SUSTAINING CREATIVE HEALTH - Part 1: Refining the Home Studio Workspace with Samuel Organ

In this Lux Cache article series, we analyse the foundational elements that lead to efficient creative workflow, testing interdisciplinary approaches to what can be applied to a musician’s arsenal outside of the DAW. In part one of Sustaining Creative Health we invite producer, tutor, & multi-instrumentalist Samuel Organ to explore the theories and practises of designing your home studio workspace - to navigate the hogwash and what actually suits your personal needs.

This tutorial is available as both a Patreon text post and .pdf document format . We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations.

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Introduction

Welcome to the Lux Cache: Sustaining Creative Health series! This is going to be an opportunity for you to explore and implement new perspectives around your creative practice, positive psychology methods, and ultimately the significance of parts of your creative process outside the DAW. Firstly, I’ll introduce the way in which I’m defining sustainability and how it relates to creative practice. I’ve personally previously misinterpreted the term sustainability to relate specifically to environmental concerns, but I’ve come to understand that it is characterised by four distinct areas; human, social, economic and environmental. In addition there's the idea of personal sustainability, a concept which is underpinned by not just maintaining one’s own health and wellbeing, but also by actively improving it and supporting others to do so too.

So, why should we be thinking about sustainability? It becomes ever more evident that the modern professional musician is faced with a career characterised by fragmentation. This is represented simply in the way money is earned through a variety of revenue streams, but also that performing artists are exposed to a range of occupational demands from organisational, interpersonal and intra-personal sources, which may impact their well-being. To maintain even a basic income, a musician's career is defined by a portfolio approach and the ability to recognise transferrable skills and adapt accordingly. I’m sure all of us wish to continue working within the music industry. For me, creative expression through music performance, collaboration and spectating is what leads me to happiness. I’ve come to understand that embracing concepts of sustainability could have positive impacts on key areas of my professional and personal life, as well as acting as a direct response to current threats facing individuals and the industry. Further from career progression and development, it could lead us to a more meaningful career that reflects our core values, and also to improved physical and mental well-being.

A great place for us to start will be to unpack the functionality of our creative environments at home.

As musicians or artists, I’m sure we’ve all felt a feeling of longing to be able to fulfil our wish-list of equipment, productivity tools and furniture to create our ideal home studio at whatever the cost. More than ever we are looking through the window into other peoples homes, lifestyles and practices, and making impairing reference to our own lives. There’s an intimidating amount of articles online detailing Home Studio Essentials, The Top 10 Hardware Synthesisers You Need Right Now!, 14 Ways To Increase Productivity At Home, but I really believe there’s a more important elementary holistic process to go through before the practical advice in these becomes easy to separate, and potentially ignore. In this article I want to challenge the perception that somebody else is going to be able to tell you how to approach creativity at home and influence the mechanics of the space in which you do so. It’s likely you’ve already got everything you need.

What is a home studio?

Let’s look at the terminology. Almost all definitions of a studio suggest that it’s a separate room designed for work and creative practice. For many of us, I’m certain a dedicated environment is an opulent and unachievable goal, and through time, various spaces in our homes have had to sustain multi-disciplinary activities; to this day my kitchen table functions as the production suite. Whether you’ve spent time studying or not, you might have encountered the structure of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (fig. 1), which details a five tier model of human needs, from physiological up to self-actualised. Some of the basic and physiological needs (including food, water, warmth, security, resources etc.) may seem self-evident to talk about, but I think it’s important to reinforce their place when it comes to supporting and sustaining creativity at home. They strengthen the importance of home in ‘home studio’, that it’s an adaptable space and that your creative endeavours are going to be built on solid foundations. It’s important to recognise how creative practices might impact your ecosystem at home, in both positive and negative ways.

Fig. 1 : ‘Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs’

What’s the primary function of my home studio space?

Firstly, I think it’s fundamental that we become comfortable with both the present and future function of a home studio. Try and transport yourself to where you might be in a few years times based on the opportunities you see opening up for you, or where you’d hope to be. If you see the bulk of your work being realised in recording and rehearsal facilities, then you may want to consider the focus of your space to be a source of inspiration and a place to explore new ideas, of which you’ll then continue in external environments. Is there anything you can change about your current set up to support changes in the future? Unused equipment…unused space?

For me, the primary function of my creative space is to be able to very quickly explore ideas. Minimal waiting, loading, patching….whether that’s to satisfy capturing ideas with immediacy, or squeezing creative time around other demands of home life.

What items do I need?

This is a very personal list you’re going to make, and not one I’m looking to influence and the items within it. The purpose of asking yourself this is just to distinguish between wants and needs. If I spend enough time looking at Instagram of a day, I guarantee I can convince myself I need a certain pair of monitors, or a valve preamp…but honestly, for me…the bulk of my work at home has never deviated outside of laptop, interface and speakers….and I really intend to keep it that way. It promotes flexibility and mobility in my set-up which is what I need in my adaptable creative space. Make sure you have a firm grasp on what is essential, and that it’s not dictated by others.

What other factors can sustain creativity at home?

Further from basic and physiological needs, there’s other important factors to think about to help us sustain creativity at home. Firstly, separating your environments is worth considering. If you’re able to make space to be creative and work outside of your bedroom, I highly recommend it. In my experience, associating my bedroom with work and productivity only served to affect my quality of sleep and sleeping patterns, and when you start to go down this road this will start to affect the quality of your work, which further reinforces meeting those basic needs.

Secondly, take a moment to consider the visual stimulus in your creative environment, these being items from which you draw inspiration or motivation. How does your current environment make you feel? Is there anything you could change that would empower you to feel more creative? For me, it’s just natural light and sitting close to a window that aids that process. In the past I’ve been incredibly lucky to have a sea view in my home creative space while writing music, but at the moment the view from my space is north facing, and watching the incoming weather roll off the South Downs hills at the edge of the city of Brighton is a really exciting and new source of inspiration.

It’s incredibly likely you’ve taken the time to consider some or all of the factors in this article already. Some of you might find this process incredibly exciting and constantly consider and refresh your environment in this way. For others, maybe you’ve hit a wall creatively, and there could be something in this elementary process to consider here which will help you find a new perspective to push forward.

Gibbs Reflective Cycle

Fig. 2 - ‘Gibbs Reflective Cycle’

As something to leave you with, I wanted to share the model of Gibbs Reflective cycle (fig. 2) - a six stage process centered around exploring experience to give structure to learning. The six stages include providing a description of an experience, explaining how you feel, evaluating the positive and negative parts, analysing, drawing conclusions and creating an action plan. I’ve found this to be a really useful development tool which you can run any parts of the creative process through with a focus to making positive change. As an exercise, you could try putting the way you view your creative environment through the reflective cycle to support taking any necessary steps to improve. We subconsciously use this process, but applying structure might help make it happen sooner.

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Samuel Organ is a producer, multi-instrumentalist (The Physics House Band, Slugabed, Kai Whiston) and tutor based in the UK. His last album Complex Habitat Systems is available everywhere and his new sample pack featuring 200+ Guitar SFX is out now.

You can follow him on Twitter @samuel_organ and Instagram @samuelorgan