I had the floor plan of my studio all planned out and then I went it ruined it all buy buying the Tascam M3500. 
The board is wonderful and certainly is going to take center stage in the control room but I'm a little lost as to how I'm going to manage to get a comfortable setup happening where I have easy access to everything I need.
My studio is a blend of digital and analog, as I'm sure many of yours are, and I need some help trying to figure out how to make it possible to access the M3500, a keyboard and mouse or trackball, Command|8 control surface and remotes for my tape machines.
Tell me if I'm crazy here and if you are in the same boat please feel free to jump in and explain how you've made it work!
I'd like to be able to sit in the 'sweet spot' behind the board and be able to reach all the oft accessed items above. If I setup the M3500 on a table surface I should be able to mount a keyboard/mouse tray beneath it. It would take some doing to find a height that worked for both the mixer and the keyboard. I find if eye level is too close to the height of the board it's impossible to use. I can't tell which knob is which and I have to get up to adjust everything. Granted, some functions will always be adjusted while standing but things like tweaking an Aux send should not require me to get up from the listening position.
The other option would be to build the M3500 into a desk that allowed for more depth before the bottom of the faders. This would allow me a better angle on the board and should prove workable for my wrists accessing the keyboard. The issue with that setup though is it pushes farther back all the functions of the board putting a few more items out of reach.
This still leaves the issue of where to put all the remotes. Perhaps the best idea would be to build a rolling cart to mount the Command|8 on? I use it a lot as the transport for my DAW so having it close at hand is a must. I suppose a could build 'wings' to hold a few other remotes. Would it be perhaps more comfortable to just mount these items on a 'L' shape surface perpendicular to the board? Sort of building my seating position into a U shape with gear racks?
I expect that most, perhaps all, sessions will make great use of the M3500 during tracking (I bought an inline console for a reason), not all sessions will use the board during mixing. If I have tracks on tape they will come through on the board of course, and I will at least try out using the M3500 for summing the DAW tracks but for the grueling bits where I'm editing in Protools or tweaking some plugins needs to also be comfortable. My last studio setup was much too digital focused and analog was treated like a second class citizen. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far the other way and make it difficult to work on the digital side. Perhaps some peoples experience in the same situation will be helping to helping me find control room nirvana.
In terms of space, it's not a major issue. I have an area of my house that is currently naught but a concrete slab with a covered set of dog kennels on it. The previous owner was a dog breeder. I plan to take the roughly 20x20 space and build it out to suit me and while I will be starting a thread in the 'Studio Building' section soon I wanted to put some focus on the heart of the studio before settling on wall positions and materials. Let the studio form around the workflow.
Robert
The board is wonderful and certainly is going to take center stage in the control room but I'm a little lost as to how I'm going to manage to get a comfortable setup happening where I have easy access to everything I need.
My studio is a blend of digital and analog, as I'm sure many of yours are, and I need some help trying to figure out how to make it possible to access the M3500, a keyboard and mouse or trackball, Command|8 control surface and remotes for my tape machines.
Tell me if I'm crazy here and if you are in the same boat please feel free to jump in and explain how you've made it work!
I'd like to be able to sit in the 'sweet spot' behind the board and be able to reach all the oft accessed items above. If I setup the M3500 on a table surface I should be able to mount a keyboard/mouse tray beneath it. It would take some doing to find a height that worked for both the mixer and the keyboard. I find if eye level is too close to the height of the board it's impossible to use. I can't tell which knob is which and I have to get up to adjust everything. Granted, some functions will always be adjusted while standing but things like tweaking an Aux send should not require me to get up from the listening position.
The other option would be to build the M3500 into a desk that allowed for more depth before the bottom of the faders. This would allow me a better angle on the board and should prove workable for my wrists accessing the keyboard. The issue with that setup though is it pushes farther back all the functions of the board putting a few more items out of reach.
This still leaves the issue of where to put all the remotes. Perhaps the best idea would be to build a rolling cart to mount the Command|8 on? I use it a lot as the transport for my DAW so having it close at hand is a must. I suppose a could build 'wings' to hold a few other remotes. Would it be perhaps more comfortable to just mount these items on a 'L' shape surface perpendicular to the board? Sort of building my seating position into a U shape with gear racks?
I expect that most, perhaps all, sessions will make great use of the M3500 during tracking (I bought an inline console for a reason), not all sessions will use the board during mixing. If I have tracks on tape they will come through on the board of course, and I will at least try out using the M3500 for summing the DAW tracks but for the grueling bits where I'm editing in Protools or tweaking some plugins needs to also be comfortable. My last studio setup was much too digital focused and analog was treated like a second class citizen. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far the other way and make it difficult to work on the digital side. Perhaps some peoples experience in the same situation will be helping to helping me find control room nirvana.
In terms of space, it's not a major issue. I have an area of my house that is currently naught but a concrete slab with a covered set of dog kennels on it. The previous owner was a dog breeder. I plan to take the roughly 20x20 space and build it out to suit me and while I will be starting a thread in the 'Studio Building' section soon I wanted to put some focus on the heart of the studio before settling on wall positions and materials. Let the studio form around the workflow.
Robert
...yeah, I can do that, but because it's not a HUGE space and it's pretty jammed up with amps, guitars, drums, organ, piano...and lots of other stuff besides the console and rack gear...