You guys have seen pics of my chaotic "studio' on the "Show Us Your Studio" thread.
TBH it would be generous to even call it a studio.
It had become more of a storage room for gear than a studio for several reasons.
First off I have so much stuff ..... I feel sure I have the most gear here because I keep everything.
Currently 13 or 14 guitars .... a dozen amps ..... at LEAST 100 pedals.
7 or 8 rack mount effects units .... 7 or 8 amp modelers ..... 3 pedalboards ....8 or 9 LDC and several SDCs and at least 10 dynamics .... 7 mixing boards ..... 7 pairs of good stereo/monitor speakers with 3 pairs of speaker stands ..... 8 turntables ..... 6 good stereo amps and 3 stand alone phono-pres ....... 3 reel to reels and a Roland rackmount VS-880 ..... a Fostex 8 track stand-alone and 2 Fostex D1624 16 track recorders and recently a D2424. ..... 3 Peterson Strobe tuners and one Conn ..... 4 saxes .. .... a DAT Walkman and a couple of Tascam DR-05s and a 6 track Tascam Field recorder ...... that's off the top of my head and as I write this I'll prolly think of more.
But when we moved here 15 years ago my mixer lost a channel and then a second went bad so I had a 16 track recorder but only a 14 channel mixer.
There's ways around that, patching this over here and that somewhere else .... don't need this channel? Take it out and stick #11 in there instead. Workable but tiring and it eventually got to giant PIA status and after that was in "don't even bother to fool with it" territory.
I didn't remember what channel was where ...... and half of the rackmount processing gear would have to be slid out and hooked up to use when needed .
Thing is ...... a useful studio has to be ready to record your whim at the drop of a hat and the press of a button ...... so mine wasn't used and simply became an overflow room for gear with little room to move around in and certainly no room for productive work.
And that's how it stayed until a couple of weeks ago.
Now our house is in a similar state ..... piled with stuff, especially since we had to move all Jackie's stuff in here after she died.
So in our cluttered living room was an unopened carton with a 'lifting' work desk to allow Debi to stand and work or sit as the mood dictated.
But we never assembled it because when Jackie died some of her computer furniture went into Debi's office and we didn't need it but didn't have anywhere for it to go.
I got tired of looking at it and wanted to haul it to the dump but Debi was all "That's brand new!"
Well yes, but it's just a huge box taking up space.
But she wouldn't hear of it ...... so in a fit of desperation to open up the living room I put it together and figured out a place to put it in my room, taking the place of boxes of records that I had been using as a desk.
And that's where it started .... with that desk.
Setting up the desk immediately opened up new storage possibilities and my room cleared a tiny bit and I said, "Well ...... a small 5' bakers rack would fit on top of that desk" and it did .... so now I've got a LOT of room for stuff.
This is exciting
..... that led to "Well, I can get rid of those crappy shelves and stick another bakers rack over there" and all of a sudden I had room in my room. 
So now, since I'm in there working, I decide to get the 16 track hooked up but I don't have enough channels (14) PLUS even if all 16 worked I have a 24 channel recorder so I need more channels.
So I looked at mixing boards ..... thing is you have to buy a 30 channel board or such to get 24 channels because they all inflate their channel count with the last 4 being stereo pairs.
I need 24 discrete channels plus aux's for effects.
Cheapest I could find was around $1400 unless I wanted to get a Behringer cheapie and I don't.
I have enough mixers to patch shit together but I use the better ones and I want to hook everything up and leave it that way
Wait a minute ..... ya' know what?
I have a Soundcraft Spirit Live 4 shoved back in a corner where it has sat since the day we moved in 15 years ago.
I pull it out ...... it's fucking HUGE!! 12 channels of hugeness!
Can't set it beside my Mackie ..... one will have to go on the floor.
Alrite ..... let's figure this out .... Soundcraft on floor and Mackie on desk .... no, Soundcraft is to big ..... gotta be the other way around.
So I start hooking things up ...... this means pulling stuff off the shelves ..... now I've got 25 or so pieces of gear sitting on the floor surrounded by tubs of cords ..... fuck. Literally stepping way over here and then grab the shelf and help balance yourself as you stick the other foot over there.
Well shit .... if I'm gonna do this I may as well tear the whole thing down ..... start from scratch and have every single thing either hooked up or on a patch bay clearly labeled.
So lets order a few hundred dollars worth of cables the right length for each application and do it.
So I spent a week getting on the floor and threading a cable thru and then standing up and pulling it up and then getting on the floor and threading another cable and then sliding this piece of gear in here but that won't work so let's try over here etc.
Up and down and up and down and up and down over and over all day and night for a week.
And then once it was all together there was another 3 days of "Why doesn't this work?" and "How could I have wired that wrong?"
I think I have chased down most of the gremlins ..... the Soundcraft still has a few .... switches that need repeated pressing to clean them up and such.
I did everything including getting my audiophile Headroom amp hooked up and my turntables cleared and available and my record cleaning maching! It had been buried for years ...... I'm cleaning records again!!
But it all works
Now I'm going thru the 16 track and archiving anything on it I think it decent ........ I'll prolly post some of them and, in fact, did the first mix of one last night so I'll prolly stick it in the listening room tomorrow.
Then once I've gone thru all of that I will move furutre recording projects to the 24 track.
Well, except for Lt Bob's salty chocolate balls ....... I've already started that ..... but after that the 2424 will be my new home in my studio that's now usable!
Pics in post below
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