Not everything you build in your house has to be an essential. Sometimes you can spare some space and resources for the things that we truly love in life. The things that make use keep pushing forward, and the things that help us wake up in the morning.

Personally, I love music. I am a guitar player at heart but I love to dive into music in many ways whenever I have a spare moment. As part of renovating my house my wife and I agree to dedicate a small area to my music addiction. It’s not much, but it gives me a place to keep all of my guitar gear. There’s also just enough room so that I can comfortably isolate myself from the rest of the house and get in the zone to make music.

It wasn’t an easy task to fit so much stuff (I have a lot of guitars) in such a small space, but with a bit of though, planning, and creativity I was able to pull something off that worked really well for me. Here are some things I learned along the way that you can apply to building your home music studio, should you ever start heading down that path.

Decide What’s Most Important

What’s most important to you as a musician that you need this music studio to provide for you? Is it a place to actually sit down and record songs, like it was for me? Or on the other hand, maybe you just need a place to store all of your guitars until you want to take them out to play with them? If you’re an avid collector and you just need a place to put your guitars you really won’t need that much space. A bit more on that later.

Once you know what’s important to you in your music studio, it’s very easy to prioritize around that so that you can make sure you’re getting everything you need out of your efforts.

Organizing Your Electric Guitar and Gear

One way to really maximize space when you’re dealing with constraints is to make use of organization tactics. I found guitar stands online that you can actually mount right on the wall to save floor space. I only needed one, but I imagine even if you have several guitars you could store them this way just fine.

I was a little worried about their integrity since my guitar is one of the best electric guitars out there and I really didn’t want it to fall and get damaged. I was quite happy to see that the quality was actually very good, and once mounted properly in a stud it was quite sturdy.

Another huge space saver for me was to make hooks from which I could hang coils of cables. Not only does this keep them from becoming a knotted mess, it also makes it really easy to find exactly the cable I need in matter of minutes.

Lastly, I make a console in the room where I could put my computer, audio interface, and studio monitors. I made them nice racks so that everything was neat, orderly, and contained. I took a lot of inspiration from the idea of racks, but instead I made it out of nice, beautiful wood so it would match the rest of my house.

Ultimately you have a bit of flexibility when you build your studio out from scratch. I find that I have accumulated so much gear over the years that it’s extremely helpful to have everything accessible within an arm’s reach.

Do you have pictures or stories of your home music studio? Please share, I’d love to hear them.