Believe it or not, this is MUCH tidier than it was before...
Pencils down, everyone, National Tidy Up and Reorganize Your Home Studio Day is over; just a lovely fond memory now for another year. Come now, no cheating, seriously, time is up!
My little corner of wired-up heaven isn’t perfect; it’s cramped and I don’t (yet) have the kind of dedicated patch bays that allow one to wire up an effects unit to the mixer without having an eruption of cabling spilling over some surface or another. I’d also like to get the mixer on a bit of an incline so I can see the controls more face on while sitting in my comfy task chair. Finally, my old Dell Dimension XPS B800r seems to have finally choked on Windows XP and its (funeral?) “Service” Packs, meaning there’s plenty of work still ahead to get that box up and running as a sequencer/sound module (hopefully with the capacity to run Skype too).
All things considered, though, my brain tells me that my stiff legs and aching feet are a fair trade for a vast improvement in the usability of this work space; for starters, compare the most recent photo to the one I published a couple of days ago and you’ll see that the stacks of miscellaneous optical media piled all over every available flat surface are gone. More importantly, there is no longer a stack of speakers in the middle of the room that resembles the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have now managed to get myself a little stereo separation in the “control room” mix. Of course, such was the state of the prior setup that in order to move the each speaker less than four feet in either direction I had to completely pull the whole system apart so that I could move the furniture that was impeding the correct setup in the first place. Allow me to say: oy fucking vay that was a lot of work.
Most awesome new development: I now have a Midisport 4×4 USB-Midi interface wired in to the system, and this device has a single green LED eye (pictured below, on the right) that seems to gently pulse whenever is powered up (which is whenever the computer is on, the way I have things connected). In other words, the Digital Overlord – the silicon brain at the heart of all computing matters anywhere in Juniorvania – has taken one step closer to looking like the HAL9000. It’s only a matter of time before I’m pulling cables out of the mixer and singing “Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do…”
Dave, don't do that.
On the plus side: the colours!
Next plan: put the HAL face on!
HAL face
HAL eye
Alternatively, I’ve thought about using a door peephole as a mini-HAL eye (and one that’s significantly friendlier to a budget).
Wow, that HAL face guy has gone into some kind of detail – did you see the page on his site about building a full size replica of one of the pods from the movie? Yikes!