The right environment is condusive to making good music. Bad environments, not so much. I've moved around a bit since I started playing keyboards, but I've always needed a little corner of my living quarters dedicated to writing songs at all hours of the day or night, whenever an idea strikes. I can't tell you how many songs I've lost when stuff wasn't wired up, or how many times I've awaken from a dream with a new song in my head.

Music is a hobby for me, and as a result I made a conscious decision to do other things in order to make a living. You'll note in these photos that I've been blessed to acquire a good deal of truly neat stuff, but I have worked my ass off with 70 hour workweeks and 2-4 hours a day worth of commuting time in order to afford some of these instruments. And others were amazing finds in pawn shops, on ebay, or in craigslist. I've sold off a good 30 or 40 pieces of gear, and have kept the items I liked the most or which had something particular/peculiar about them, so that they have their own personality.

The lo-res environment is in a bit of chaos since moving back to Indiana from north of Chicago in 2008. The photos below show the chaos as I've started to put things back together. The walls are not treated and there's no carpet on the floor due to the flooding we get in this basement room. But I feel blessed that I still have a home and job and family during these trying economic times.

Left Side - composing, modern sounds:
* Novation X-Station 61, serves as virtual analog + USB MIDI controller. Lightweight and my go-to synth for using on both my Mac and PC when playing virtual synths. Not quite as cool as the KS-4 it replaced (no hypersound) but the onboard 8 voice VA is flexible.
* Roland V-Synth - extremely fun to mess around with; I should probably hook up a mic to use it for sampling. I'm also working on putting together a collection of 256 vintage synth samples to see how well they work being pitched up and down the synth -- it won't load multisamples, just 1 sample per program.
* Roland Fantom X8 - I could do almost everything I need to do on this instrument, but I prefer to record & mix & edit on the computer. I have loaded up the 128MB William Coakley Hamburg Steinway samples which are very very good. I have zillions of sounds for the Fantom and it's an inspirational machine.
* Access Virus Classic - it's got crazy wicked sounds and I dig the fact that it's RED.
* Roland JP-8080 - great vocoder, lots of knobs and switches and sliders. I like the control layout; which it held more programs in memory though.
* Korg MS2000R - makes angrier and fresher sounds than I expected judging by how little I paid for it. Only 4 voices means lots of chances for voice-stealing.
* Emu Proteus 2000 + 4 ROM cards - lots of good sounds for hiphop and dance, although it's a little dated.
* Korg TR-Rack - I got it cheaply because the display is missing a few lines. Sounds good but I'll either add a Korg MOSS board to this or swap it out for some kind of Yamaha Motif Rack.
* All synths are MIDIed to an Emagic AMT-8 that connects to my Mac
* All audio is routed to the Behringer RX1602 in the top space of the rack, then to the Yamaha mixer on the subwoofer. This makes it easier to monitor just a couple of sounds at a time through headphones without having to run the amp, subwoofer, and speakers.

Right Side - composing / orchestration:
* - empty - used to be the space for my Roland VK-8 which I use with my blues band. I may put some lumber there with velcro attached to some smaller synths.
* Korg Karma - truly inspiring, and I'd like to get more sounds for it. Although I've never used it on a recording, I can see maybe trading up to an M3 in the future because of the improvements they've made to Karma.
* Kurzweil K2500XS - rescued from Guitar Center for $500, then rebuilt for $1800 (2gb hard drive, 128mb RAM, PRAM, all expansion boards including sampling and digital) Contains great AD/DA converters and a zillion patches, including a host of 50-64mb pianos (Bosendorfer, Steinway, etc.) as well as extremely good strings. Plus it has the best feel of a weighted synth, very expressive.
* Yamaha EX5R - great for pads, makes some wondrous sounds but has a flaky DSP bug that forces power resets from time to time
* Korg Triton Rack - having 2 arpeggiators is fun, has some quite rhythmic sounds. Has a few Korg ROM expansions but they need to have their programs loaded via floppy drive, which is LAME. Has the SCSI port on the back and sometime I'll get around to reconnecting the zip drive I have for it.
* Roland JV-2080 with 4 SRJV80 expansion boards. I have 2 others that I haven't gotten around to installing yet; only 2 more slots left!
* Waldorf Wave XT - rare imported wavetable synth with loose-fitting power adapter. I haven't used this very much but it's perhaps the rarest of my vintage synths.
* Yamaha TG-33 on a rack shelf which will be plugged into the MIDI interface port 8 (on the front). The 2-OP FM is lame compared to bigger FM synths, but it has the most wicked joystick which isn't spring-loaded, so it doesn't automatically return to the center detent.
* Emu 1820M breakout box for my 1212M audio card on the PC.
* Behringer 8 in/ 8 out digital ADAT interface for adding more mic ins to the Emu audio interface that's racked above it.
* Emagic Unitor 8 MIDI's these synths to the Mac via USB
* Audio for all units is connected to a Behringer RX1602 then to a Yamaha submixer for monitoring through a Hafler reference amp, an active Sony Subwoofer, and Audix Studio 1A reference monitors.
* boy, look at that mess of cables!