I currently have a 2 metre wide and about 80cm deel desk in home studio room. On it, I have a Dell 34" ultrawide monitor, Logitech K800 keyboard, Logitech MX Master 3 mouse, Ableton Push 2, Native Instruments Konplete Kontrol M32, a Korg nanoKontrol 2, and a pair of M-Audio BX5a monitor speakers.Underneath the desk is a pull out shelf with a 4o key Behringer Motor 49 keyboard, and the desk 'legs' are two 13U (from memory) racks that house virtually nothing having recently downscaled and streamlined my setup to be more in the box and sold my hardware rack units.

I'm finding my setup now a bit bulky and stale, and my room is pretty small already without such a huge desk in there. In fact, so much so that it dissuades me from wanting to spend I time in there, weirdly...or maybe that's normal if you feel uninspired by your desk?!

Anyway, I'm just looking for some shares of your setups or suggestions for more compact and streamlined desks and setup to inspire me on a direction to go with my stuff.

I just want to keep the Dell monitor, keyboard and mouse, Push 2, M32, nanoKontrol on the desk if possible, but will be getting rid of the 49 key keyboard soon due to lack of use along with the remaining rack gear (mainly power supplies, old Motu interface, patch bays, speaker splitter and so on.

In light of all that, feel free to inspire me....

 

YMMV, but to be honest, the best desk I've owned is what I own now, which is just a very basic IKEA desk. It has decent depth to it (which I like a lot). It really is just a table top that either sits on posts, or on a drawer, or a combo. You can get the tabletop in varying widths and colors, and I guess technically you could get some fancier real wood one elsewhere if you really cared that much.

I have a decent sized room/space, so I actually have two of these desks on opposite sides of the room. One sits on 5 posts (center post), the other is a drawer, a center post, and 2 side posts.

I have dual monitors, and they're actually wall mounted, but there's some good desk mounts you can get too that don't eat up much desk space.

Really it's all quite basic, but I like it because I feel like there's so much space underneath and on top.. not some big, bulky eye sore. Then I just attached some cable management stuff underneath to keep it fairly clean.

 

I have actually been contemplating an IKEA hacked together desk. Currently trying to work out what exactly i need in terms of setup though, hence looking for some inspiring photos and suggestions of setups.

 

https://www.thomann.de/de/thomann_studio_table_l_wood.htm


this is mine:

https://www.thomann.de/de/thomann_combodesk_designed_by_zaor.htm

 

if you have your monitors on the shelf (like the first one @Lemmy posted above), you can free up space on the shelf by putting your monitors on pole stands. You can free up about 2 feet of surface area on the shelf of a smaller desk, like the one he posted second; or not even have a shelf. Generally speaking, you negate any possible desk resonances/vibration, and create a better aimed "listening triangle". but that may depend on the room and space you have.

something to think about anyway.

 

Have been reading all your threads and responding in most of them, probably this one is going to be off topic, but been thinking about you and your situation, so gonna write having all that in mind.

I never could work on laptops before, had few of them and felt frustrated most of the times, was usual desktop, big screen, keyboard & mouse guy, sitting in front of monitors, MIDI keyboard and all that fun stuff. Than I got this Air when I finished building my friend his machine and just couldn't deal with another WIndows desktop build anymore.

Embraced the change and something really great happened, I started making music anywhere except where I would usually do it, I would just drag this little beast everywhere with me and just make music in front of people, that period of time was such fruitful one, I could just have casual talk with someone and make music simultaneously, sit somewhere and just have a go with it. Making music wasn't this routine, like I would power on my machine, turn on monitors, look at screen and sit there alone waiting for stuff to happen, this time I would just pull up my laptop and work. I got hooked on that so much, I actually gave all my gear to my partner at that point, left me one Nektar keyboard just when I got the urge to play the thing, but from that point everything I used was in that box, headphones and that's it. Already invested two years into learning Realhpones, so it was smooth transition.

Found trackpad so much better than mouse, especially while tweaking synths and plugins, it feels almost like I have touch screen, you can just get a feel for it under your hand and close your eyes and magic happens. Also whole macOS experience where you can make music, have full blown Firefox opened, don't worry about tweaking system or DPC, battery that actually last, machine that I can't hit the limit, I just felt totally liberated and just focused on music. Have few essential plugins and that's it, it works, all of them are optimized for this system and everything runs as it should.

I don't use Kontakt, I don't use NI at all, so all this is just working. I see you are getting new machine in case you get your thirst for scoring and Kontakt, so you need crazy amount of RAM and whatnot, feel like all that is just dragging you back to clutter, Kontakt is one big clutter, gig's and gig's or libraries, tons of RAM and you sitting there trying to make your scores believable and whatnot, playing with articulations and all that.

Is that really what you enjoy so much to do, I know you are into techno and house too, those production just work on these kind of setups, actually more you play live with it better it get's. Maybe idea, if you want to get your groove back, ditch whole Kontakt thing, get yourself Macbook and just use your Live and Push, headphones, that's it, pack your bag and go out out of your studio space, have fun and make all that work for you. Get most basic configuration, don't even install Kontakt, if you want to get really into minimalism, install Diva and few effect plugins and see how far you can go with all of it, one sample pack, than synthesize everything else you can't find there.

Than gradually come back to the things that are really essential to you, like I got my monitors back, I just get excited like mad when air starts blowing in my face and room is full of sound, I started missing that, but that's it as far as I'm concerned. Still like to go out and make music, but appreciate my alone time with full blown speakers, if I needed to pick one, would go with laptop and cans, nothing is really stopping me from making great music on that, except myself.

Again, sorry for going OT or If I misjudged everything, but needed to share this with you and maybe someone else in similar situation.

 

Do you mean Air as in a Macbook Air I presume? What model did you get, out of interest?

 

It's in my signature, base model 8/256.

 

Last edited: Apr 27, 2023