August 28, 2025
I got up today and right after breakfast went downstairs to my basement… but right there kind of lost a bit of motivation. It looked disorganized and messy, so right there I started by making a few fast decisions and deciding that I needed 4 areas for my music needs:
- Green screen area for recording my videos
- The area in front of my shelves for recording videos
- A dedicated practice area
- An area for the audio and video editing as well as zoom calls and it had to be big enough so that I could play on zoom calls and/or be close to the mixer for making multitrack recordings.
I recently did a good cleaning downstairs, so it wasn’t like it was dirty or dusty, but it was messy, unorganized and that took away my motivation, so off to do that.
None of the 4 areas would be difficult of itself, but altogether, its a good amount of time and effort to do. I also want to organize things better, in particular, cable organization, cable management and cable storage when not in use. I have a ton of small cables that need to be out of the way, yet readily available and close-by.
The desk is going to take the most effort to do, as it is basically 2 of the 4 places. Right now, it is a mess:
After all the cleaning and organizing (which took over half a day!), I want to add a small 32″ TV as my new screen for the iPad and move the current 24″ monitor in to the list of available monitors… and speaking of monitors, I also want to increase the number of monitors from 4 to 5 total, where the 5th will be a screen that is going to only be seen from the green screen side, so from there, I will be able to start/stop the DAW from there with a secondary (and wireless), mouse and keyboard.
Having 6 screens in the area of my desk is also going to be visually impressive!
Before the end of today, I stopped in the local dollar store and picked up 20 small plastic containers for part of the wire management and I cleared out and organized my file cabinet under the desk so that the top drawer was free and clear for the plastic containers. After this, I started the process of clearing the top of my desk.
This is the first day of me doing some things and I just started yet already I am feeling motivated again. Tomorrow I plan to see if I can complete things and then start on the next phase of the process.
I am pumped!
Addendum: Friday August 29, 2025
The first thing that I did was setup the practice station. This took a little setup and polishing to get the 32″ TV in place and linked/tested with the iPad Pro. Those dots are now HUGE! 🙂
At this point, my computer audio/video/zoom station is also completed. I now have 5 functional monitors and the setup for the practice area is ready. Above you can see the setup… and yes I did not just set up a practice station but a little IPTV action courtesy of ROKU.
The four monitors on my desk are amazing and perfect, the now clean and organized desk makes it such a pleasure to use, even more so than before.
With all 5 monitors turned on and now properly placed in Windows I can move from far left to far right with a single swish of the mouse… love it!
My practice area is not *just* a practice area, but I also am able to take video with great audio thanks to the Sony 4K Handycam and ZOOM F4 audio interface.
On the green screen side, this is the point of view from the stool that I sit on. here I have the small iPad that controls the Panasonic GH5s, the large iPad that controls the Panasonic GH7 and in the middle I have a the 5th monitor from which I will be able to view REAPER from and control my DAW, all thanks to the wireless keyboard and mouse.
This is the other side of the green screen…. here we can see how that is set up and bonus… you can see my SE Electronics SE4400a microphones in their stands and where I place them in the frame.
The green screen portion is still not completed as I want to add 2 more sides to the setup so that when I do video, I have green screen on my left and right as well as behind me. This will give me greater artistic possibilities in the near future. Work still left to be done as soon as I get the time to complete it, I have the green screens ready to deploy!
This is area #4, the location in front of my shelves that hold my accordions, they make a fantastic backdrop for the times that I want to make a video and not use any of the other 3 locations.
A plethora of creativity riches for my future accordion journey!
More to come soon.