As the forum wants to remind me, the last reply to this topic was 9 months ago. Sorry that it took me so long to update! As of today, things are finally done here, and the last couple minor things took longer than I thought it would. As promised, I thought I’d share some photos with you.
Keep in mind my office is small — 8x10 — so this isn’t luxurious, but it works for me.
This is the view coming in to the office. A few things worth noting: This is the secondary guitar rack (you’ll see) for overflow. I’ve got a glass chair mat because our vinyl floor is not that great in the basement, and it kept chipping. You might also notice the desk is a Jarvis sit/stand, and I’ve got one of those Ergodriven mats below it. I also have a little filing cabinet on wheels there. It’s got a cushion on top in case I need another seat for my wife or something.
This is the desk itself: there’s a 16" MacBook Pro with M1 Max there, a Studio Display, one of the big keyboards with Touch ID, a Logitech MX Master 3 on the right, a trackpad on the left (one of the old-school AA battery ones), and a Twelve South BookArc keeping the laptop up.
This is just a closer shot of the whole thing. The speakers are Focal Alpha 80 Evo, which serve as my recording/mixing speakers and my guitar practice speakers. They now sit on Iso-Stands to raise them up a bit and isolate them from the desk.
My recording work is all just a side hustle. The real gig is web design/front-end development, and all the stuff that goes with it. Sometimes I’m taking photos, for example. To deal with all the media, I’ve got a Synology and a Mac Mini in the utility room (not pictured, but it’s nothing fancy). The Synology handles Time Machine and archival backups for every computer in the house. The archive folders on the Synology get backed up to the Mac Mini’s connected external drives, and all that gets backed up to Backblaze, so I’ve managed to create a media workspace in my office with no clicking hard drives.
We installed these bookshelves shortly after I started this thread. I didn’t expect to have so much stuff to put on them so soon. But my Canon gear lives here, as well as the Gamecube (which we don’t have space for in the TV, sadly), my reference material for work, some small repair tools for my guitars, some decor, etc. I love these things.
This is the rig I play and record my guitar through 99.999% of the time. It’s an all-digital effects and amp rig (link). It simulates the sound of thousands of speakers, guitar amps, and pedals, and is (to my ears) very convincing. You program it all from your computer, and because it plugs in via USB, you can record without plugging any microphones and dealing with all that. It’s great, and I can’t recommend it enough. The cabling is a little messy because I’m constantly unplugging this whole rack and taking it with me to church, so there’s not much of a point in fixing all the dangling cords you see back there.
These are the two most fun things on my bookshelf for me. Both were gifts from my wife. The egg is an ostrich egg that she gave me before we were dating. She’s South African, and she went to visit a few months after we met. When she came back, she gave me the egg as a gift. I have kept it ever since. She surprised me with the stormtrooper as a decorative object for my office at the first apartment we lived in after we got married. He’s stained a little yellow from sitting in our window well for years before getting moved here.
These are the primary guitars. This the wall behind my desk. They hang from Hercules hangers, for anybody interested, and I recommend the Hercules models very strongly.
From left to right:
- PRS Custom 24 Piezo: it’s 24 frets, hence the name, but its real trick is that it can use a bunch of little microphones hidden inside the bridge of the guitar to create an extremely convincing acoustic sound. It’s useful for recording and useful for church. I run it through an acoustic simulation device, so in a mix, you can’t really tell the difference. It sounds great as an electric too, but the flexibility is the real trick.
- An Ultra Luxe Telecaster. It’s a hyper-modern version of the Telecaster with a few extra tools at its disposal. This one has “vintage-wired pickups,” which just means they sound a little warm and not as twangy as some Telecasters (which is my preference).
- And a Gibson Les Paul (the Slash model). This is far and away the brightest guitar I own. I spent a year looking for a Les Paul I wanted. I’m no fan of Slash, but this is basically the instrument for me. Lots of rock attitude, a bunch of swagger. Super fun. Not as versatile as the others, but this is what I want to play most of the time when I just want to have fun.
This is my “analog” guitar rig. It’s a Mark V:25 head from Mesa Boogie, with one of their cabs. Both models have sadly been discontinued, but if you’re looking for an American-style amp that can do basically everything, this one is pretty good. I can’t bear to part with it at this point, and I like having a backup in case my digital rig randomly dies (not that I expect it, but if you’re not prepared, it could happen).
And that’s it, folks! Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to know more about, or anything you’d like a closer photo of. I’ve been freelancing and working from home 10 years and playing guitar for 20 years, so this stuff didn’t all spring up overnight or anything, so if you’re wondering, “how did he afford all this stuff?”, well, time and the benefit of claiming stuff for taxes.
Sorry it took so long to post this!
