Music Studio in a Box

I have this issue. My house isn’t big enough for a dedicated music studio. We have a digital piano in the lounge and a few other instruments hung up on the wall, but here’s the issue. When I want to have a decent jam with loop pedals, effects or record anything through the audio interface, I have to spend a bunch of time on set up and pack up. I’m a parent, so when my son goes down to sleep, I’m free to play, but I don’t want to stay up late. So I have to spend half an hour setting up all the music gear, jam for an hour and then pack it all away in the cupboard again. I’ve always wanted something I could leave plugged in. A small pack away music station. Something to store a few mics, a pedal board, the sound desk, the audio interface and some cables. Something where the cables could be managed well enough to just leave plugged in. Something I could open up, plug the iPad into and get jamming.

So this is my solution. A box small enough to fit under one end of the piano, but versatile enough to store everything I need and to store it in a state that is ready to go!

I’m lucky to have a bunch of good tools to play with, but really, you can do this with a hand saw, a coping saw, a drill a screw driver and some good chisels, it would just take longer.

You will need some plywood, enough for the top, bottom, back, sides and some shelves.

Screws and pva to hold it all together.

Hinges x6

Some wheels

Some music gear to store!

You could just build what I built, but really, it has to fit the gear that you want to use and the space that you want to use it in.

Start with the size, what’s the maximum and minimum sizes that you can store what you want to store in the state you want to store it? For me, that meant storing a mixing desk in the top and I wanted to be able to have enough clearance that I could leave the cables plugged in. While I can buy cables that with right angle bends (I’m going to do this in time anyway), I also don’t want to be bound by the cables I have, so I needed enough clearance that I can have cables plugged into the mixing desk when the lid is down and no cables are trying to bend too hard. I made that the priority for my top shelf and measured the mixing desk to fit.

My second restriction was that it had to fit under the piano. So I had to make the height work around that (including wheels, which I completely forgot about).

I wanted to have the rest of the cabinet reasonably adjustable, mostly because I wanted to be able to change gear and know that the cabinet can still work.

I also have a travel case that I wanted to use to organise things. So I wanted this to be able to fit.

I wanted to have a shelf for my laptop to sit on when recording and I wanted a mic stand of some sort to be able to fit.

I also wanted it to be cheap. I was lucky to drive past a salvageable sheet of 18mm plywood someone was throwing away, so I wanted to design within the amount of timber I had.

It’s a lot to ask of a small cabinet, but I’m pretty happy with how I managed to make it fit all of those criteria.

To test out how it might look, I built the project in tinkercad’s code blocks and animated it to get an idea of how it works. I have made a seperate instructable on how I did that.

There isn’t much to building a box, but I did make myself a stupid challenge by trying to include some wheels that don’t really want to be there and using ply that was pre-used. So I spent a bit of time cutting off all the bad and water damaged ply, then figuring out what I had left to use and looking through my shed for other bits I could use. Those processes made things take a bit longer than I had initially thought. I often stood around thinking, “So, what wood am I going to have left for this part?”

Luckily I found some old cupboard doors to make the front and lid from and figured that they would work pretty well.

The important part to remember with the box is, you want to be able to feed cables through any part of the box from any part of the box, so cut some little cable holes and make sure that they can fit.

I set my skill saw blade about 4mm deep and put a guide on it. I ripped a little edge to all the parts for the door so I could slot in some pegboard. Unfortunately, I didn’t have peg board. It’s pretty expensive to buy and quite time consuming to make. So I just made some. It was as time consuming as I thought, but I’m looking forward to having all me gear in there and being able to easily make hooks for all my cables.

I figured that I could make a clip to hold the cupboard door closed and making it out of wood could make it a cool feature. It worked well for a wee bit, I thought I just needed to replace the wire with some stiffer metal, but then the ply broke and it all fell apart. It was a cool idea, but it really didn’t work at all and I spent way too much time making it.

I wanted this cabinet to be easy to move about when filled with gear. Initially I spent a long time putting some different wheels in, but they turned out to be very unstable, so I took them out and replaced them with these. These ones are much better. The only thing I might change is that the wheel on the door should be at the front edge to give it slightly more stability when the cabinet is closed.

I had an old mic stand which is flimsy and not my favourite. I took the base off it and cut all the parts to length with a hacksaw. I then mounted it so that folded up, it fits neatly inside the cabinet, but when the cabinet is open, the cabinet acts as a stand and the microphone stand easily folds out of it so that I can sing sitting down with my guitar (which is what I tend to do when I jam.

I didn’t take as many photos of this as I would have liked to, but I’m quite proud of this part of the design. I made a little fold down shelf inside the lid that can close up with the ipad inside. This way, I can have all the sound gear set up and easily close it all down without anything being unplugged. Basically, I screwed a spacer onto the lid and then hinged the shelf off that. Initially I went for a clever little cupboard latch, but it wasn’t strong enough to hold the weight of the ipad when I closed the lid, so I made a little twisting one.

I wanted shelves to be adjustable, so I drilled holes down each side to put shelving pins in.

I also put a little shelf on the outside for charging our phones at night and drilled through so that we can hide all the chargers neatly away.

It’s done! A working studio in a box!
I’m so excited to get jamming with it, try new things and put some time back into music in the evenings again! It took me a whole evening emptying storage boxes into this space and routing all the cables, but now I know that they are set up and ready for a jam session as soon as I open the box!