{"id":222,"date":"2003-06-14T01:31:03","date_gmt":"2003-06-13T22:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kimjohnsson.com\/?p=222"},"modified":"2021-08-31T19:12:13","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T16:12:13","slug":"a-house-of-our-own-2003","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kimjohnsson.com\/?p=222","title":{"rendered":"A House of Our Own: 2003"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By this time, 10 years have passed since I got my first Korg. During 2003, several items both entered and exited my studio. Buying and selling was almost getting to be a habit.
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My gf and I bought a house (or part of one), and moved in february 2003. Before moving, I sold my Jerker to my brother, as I had decided I didn\u2019t want a desk in the traditional sense, but I would instead try to build a studio which by its design would keep my focus on making music, as comfortably as possible (without spending additional money, though).
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I placed the two racks on top of each other for maximum reachability from my chair. By not having a desk, I was able to rectifiy another inconvenience from most previous studio configurations: I could place the monitors on each side of the keyboard. No more turning my head to hear the stereo sound of what I was playing. It was always about having either the PC monitor or the musical keyboard in front of me, and the PC monitor always won, until now. The PC monitor I now placed on the Spirit monitor, to my left, which was suboptimal but I could live with it. I learned something about sitting in a forward-leaning position while surfing the net.
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It quite quickly became apparent that the Obie wasn\u2019t going to cut it as a master keyboard. It was an excellent MIDI controller, but four octaves felt somewhat constrained. I found a second-hand 88 key controller, the Kurzweil PC-88, which really made up for not having been able to upgrade the rack version a year earlier. My first QuikLok rack functioned as a surrogate keyboard stand for a while, but very quickly I got a two-tier QuikLok stand for both my keyboards. I mounted a board in front of the Kurz for my computer keyboard and mouse, and things worked pretty smoothly. I soon reinstated my other keyboard stand and mounted another board on the upper QuikLok tier, onto which I placed the screen. Sitting straight again.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The summer of 2003 brought with it one notable acquisition: my first drum machine, the Elektron Machinedrum. I also got an additional audio patch bay (I had one previously, but didn\u2019t really use it), and did some recabling to get a more flexible signal path. By the end of  summer, I traded my Obie for a Roland JD-800. 

Now I had \u201ctoo much\u201d stuff, and I had to buy an additional mixer. I got a cheap Behringer RX 16\/02, even though I\u2019ve read mostly bad reviews about the Behringer brand in general. Then my PC broke down, so I had to get a new one. New ones don\u2019t have ISA slots anymore, so my 4\u00d74 MIDI internal interface was useless, and I had to get a MIDI interface as well. I got the MidiSport 8\u00d78, and I\u2019m pretty happy with it. Now, hopefully, I don\u2019t have<\/em> to get anything else just to keep things working. <\/p>\n\n\n

Musical Output From This Period<\/h4>\n