Building a Custom Home Studio Desk - The Design
I have been into music most of my life, but more seriously the last decade (you can check out my music if you like). For that decade I have been using a simple Ikea desk that is just a rectangular top and sides. It has worked well enough and if you look back through some of my projects you can see how I made some attempts to solve this before, but as I have slowly acquired gear, the desk has gotten smaller and smaller. Add in the dual purpose of office that my desk has served the last couple of years, my frustration has grown such that it is time to deal with. Plus, it fits in great with our theme of the year; organize!
I started by seeing what was available to buy and quickly found that unless you have a couple of thousand dollars sitting around, a commercial version was out of reach. Though there are some really cool desks out there, I did not have that kind of money to spend (and this being a DIY/maker type blog) it made sense to build my own. I will bring you along as go through my build. This is the first part, designing what I think I want. My requirements are as follows:
I need my gear to be accessible. I do not want to dig through boxes just to use or modify.
I want to be able to context shift (composing, recording, mixing, day job) with a minimum of effort.
I do NOT want my knees hitting any part of the desk. So many desks have a miniscule opening for you to sit.
Aesthetics need to play at least some role.
I would like it to be reproducible by others.
I would like it to be expandable since I will probably miss something as I build.
With those requirements in mind, I started off by doing some deeper research. I did this by searching internet images and articles as well as Pinterest for music studio, music production, and home studio desks. A quick aside, there is a ton of “furniture” out there that I wouldn’t trust to hold my breakfast, but I digress. I spent a couple of weeks going through the images looking for pieces that could inspire my own build. One blog I ran across was Alexander Jenkins, who was going through some of the same process I was, though he is building a more serious studio. However, he had some great insight from a professional perspective that affected my ultimate requirements. As I would step away from a research session, I would then try to imagine a desk with features that would answer all of my requirements. If something didn’t work in that mental exercise , I would discard and try again.
Once I had a couple of ideas in mind, it was time to start documenting. I did this with Sketchup, putting down actual dimensions using simple shapes so I could visual the desktop (the legs and other things will come later). I used a couple of designs I really liked (Wave Nature, Argosy Halo) for inspiration to get initial dimensions and see what angles I tended to like. I then iterated a few times, taking dimensions from both my studio/office and my studio equipment creating rectangles in Sketchup. If it worked I would keep it and if not I would modify my design. What I ended up with was a rectangle 36” by 60” (3’x5’) with a cutout in the back middle for a control surface and cutouts on the front corners where I would be able to angle in larger rolling racks. You can see that in this screen shot (the rectangle lower left is my “rack” proxy).
From there I took that design to a piece of cardboard (nice to have a box for a shower pan we recently installed) and transferred the dimensions to it. For my initial prototype, I have not made an cuts other than the outer dimensions, and have now placed it on my existing desk. What this allows me to do is actually work the different scenarios to see if this desk shape actually meets my requirements. I have already found that the back cutout really needs to be an inch bigger to allow me to put my control surface into place. But I will be giving it at least of week of real use to determine if I go to the next step.
I hope that helps give you some ideas of how to brainstorm and find a solution to an issue you are facing. If you need a music studio desk, hit me up to see if this solution could work for you. Am I missing something that could make it useful for more people?
I am not sure how many parts this will end up being, but I will link to them here as they are created.