Home Studio Feng Shui

One of my hobbies (I guess I can call it a hobby now) is making use of, and adding to my home studio. I studied a music degree at university, and started piecing together a DIY studio in my second year there. I decided that I wanted to compose, record, and produce some music in the comfort of my home. At university everything was time restricted and of course there were many students in the building. I sometimes felt inspiration was hard to come by this way. After much researching I realised that I could put together some of my work at home with the right gear. This is where the credit cards came involved (I'm still paying them back now). After a few months I managed to rig together a fairly impressive studio that I could use for many musical purposes.

After finishing the course I decided to take a break from music altogether. My aim was that this would be a temporary thing. I would work for a while, have a holiday in China, come home, and start it all up again. Things obviously didn't turn out that way. Once I had decided to come back to China I knew that leaving my keyboard (a Roland Fantom X8) at home would be a mistake. Not only would it be neglected for a year or two, but it would also be devaluing by the day. So I logged onto eBay and sold it immediately. Actually, the money of the sale paid for my plane flight and financed my first two months in China.

I returned home 5 months later, and felt that more of the equipment should go. Just like the keyboard, some of the other items would just get old. New technology is released all of the time, it is wasteful to keep them in my bedroom collecting dust. So I sold some more. By this point my studio was down to more than half the size.

Today I posted off the remaining pieces of gear that I own: my Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro mixer, and my M-Audio BX8 speakers. The reason I had kept these for so long was that I didn't want to see them go. Unfortunately I don't know how long I will stay in China, and after reading an article about Feng Shui the other day, I realised that getting rid of them was the right thing to do. When I do return from China for good, I can slowly rebuild my studio again -- I hope.

Mackie Mixer, I will miss you the most

My studio speakers (confusingly, in music we actually call them monitors, not speakers)