Hello all,
One of my favorite things about Elektronauts is how open people are about sharing information. It’s a great way for everyone to learn and develop their craft and it is also nice to help someone with your expertise (I don’t have much expertise to share but I imagine it would be nice to share if I did). In that spirit, I was thinking it would be nice to have a thread dedicated to helping one another organize, simplify, and generally improve our studio spaces.
A couple such questions have arisen for me recently. Has anyone locked into a great system for organizing and storing their cables? Not just the cables you use everyday but also the more esoteric cables you need every once in a while (headphone extensions, outdated USB cables that are needed for one old external hard drive, etc). I’d love to have a tidy one stop shop with all of my cables neatly identified and filed away.
Another question I have is about mic storage. I have been taking an assortment of mics to a friend’s studio space to record lately and I’ve been thinking it would be great to have one case where each individual mic had its own place that was safe and secure during transport. Has anyone had success with a particular case?
This is all the stuff I don’t really want to think about when creating music. I usually just want to get down to it. But, especially as I get older, I find more and more how much these QOL considerations improve the overall enjoyment and end result of making music.
So what’s been your biggest eureka moment with organizing and refining your space? Or what issues do you want to hear other’s solutions for?
I don’t have a massive studio, but I do have a lot of cables, and my organization of them works best when I use self-gripping cable ties (these are found under a lot of different names) and ziploc storage bags of various sizes that I label (get the big variety pack). These are best for storage, though, and not necessarily for the stuff you’re grabbing on a daily or weekly basis.
Bendable gear ties are also really useful if it’s cables I’m carrying around…
I just stick with the dreaded cable box. For the most part I keep all of mine coiled with twist ties so things stay tidy and they don’t get tangled. It’s a small bit of extra work upfront but it saves me a lot of work when I actually need something. One box for audio cables, one box for USB, one for power, one for midi, etc. Anything particularly esoteric (old hard drive cable, weird plug for an ancient electronic) generally gets stored with the thing - taped to it, rubber banded, whatever. If for some reason I can’t do that then it gets a little cable tag as a label, goes into whatever the most applicable box is and I pray I remember where later.