesis power switch
• ADA 1024 digital delay
• 2 Alesis nano compressors
• Alesis micro gate
• 2 Alesis NanoVerbs
• Alesis EQ
• 2 Behringer 1602 8 channel stereo mixers
• Behringer DEQ2496 monitor EQ
• Behringer DSP1024
• Samson power amp
• Alesis MidiVerb4

The workstation was built around Sonar running on a PC. The old 1989 studio described in the previous post used a DOS version of Cakewalk. This time I tried the new version of Cakewalk,  now known as Sonar. Sonar is a full-blown workstation with lots of features that I didn't use much. I mostly used it like a mulit-track recorder for MIDI.

You can also see my faithful JBL 4401 control monitors. These monitors are over 20 years old and still sound as good as they did the day I bought them. I have mixed a lot of music on those monitors over the years and they have never let me down. The old JBL speakers from the 70's and 80's are about as good as it got back then. The 4300 series monitors from that era are the stuff of legend. JBL took a brute force approach to speaker design back then. They did the best that could be done with the cabinet design, materials and technology that they had at their disposal at the time, but in the end their speaker designs sounded great and could create sound pressure levels that could damage your hearing but required required audio power amps that were capable of arc welding.  I built a pair of JBL 4350 replicas (the big boys with 2 15's in each cabinet) that will be the subject of a future post.

This equipment configuration proved useful for two years. After I had explored most of the capabilities of this setup I decided to expand. The subject of my next post.