What is your home office or studio setup? What does it say about you?

Many of us work from home or even run entire businesses from our home. It’s not enough just to have an office anymore. We need home studios. We all do video calls with our customers and teams. Many of us also produce audio and video content

This is my setup. The heart of it is an M3 MacBook Pro. The audio hardware is a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 and a Shure AM7B. The lights are GVM 800Ds. I also have two KRK Rocket 8 powered studio monitors just out of frame to the left.

That is a 20-year-old 60GB iPod plugged into the 4i4. I have not synced it with a computer since 2008. It’s not part of my workflow - it’s just for fun. It still works as good as the day I bought it. It has thousands of songs I listened to two decades ago. I have an iPhone with an Apple Music subscription, but sometimes it’s fun to go retro and remember what I was listening to before we gave away all our free time to social media.

The monitor is an LG 5K 21:9. I was using two smaller monitors side by side. I was looking at a seam right in the middle of my work area all the time. You will not believe how much better one large curved monitor is until you try it.

This all sits on a sit/stand desk I built myself with a recycled countertop from our previous home in Buffalo. Does this reuse justify years of hoarding building materials in my garage and even moving them across the country? I think so, but my wife would probably disagree.

Dylan Mitchell and I produce a Leadership podcast called Rincon Horizons (If you are not listening to it - you should be). This is my workflow for the podcast:

We record with an online tool called Riverside. https://Riverside.FM That is the app in the Chrome window on the left. If you are recording podcasts straight to a DAW and editing the old way: Stop wasting so much time! You have to check out a tool like Riverside. It is full of some great AI. AI that is not just hype, it really helps. There are Easy Buttons to find and remove all the ums and pauses, and another one that can almost make audio recorded on a laptop mic sound like it was recorded in a studio. Riverside converts all spoken words to text, organized by speaker. You can also remove sections of audio by just selecting a whole paragraph of text and pressing delete. It will auto smooth the audio and video cuts and transitions for you.

Riverside also has an AI-driven “Made for You” section that finds interesting parts of the recording and auto creates short audio/video clips you can use to promote your podcast. It will even add captions. I can’t say enough great things about Riverside.

Riverside will let you add music and do the final mix, but I don’t want the AI bots to kill all of my ability to use a real DAW. I do the final mix with music and intro and outro cuts in Apple Logic. I found a great reasonably priced site called Envato. https://envato.com (Thank you John Nixon for the recommendation). If you are not licensing music or images for your work, stop stealing and sign up for Envato. Your conscience will thank you.

We are promoting our podcast on LinkedIn, but it seems like their algorithms (that I am sure are reading this right now) want me to pay before they will let anyone see my podcast posts. We have decided to start using other social media platforms too - even though most of my potential customers are on LinkedIn. I would love to hear what other people and small companies are doing for promotion beyond LinkedIn. Please tell me in the comments.

The next image is my backdrop…

My video backdrop... It's really what is behind me.- no fake backgrounds for me.

You have seen it if you have been in a video call with me. It is all real. No green screen or fake backdrops for me. I am just not a fan of those. I think your office should reflect your personality. This is what my office says about me:

I am a musician. I can play all of those guitars. The pedal boards are in a back closet. I am on a lifelong quest for the perfect tone. I have not found it yet, maybe someday.

I am a photographer. The poster in the background is my work. Those images are from the Cleveland National Airshow in 2017 - thus the legacy Hornets in the Blue Angels image. It is still amazing to me that 5th gen fighter pilots open their weapons bays in public airshows. You can see more images here: https://oazd.smugmug.com/Cleveland-National-Airshow I also have a shot of an F-35 with its weapons bay open here: https://oazd.smugmug.com/Tucson-Thunder-and-Lighting-Airshow-2025

I live in a postcard in Southern Arizona. I do a lot of landscape photography too. Here are some of those images: https://oazd.smugmug.com/Arizona-Skies

This is a close up shot of the table:

I have models of jets, and coins from first flights and test programs on the table behind me.

I am an aerospace engineer. I have been part of developing several aircraft. There are models of my favorite three aircraft in my office: (F-15C, F/A-18F, and F-35A). There are also some coins including one from our Embraer E-190 flight control system development at Moog. I also have a crochet Snoopy pilot from my daughter Amanda Hays

I am a world traveler. I have a wooden elephant the Siemens India team gave me for speaking at Swadesh 2024 and a coin given to me by an executive from the Korean Aerospace Research Institute. I also have several things from Singapore from my good friend Clairy Chow. This includes the Republic of Singapore Air Force F-16D model.

What does your office say about you? How have you made your office space yours? I spent several years of my career in closed rooms where I couldn’t take photos, so I understand if you can’t do this. If you have an office where you can take photos, would you shoot some and put them in the comments? I can’t wait to see what your office says about you.

NOTE: None of the products or companies I mentioned in this post paid or even asked me to mention them… But I am happy to take their money if they want to sponsor a podcast episode.

What does your office setup say about you?

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