Useful tips and suggestions to save space in your Home Studio, lets you accommodate more in limited space. There are many who have their recording setup in some corner of their house and if they’re lucky some may have a separate room for their studio. But almost everyone has limited space and would like to have some extra space to accommodate more things. Here are some useful suggestions that can help you save more space, not all are free though:
- In general, avoid small rooms/spaces if you can. A studio in a bigger room will be able to accommodate more musicians and more gear/instruments over time.
Another important factor is that the room should be naturally quieter. - If possible, remove everything off the floor and also off the walls, especially those things that vibrate
Once these are sorted out, these steps will help you keep your studio more organized.
Buy a Rack
And as much as possible, only buy gear that you can mount in a rack. Professional hardware manufacturers know the importance of rackmounting, so if a certain piece of gear you are looking at was not designed to fit in a rack, that is your first clue to avoid it.
Keep Your Cables Organized
Nothing makes a studio feel cluttered like having cables lying around anywhere and everywhere.
Use cable snakes where you can and condense multiple cables into one. If you don’t have extra money for a snake, and you want to use the cables you have, just buy some tie-wraps and use those instead.
Another good idea is to label your cables using different colors of tape (electrical or masking). Use the same color tape on either end of a cable so that its easier to quickly locate the two ends of a cable; this is particularly useful if a cable is long or is entangled with other cables.
You can also use Velcro ties to keep un-used length of cables together, keeps it nice and tidy.
Guitars Go On the Wall
You can always place all your guitars on a guitar stand. But, instead of putting your guitars on a stand where they take up floor space, you can also hang them on a wall mount.
This has the added benefit of possibly helping your acoustics by adding irregular surfaces to the wall for diffusion.
Use a Pedal Board to organize effects pedals
Most guitar players end up owning multiple effects pedals over the years. And it becomes very messy when all those effects (pedals) are spread across on the floor with cables going everywhere.
A pedal board allows you to place all those pedals nicely arranged together.
The supplied case also makes it easy to store all the pedals, in case you wish to store them away, out of site, for some time.
Space Around Your Keyboard
Use the Space Below Your Keyboard
Even if you were to use a piano pedal, you would still have space there to accommodate some gear, so use that space.
How about keeping the rack there?
Use Multi-Tier Keyboard Stands
You should also consider using multi-tie keyboard stands wherein you can place multiple keyboards on the same stand.
Check out the best multi-tier keyboard stands here.
Use Multiple Microphones Per Stand
Instead of having a separate stand for each microphone, combine multiple microphones on one stand with an extension arm.
You would think that all microphone booms would be pretty much the same, but this could not be further from the truth.
Anytime you load up multiple mics on the same microphone stand, you run the risk of adding too much weight, and having the stand possibly fall over and damage your expensive mics.
Keep your mics safe and buy a quality stand first of all, but especially make sure you buy a quality boom.
Similarly, you get multi-tiered stands to keep your piano/keyboard and things such as your laptop computer.
Get Rid of Unnecessary Gear
Last but definitely not the least, if you no longer need a piece of gear, or you realize it’s not the product you were originally hoping for, just SELL IT!
I know it hurts to feel like you wasted money by selling a piece of gear that you just bought a few months ago, but it is an even bigger waste of money (and space) to keep it around if you don’t use it.
Keep the gear you need. Get rid of as many redundancies as you can.
If your gear is still in good condition, you should be able to get anywhere from 50-80 percent of what you bought it for. eBay and Craigslist are some good places to sell your gear.
Do Regular Clean up
Over time, dust and trash accumulate; so it’s a good idea to conduct regular clean-up so that things stay clean and organized.
I suggest you do a deep-clean (dusting everything) of your studio at least once in 2-weeks to prevent build-up of dust and trash.
KeytarHQ editorial team includes musicians who write and review products for pianists, keyboardists, guitarists & other musicians. KeytarHQ is the best online resource for information on keyboards, pianos, synths, keytars, guitars and music gear for musicians of all abilities, ages and interests.
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