Episode 26: Complex Studio Setup

In this episode of the Face Your Ears podcast, Rich and Justin discuss the intricate process of setting up Justin's newly renovated studio at Man Made Random Studios in Michigan. They delve into the severe plumbing emergency that initiated the renovation, and how it presented an opportunity to modernize Justin's basement, including the studio space. This episode covers the detailed steps involved in setting up complex audio equipment, including the use of spreadsheets for planning, organizing cables, power management, and the importance of testing each component. They emphasize the importance of labeling, flexibility, and having a collaborative partner. The episode gives a thorough breakdown of their methodical approach and the tools used to achieve a neat, functional, and aesthetically pleasing studio space.

00:00 Welcome!
01:27 Studio Renovation Saga
03:43 Setting Up the Studio
05:09 Planning and Organizing Equipment
09:20 Power and Cable Management
23:17 Testing and Troubleshooting
26:59 Final Thoughts and Recap

For Production Services, Coaching and Lessons, visit:

www.rjbmusicproduction.com

For help prepping your songs/voice for the studio:

www.bozicvoicestudio.com

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Transcript

Rich 0:10

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Face Your Ears podcast. We got a special episode today. I'm actually joining you from Man made random studios in Michigan. I'm here with the owner and founder of the studio, Justin Hoshilla. How are you doing, sir?

Justin 0:32

I'm doing well, Rich. You are currently sitting above me upstairs. I'm down here in my basement where we recently finished renovations. That's where my studio space is located. So it was out of commission for a few months, but I am so thankful. To have it set back up and have you here offering your blood, sweat and tears to get it back up and running.

Rich 0:59

Yeah, I think uh, this is kind of appropriate though. Cause something bad might happen. Actually, if we're in the same room together doing this podcast, we need this separation, I think.

Justin 1:09

Yeah. On a technical level, it's funny. It makes it easier if we're like not in the same place even when we're in the same house.

Rich 1:19

Yeah, I think it allows us to have separation of audio and all those fun things. But anyways, so you have undergone quite a journey in your studio. Can you fill us in? What's going on?

Justin 1:34

gosh. It has been quite a saga. A few months ago, I think it was mid to late April we had a pretty severe plumbing emergency happen in our basement here. one of the pipes broke and It caused a bit of backup and a little bit of flooding and we had the plumbers out here, they took a look at everything and they discovered that the pipe underneath our concrete floor had deteriorated and broken and needed to be replaced. So it was a pretty major repair They got it going for like a day, but then a couple of days later, they had to come out rip up the floor, like jack hammers, getting all the concrete broken up, getting the dirt dug up. So ended up being around 20 feet of pipe that they had to replace. So you can imagine that the tear out for that was massive. And so they got that all patched up. They got the floor concrete back in, everything was working just

Rich 2:46

Mm hmm. Mm

Justin 2:47

We're like, my wife and I were like we've gone this far. We may as well renovate the entire basement because we've lived in this house now for about 15 years. And Rich, you've been here plenty of times you know, the basement was, was in good shape. It was fine. It was functional. It was livable. It was really nice, but it really wasn't ours. We inherited it when we bought the house. And so. this was our opportunity to make it our own and really bring it up to date and just make it more comfortable. And so little did we know that process would take about three months, but

Rich 3:22

Not too bad though. Three months, not too bad. It took me about two years to renovate my basement. So

Justin 3:28

all in all, not bad, but Rich, you saw it for the first time a couple of days ago and you were blown away as we were when we first saw it. And it's just a much more comfortable, much more modern space. And the biggest hurdle yet was setting the studio back up. And so Rich, you just got here to Michigan to hang out with me and for us to catch up as friends, but also for us to, Get the studio back online and up and

Rich 3:52

Oh, yeah. It really does look amazing down there. I really love The work that was done looks fantastic. I think it was a great move And also afforded you the opportunity to set things up in a more comfortable fashion I'm out here to hang out. I'm out here to help out so Let's talk about that a little bit. Justin's studio, the way I would look at it, it is a more complex setup. This is not like someone with a laptop and a interface and some headphones. This is like more of a heavy duty setup. And I think what we'll do is we'll post some pictures so people can see on the website. It's truly a Marvel.

Justin 4:35

It's a jewel of Livonia, Michigan. it's a multifaceted place. My studio has a lot of vintage equipment, a lot of audio equipment, both for recording and MIDI controllers USB stuff. it was a lot of stuff. we spent about what a day and a half working on this we found there to be a lot of nuance, a lot of details to this

Rich 5:00

I think what would be great is for us to break down this process a little bit so the listeners can maybe get an idea of planning for this kind of the first thing I noticed, if I could just jump right into this here is you already had in mind where you wanted to place your equipment. Can you talk to us just briefly about. what do we need to consider with regard to the placement of the equipment first?

Justin 5:23

That's a good place to start. I started by essentially staging all of the equipment that I have. So my studio desk, my monitors, my rock mount equipment, my keyboards, my guitars. So I staged those roughly where I thought I would want them. And that gave me a sense of the space itself before going into more fine level of detail. So that's I would say broadest detail first is like the actual placement of the stuff

Rich 5:53

I also noticed along with that, you had worked out some spreadsheets uh, what we Would call I guess, a schematic. You had a picture of the equipment with the inputs and outputs, and you had a spreadsheet listing all the inputs and outputs. Can you talk to us, what is that all

Justin 6:11

I used a spreadsheet application from Apple called Numbers, or you could use Excel, and I mapped out a few different things. So I have an audio interface called the AudioFuse 16 rig from Arturia, and it's a pretty sophisticated interface. It has a lot of inputs and outputs. It actually has 16 inputs, and eight outputs and I also have a patch bay and a patch bay just allows you to route audio signals your outputs to different inputs and so forth. And that actually has 48 connections. It's a 48 point patch bay. So, you know, between the inputs and outputs of the interface and then all the. The patch bay inputs and so forth, like that's a lot to keep track of. So you're not just talking about, like you said earlier, an audio interface. With two or four inputs or something like that, like you can just take it at a glance and know what's going on, but something like this, you need to map it out. So in this spreadsheet, what I did was I just made tables that represented the inputs and outputs and typed in everything that I wanted to have And then I also have a couple of what are called power conditioners, and did the same thing there. Created a table that outlined what would be plugged in for power to each of those So just type that out. Because again, We're dealing with a lot of equipment, so it's not easy to remember as you're going.

Rich 7:47

Can you explain to the listeners, what is a power conditioner?

Justin 7:50

we can take a segue into that. So a power conditioner not only provides power to equipment, but it also acts as a source to, Make sure your power is clean your power coming into your home or your studio can actually cause a lot of noise and signal disruption in your audio. So studios typically employ power conditioners to minimize or avoid. degradation to the audio signal. When you have got a lot of equipment it's a good investment, but moreover, it's actually a great way to keep things clean and organized. So these are actually rack mountable. The outlets are on the back, so you can plug everything in on the back. And so then the front looks really clean and simple. One of these power conditioners is just controlled by a single switch. So I use that for things I'm using all the time. And then the other one has individual switches for all the individual components. I don't have to walk over to the actual keyboard or synthesizer or whatever. What I can do is actually just turn to my right and I've got all these switches here and I can turn everything. On and off here, right next to me. So those power conditioners had like a map for everything that would be plugged into them which, which, you know, in total is almost like 16. Outlet. So again, a lot to keep track of.

Rich 9:20

in a nutshell, a power conditioner is a fancy surge protector that also helps to clean up the sound a little

Justin 9:28

Yeah. Clean up the space and clean up the sound.

Rich 9:32

I noticed, on your schematic, you had a section for what we'll call the power section where things are plugged into the surge protector. You had also a schematic for the interface, the ins and outs of the interface. And then I noticed you also had one more section related to MIDI. Can you talk about that?

Justin 9:52

I am a big fan of older vintage synthesizers and. Those do not have the convenience of USB to just plug into your computer. instead they employ the old school 5 pin MIDI connection. So you have to convert that into a USB signal. And you do that using a MIDI interface. So I have a few different MIDI interfaces. A couple of them have eight inputs and eight outputs. And then I've got a couple more that just have one set of in and out. One of them isn't working right now, but more on that later. But yeah, same

Rich 10:38

You had to bring that up,

Justin 10:40

yes. We're still recovering. We're recovering from that. But the nice thing is, is having that mapped out. Once again, I just made a table on the left hand side. I've listed the names of the interfaces and then across the top, I just had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And then I just wrote in to all the different spaces, what devices were plugged into those various. Ports in the MIDI interface. So again it makes it so much easier to have all of this stuff just mapped out first, because when you're dealing with any one of these alone is, is kind of overwhelming, like the audio is overwhelming, but then you add into that the power and the MIDI. Oh my gosh, like you're having to keep track of so much. So I really loved having the spreadsheet approach. It allowed the two of us to communicate really effectively and just be focused and help measure progress about like where we were at, what all left we had to do. So that's another advantage to doing it this way is when it's really a complex setup, having something like this allows you to track your progress and adjust accordingly. What this made me think about is how valuable it is to have a second pair of hands. And a second pair of eyes. So if I had to have to do this all on my own, there were things rich that you caught that I would have missed and vice versa. And so it was great that we were able to help each other in our observations and our recommendations and real time feedback and so on and so forth. So having a like collaborative. Partner to set up a studio space is awesome. So if you have the ability to do that, highly recommend it.

Rich 12:17

Yeah, find another audio nerd in your circle who you can invite over and make a day of it. One thing that I also want to bring up that was essential, I felt, was you had a little device that pumped out little labels for us. Can you talk about that?

Justin 12:41

Yes, I am a nerd when it comes to keeping things labeled. So for a long time, I was just trying to get by with like little stickers and I would write on them. And then my handwriting is awful. And so I just thought there has to be a better way. And that's when I came across a really nice little Dymo, like handheld label maker. And you can get different colored label tape for it. It's got a nice little keyboard on it. You can just type in what you want. But that was awesome. We used that left right, center in our process of just creating labels for the different cables and so forth. And that's great for 6, 7, 8 months, however much time later, if you need to dig around in the cables. They all kind of start to blur together and look the same, and it's just a big mess of spaghetti, but those labels help you identify what's what.

Rich 13:32

My approach when I was Dealing with this that might be helpful for those of you out there getting into this kind of thing is when you create the label create one for both sides of the cable. If you have something going into the interface and then from another source label, both sides. Also what I was doing was if there was an extension cable at the junction between those two, the union between those two cables, I would label, That area too, uh, so that you could, if you're digging around back there and you need to unplug something and it's in an extension you could find what's plugged into that extension at that union point.

Justin 14:18

And another label thing I wanted to bring up is I mentioned that Patchbay earlier that has 48 points on it, which You know, no, no one's going to memorize what all 48 points at that patch. They are. So I found a company called trace audio it says trace audio. com and they actually make a series of labels. It's actually a sticker and you can write on it with a Sharpie. So it's pretty robust. You actually have to like use like a little bit of water to wipe it off later, so it's going to stick around. No pun intended. But yeah they make one, I have a Behringer. Patchbay, so they make a label for that. I got a little sharpie, I can just write in what all the different points in the patchbay are. And chances are they have a similar product for your patchbay, so you can easily label it. I definitely recommend checking it out, and I'm really glad I found it, because in the past, like I said, I used these tiny little labels. They were just messy and they fell off all the time and so something like this is going to be much cleaner and allow me to use my studio more efficiently in the long run. Yeah,

Rich 15:35

broke things down into three main categories, power, data, and audio. We started off with the power cables. Once everything was situated, we got the power, all the power running to the power conditioners and surge protectors and labeled. And then we moved on to the data cables, the data being the USB cables and the MIDI cables and then we got all of that squared away and taken care of into the spreadsheet. And then we finished it off with audio cables. Uh, the thing about audio cables and cables in general is. Once you have your equipment set up, not everything is going to be the same distance from where you're taking the unit to with the cable, right? So if you're running a power cable from a keyboard, that's all the way on the other side of the room, you're going to need to plan for what size cable you're going to need from there. And also with the audio cables and the data cables as well, because the last thing you want when you're doing this kind of thing is to have like your keyboard, if your keyboard is right next to your interface and you run a 25 foot cable, that's just a waste. It's a waste. It's better to measure it out. Find a cable that will allow you to reach the unit. Successfully, but also give you just a little bit of wiggle room if you have to move things Like if you ever have to get back there and you have to move the keyboard or move the interface So you're not like locked into this length and that's it. So enough for a little bit of play I would say you could probably estimate about maybe one or one or two feet of play up to two feet of play Which is always good in case you have to move out a desk or move out a rack mount unit so that you don't pull everything off the shelf or whatever when you're moving things around.

Justin 17:28

I would call it the Goldilocks approach to cable length. Not too short, not too long, but just right so that you have some flexibility.

Rich 17:36

And what's good about this too, is you could take inventory of what you have, plan out your cables, and then if you're missing something. While you are still putting things together, you can go either stop somewhere and pick up what you need or place that order on Amazon, which we did,

Justin 17:54

Yeah, I just wanted to interject there. Another element to this is I have a bunch of cables and so I kind of organized my cables by audio and MIDI power USB so that they were easy for us to sort of navigate through and pull from. And by doing that, it made it easier for us in the moment to determine like, Oh, this audio cable isn't long enough. Give me a different one. Or, you know what, this power connector isn't going to reach. We need to get an extension cord stuff like that.

Rich 18:27

you brought up something about wall warts. Can you talk about that?

Justin 18:32

So a lot of equipment, especially more modern equipment, I think the power supply. is what is commonly referred to as a wall wart. So if you've ever seen those adapters that are really big and chunky the one end is a small little barrel connector plugs into the back of a unit, but then there's this honking, huge power brick thing that plugs into the wall or an outlet. And the problem that creates is that they usually take up the Precious space especially in a power strip or a power conditioner, like we talked about earlier. So if you plug one of those in, it can actually overlap two other power outlets beside it, which would really drastically reduce the effectiveness of that power conditioner. we actually found on Amazon these short little extenders that are like six inches or so that look like a regular plug and are really space efficient. And you can plug the wall wart into that thing. And then you've got that little bit of extra length to plug into say a power strip or something like that. And it creates room so that you can use all the outlets that you have available to you. So that was something that was a great investment, really worthwhile in this process, because I ended up having gosh, I don't know, eight or nine of those different. So we couldn't have done this project without having that accessory. And I think that brings us to cable management. So I have a giant, a lot of people have a rubber band ball. I have a giant ball of like Velcro strips and Velcro cable ties and these like rubber cable ties and stuff like that. And. We used that to cable manage throughout the process. So we kind of did that a little bit as we went through, we didn't do full cable management but we did it just enough to stage it, if you will before going into a finer level of detail with it. Because we didn't know when or if we would have to pull something out and so forth. you know, the cable management, having that type of accessory available to you is really important. not only to hide the cables, but to tuck them away. And secure them and so on and so forth. So that was something that really made this I think elevated is the right word it really elevated the space, the functionality of it, just to really clean it up.

Rich 21:10

the way I look at it is if you have a lot of equipment and a lot of cables, instead of just letting them all hang there it does is allows you to take cables from a specific section, tie them together and get them into one braided bigger cable so that you could separate out sections in your studio and be like, okay, all of the cables for this section are here. So if you need to. Come back to it. You can find it and also obviously that aesthetic appeal when you walk in. It doesn't look like a mess,

Justin 21:40

feels better and if your studio feels better, you're going to be, I think, more productive, more creative in that space. But I think on a practical level, it makes finding. And a cable or troubleshooting in the little easier because you don't have this giant mess of spaghetti To sift through if they're nice and clean and tidy You can identify the right cable more quickly and troubleshoot faster and so on and so forth So there's definitely practical reasons to do it

Rich 22:09

The goal that I'm always after when I'm doing this kind of thing is to use every possible input and output on every device with every cable, but to make it look like no cables are connected at all.

Justin 22:21

amazingly we accomplished that here so when rich first arrived in He saw the setup in the space and I chuckled and was like, yeah, but none of it's actually plugged in. And what was really great was that by the time we were done, it kind of looked almost exactly like it did when Rich first walked in. And so I have to really, tip my hat to Rich. He was The zen master of cable management here. I just stood back in awe and let him go with the flow that he was in. He was in this amazing flow state of cable management.

Rich 22:53

Well, thanks, man.

Justin 22:54

I just really thank you for that. And I just was there in awe, like handing him cables and Velcro and things like that. But yeah, it it looks incredible.

Rich 23:06

Thank you. Yeah. I like order.

Justin 23:08

Yes.

Rich 23:10

No, it really is, fulfilling, brings attention to the equipment itself, Onward to the next thing here. you may think, Oh, we're done. It's all ready to go, but no, we still have another step in this whole journey before you push that rack back into place and you get that final braid of cables tucked in what you should probably do is test all of the equipment. So tell us a little bit about that.

Justin 23:41

I think the approach we took that worked well was that we tested as we were going along. So rather than just doing all the cable management, everything is pristine and perfect. And then making sure everything worked instead of that we balanced between doing a little bit of light cable management and then testing and then adjusting as needed. And so I think that worked well because there were issues that we found and it would have been really annoying to have to like rip everything out. Undo everything to find that problem cable or whatever. And so I think that approach is really good that you do a little bit of light cable management and test everything and make sure it turns on, make sure the audio is working and that sort of thing before nailing everything down. So to speak. Mm

Rich 24:31

In groups is a good thing too. Test for power first does everything turn on because then you can go and look at those surge Protectors and power conditioners to make sure everything's plugged in properly. We actually ran into an issue where one outlet on one of the Surge protectors on the ground was very loose and the plug just kept falling out if you touched it even slightly the plug would slide out and it was driving us crazy And so when we realized this we were able to switch it We were able to then get past that hurdle and move on to then testing the MIDI and data stuff, and then, finally the audio, And you've got to be flexible with these things. we had hooked everything up. We were in the data testing phase and there was one unit that we'll tell them about that, tell them what happened.

Justin 25:17

I have this little, the little synthesizer that could. It's this Yamaha FB 01, and it gets made fun of a lot online. And it's really not a great synth, but it was special to me because I had done some modifications to it, and I had made some neat sounds on it, and so on and so forth. But It wasn't really fancy at all, but it was just driving me nuts because, try as we might, we could not get that thing to work. It worked for like five seconds and then stopped, so kind of determine that I think there's a hardware issue with this. I need to examine it more closely, open it up, see if anything came loose or it needs to be repaired, et cetera, et cetera. So then we had to extract that from the setup. And I think that's where things like the cable management came in really handy. we were able to take it out easily because it was all neatly cable managed, but then the schematic came into play because we knew exactly which port. It was plugged into Rich, you were having trouble finding it and you're like, Oh which one is it plugged into? Which port is it plugged into? And then I was able to open up the document and within two seconds I told him, Oh, it's number seven and he found it right away. And then we had this big giant cluster of cables and he had a label on it. And so he was able to find it, pull it out and boom, we were done. So what could have been an hour long or hours long process, some nightmare turned into about five minutes. We got it pulled out, probably less than that. it's now sitting on my workbench for me to take a deeper dive into and hopefully get it fixed.

Rich 26:57

all of that planning definitely helped. And I think this is a great time to just do a little recap of what we talked about today. when you're setting up a more complex studio, and you can even probably do this with a simple studio, is you want to have a plan in place. Where is your equipment going in the room? And set up a diagram, schematic, spreadsheet labeling. All of your inputs and outputs putting what is plugged into what on that sheet labeling things properly. Sometimes a label maker might work nice. There are also these little tabs you can buy that have Velcro on them that go around the. On the cables and you can write stuff on those labels. Then you want to take a inventory of your cables and what kind of connections you have and make sure you have everything you need with regards to the cables the power, the data and the audio. and then we get into cable management. The little Velcro. belts, I guess we'll call them. You have these other ties, and then obviously testing the equipment before you put everything back in the place and button everything up and tighten everything up at the end and making sure everything turns on and works properly. And just remember, be flexible in the process.

Justin 28:19

great recap rich and great episode I really enjoyed debriefing the experience with you and sharing it with our listeners here on the podcast today. Thanks everybody so much for listening. We will catch you on the next episode. Bye for now.

Rich 28:35

Bye bye.