In August of 2018, I moved out of my office rental space where I was also able to house my recording studio. When I closed the office, I rented a warehouse and moved everything into storage, including my recording equipment, because I didn't have any room at home to set my recording studio back up. At the end of 2022, I was able to repurpose the same bedroom that once served as my home studio into a recording studio once again and although it is much smaller in size than the office space I had been using, I'm glad to be able to start recording again.
I had been using a 2011 13" Macbook pro for my DAW before storing all my gear and when I set the studio back up I upgraded my recording system to a 2012 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM, a much faster machine. The only hiccup was that the Mini has a Firewire 400(1394b) port and the Presonus Firestudio uses a FireWire 800(1394b) cable and port. A quick search on Amazon and I found a Firewire 400 to 800 adapter, connected the 400 plug into the Mini's port, and then plugged the Firewire cable with the 800 end into the adapter. All hooked up for $10.99.
Another benefit of using the Mac Mini was the luxury of installing two 24" monitors that allows me to have split screens while recording. It's helpful to be able to have the tracks on one screen and use the other for the instruments/effects being used.
Another upgrade to the studio was adding two Behringer BCF2000 controllers for the DAW. While my Presonus DAW offers fader control of tracks with a mouse, I find that to be unwieldy and imprecise. I'm used to manually controlling faders and the BCF 2000 has eight motorized, hand controlled faders. I bought two of these and linked them so I can control sixteen tracks, but with a click here and a click there I can have the faders do additional duty and control an infinite number of additional tracks. Instead I could always add another unit to control another 8 tracks but it's rare for me to use more than sixteen tracks so I decided to go with 2 units.
The BCF2000's faders give me the ability to make coordinated, simultaneous fader moves that simply can't be performed with a mouse. What's more, they are motorized for automated recall. The units are USB compliant and have MIDI in/out/thru capabilities. In addition to the faders, each unit has eight endless rotary encoders, each sporting a 15-element LED indicator that are fitted with a push-to-set function that lets me select and tweak an array of functions. I can assign these to control sequencers, software mixers, virtual synths, and plug-ins with knobs without touching a mouse. They are especially handy to tweak effect parameters with much greater precision than if I had to rely on the mouse. These MIDI controllers are not essential, but they sure make using the DAW software a lot easier.
It took several days to move everything from storage back home, plug everything in, and test it all to make sure everything was talking to everything, but it's all up and running and I can start laying down some tracks again.
