If you produce music, you know there’s not really a “right” way to start. you just kind of just acquire bits of gear here and there and hope for the best. for me it was no different. here's a little tour of my desks through my history.

I first started making music seriourly sometime around 2003 with our family computer and a very basic guitar tablature program called Tabit. It used whatever general MIDI sound source that was pre-installed on your computer. while I was able to program some fairly complex things with it, every song ended to become to being very guitar centered (it was for making guitar tabs, after all) and I wanted to eventually make other things. so even though I created folders and folders of "guitar tab" music, I looked into other options. i couldn't use the family computer anymore, i wanted a dedicated desk like the pros had - one specifically for the purpose of making music.

like many other gullible youth in the early 2000s, it was also around this time that I became convinced that in order to become a creative-type you absolutely had to own a Mac. So with funding my summer job then and desperate pleading with my parents to help the difference, I was able to get a Macbook and some gear to begin my building of a “proper” music production studio.

I must have been the only person in the universe this excited to use Garageband. I saw an interview on YouTube (which was new at the time) with John Mayer who boasted how realistic the keyboard guitar sounds were because you could bend the notes. I had a microKORG (who didn't back then?) and an Alesis SR16 drum machine which i considered useless because I didn't understand what a MIDI clock was to get it synced up to anything. After enough experimentation with Garageband I pirated Logic Pro (which I officially own by now, relax) and set up a second monitor because that was what I read the pros did.

it was crude, but this really became the foundation for all of my future iterations of a home studio. I moved cities a lot in my life so I never bothered with extensive room treatment, I mainly live in apartments so large monitors were always difficult, and the music genres that I enjoyed making most didn’t often require things like recording drumkits or vocals.

so out of necessity and choice, the studio desk itself would eventually become my primary instrument.

but even by looking back at this one, it's incredible to see what I was working with then.

I also ended up getting an 8 channel audio interface. I didn't really know what a "rack" was so it just often sat next to the laptop. Still though, I don't think I ever acquired enough gear to use all 8 channels at once so it ended up wildly under utilized. i often kept a printout of the General MIDI numbers because I thought everything still had to be programmed in the right channels in order for anything to work. I used books and magazines for monitor stands and I'd be lying if I said I don't still sometimes do that today. A KORG Nanokontrol gave me the experience of real faders even though they were the cheapest plastic you could imagine. Once again - crude, but it worked. To me this was still a futuristic battlestation.

It's actually a little eerie how similar my current desk is to my very first one. i honestly didn't expect to have this discovery while making this post. maybe i'll do another post with all of the variations up to this point. the pegboard is a nice touch. I'm still always experimenting with gear but I've learned over the years that I really value an empty space in front of me to keep my mind clear. Also a lot of green for some reason. it's just gotta be green.