Lessons learned: minimalism & portability

Avoiding headaches with a clean and hassle-free studio and stage

Today I’ll offer a peek into my home studio, and share a little bit about the touring setup for Hotel Neon.

When it comes to my workflow and gear, I’m always on the lookout for new and better ways to do things. I’ve learned so much simply by watching how others work and implementing pieces of what I see. Even if your situation calls for a different way of working, maybe some of this will spark some ideas of your own.

Uncluttered space; uncluttered mind

Since my undergraduate experience began in 2008, I’ve lived at 10 different addresses across the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. metro area, Wilmington, DE, and Philadelphia, PA. Most of these places were shared with others and only a few had the space for a dedicated music studio. Constant physical shifts like this have forced me to adapt quickly and be as flexible as possible.

I’ve always been a minimalist at heart, but part of that is because I’ve never had time to acquire a big collection of anything before I’ve had to pack it all up and move somewhere else. Thankfully, my situation is a little more settled now. I just moved out of my home of 5 years, and into a new one that I hope I’ll have even longer. Even still, I’m hard-wired to keep a minimal amount of “music stuff” on hand.

When I have too many choices in front of me, I feel paralyzed. So I’ve been careful over the years to buy equipment that’s as functional and multi-purpose as possible - things that can pack easily, but also fit into a wide variety of musical settings.

Here’s what my work zone looks like at the moment:

My talented wife transformed the most depressing, blinding white, unremarkable box of an office into an inspiring and cozy place to work. There are some recessed lights in the ceiling, but I’m a fan of keeping them off when daylight spills in. Normally I have a proper office chair, but the velvet is nice for now. I’ll be putting up sound paneling soon.

As you can probably tell, I like to keep a fairly tidy and uncluttered workspace. It’s small - only 120 square feet, give or take - so I dust, vacuum, and try hard to take care of this room and make it feel enjoyable to be in. Little things like that matter to me. It’s especially necessary because I also do my day job in this room from 9-5 on Mondays and Fridays, when I’m not in the office. It’s important for me to have a clean and orderly space available for both sides of my life.

When the working day is over, I like to unplug whatever it is that I’m working with on the desk: sometimes an Octatrack, sometimes some pedals, sometimes an iPad or laptop. I make sure to completely put it all away so that I can approach the space with a fresh mind the next time around. I find that this keeps me accountable, too, because if it starts getting too hard to do this every night, then I know I’m probably acquiring (and spending) more than I need.

Every piece of gear that I own can fit in this room. Half of the closet is bins of cables, MIDI controllers, recording equipment, pedals, and other odds and ends, while the other half is office supplies (I love my Japanese stationary and pens), CDs/tapes, and shipping materials. Everything you buy from my bandcamp is packed and prepared in this room.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to be this fanatical, but staying organized definitely helps me and my scattered brain be focused and productive. It’s such a simple thing, but having a clean space to work in is something I strongly recommend to anyone.

I try like hell to keep this closet clean and organized. This isn't its best day, but you get the gist of it.

I also have a few guitars and a Rhodes piano in this room - the holdovers from my days of playing amplified music. The 88-key MIDI keyboard on top of the Rhodes is temporary while I hold on to it for a friend.

Minimal hardware; purposeful software

I had a brief bout with eurorack and modular synthesis a few years ago, and while I don’t regret it, I definitely don’t miss it. Things got too messy and too expensive for my taste. The platform and format is growing at an exponential pace now, and even though there’s so much more that’s possible, it ultimately felt to me like a physical version of what I was already attempting to create digitally on my iPad and in my DAW. Over time, I found that I kept trying to assemble “rackable computers,” so I admitted defeat and returned to software.

A previous incarnation of my live rig was built, in large part, around a eurorack processing skiff at the center. On the right, shopping the modular section of Rubadub in Glasgow while on tour with Marcus Fischer and Simon Scott in 2019 - I blame these two for my initial fascination with the format :)

My best and most complete work is done “in the box,” plain and simple. I’m continually blown away by the power of software these days. Making music on iPad has been the single best decision I’ve made in a long time, allowing me to further simplify and streamline (I’ll be writing more about this in the next note I write). Even my studio monitors, Neumann KH80s, are DSP-equipped and tunable with software so that I can calibrate their frequency response to fit any room they’re in.

With that said, it’s easy to be just as wasteful in the digital space as it is in the physical space. Anyone can find themselves buried under a mountain of unused plugins because of cheap prices and digital storage, so I try to be really careful with new software. These days, a majority of my work is done with Fabfilter, Soundtoys, Valhalla, and Ableton plugins. I find that these 4 brands cover all of the fundamental bases I need, and although I definitely have more available, it’s rare that I actually use any other plugins for audio processing.

The 2 key pieces of hardware I held on to from that time of Eurorack experimentation are both samplers: the Elektron Octatrack and the 1010Music Blackbox. I’ve tried time and time again to replicate these things with software, but so far I just haven’t been able to do it. They have proven themselves worth keeping around - particularly the Octatrack, which is a primary songwriting and sound design tool for me these days.

The Octatrack and Blackbox in action during a rehearsal for our Fall 2022 Hotel Neon tour dates. I ended up not bringing either of the pedals along, and swapped out the Octatrack for an iPad when we flew to the west coast. I used the Octatrack for the east coast dates that didn’t require a plane ride.

No checked bags allowed on tour

The same principles that I keep in the studio apply to life on the road, as well. I keep my setup extremely simple. Part of this is musically motivated: we’re a trio making very loud and dense music, so it’s important that each of us stays in our own lane, so to speak. We spend a lot of time practicing and rehearsing before shows so that we’re aligned on the sounds available to each of us, and so we know what to avoid in order to prevent things from sounding muddy. It’s best when I give myself fewer toys to mess around with and allow myself to fully trust my band mates to fill the sound stage.

The other motivation here is that it’s frankly just easier to travel this way. The last thing you want to worry about on tour is dealing with a bag of stuff that’s been ransacked and ruined by TSA or other security agents, or having your show depend on something you had to throw in checked bag that was lost. Minimize your risk.

left: the setup I used on tour with Hotel Neon, Viul, and Benoît Pioulard in fall 2022. Right: packed up for UK and EU shows in 2019.

As a band, we’ve also learned over time that things are smoother at the venue when you give the sound engineers fewer reasons to resent you. One way to manage that? Give them less to do! Make soundcheck and performance as easy as possible for them to get right.

Our performance rig is largely self-managed. We each send our own signals to an audio interface, and then we mix ourselves in Ableton Live and send the master output to the house PA through two stereo channels. We also bring our own projector so we can run our own audio-reactive visual projections from this same laptop. At the end of the day, all we ask from the venue is a place to plug in two 1/4” cables and a power outlet…we can comfortably play anywhere.

Here’s the Hotel Neon the rider/stage plot we’ve been sending to venues for 4-5 years now. It’s nice to know that we can set up quickly and easily, and produce a very repeatable quality of sound no matter what kind of space we’re playing in.

Give us a power outlet, and we’ll play anywhere.

This setup came about in larger part because of our friend Andy Othling, who makes music as Lowercase Noises. Andy took us on our very first proper “tour” back in 2016, when the band had only been a trio for about a year. We were playing house shows up the west coast of the USA, so in light of the fact that we’d be playing different rooms and spaces every night, we wanted the sound to be as consistent and controllable as possible. We ended up stuffing 2 QSC speakers and a Behringer X-series mixer into his truck and used this rig for both of our sets, with remote iPad control so we could mix and EQ each other. This worked remarkably well. It was a huge mental weight lifted when we knew exactly how to set up each night, and could predict exactly how we were going to sound no matter the space we were in.

Ever since then, we’ve rarely sent anything more than a L/R stereo out to the house system. We’ve played about 100 shows now, and of course, we’ve had some mistakes and issues along the way. But we always enter a room pretty confident of how things will turn out, which is a huge benefit.

Those first few "Slow Spaces" tours showed us what was possible with a totally self-contained system.

In conclusion

I hope this offered a glimpse into why I am the way I am, but I also hope it inspired some ideas of your own when it comes to studio and stage readiness. I love to plan and plot these things.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

Andrew