With help from my father who was visiting recently, I have built a new desk for my studio. The idea I had was to build a desk wide enough to build a keyboard drawer underneath. What I came up with was a simple design using three quarter inch plywood, quarter inch ply for the backing and one by three pine for a brace and attachments for the eighteen inch ball bearing drawer runners. The keyboard is a CME UF7 semi-weighted controller.
It has made a huge difference in the ergonomics of my studio to have this controller readily available without having to have it take up extra space on a stand. Here’s a segment from a piece I wrote soon after putting the studio back together with the new desk. I’m using the CME to control my the grand piano patch on my Yamaha A3000 rack mount sampler. The Rhodes is my 1976 suitcase model that does not leave the studio.
Segment of Piano with Rhodes
Looks great! Nice new sounds, too. Looking forward to your solo release.
Um, can you post those plans, that is EXACTLY the kind of desk I’ve been looking for.
Hey Grant,
It was really simple. I used three pieces of 3/4″ plywood, setup like Stonehenge. Each piece was twenty inches in depth. The sides were each thirty inches tall. I based the width on the length of my keyboard. The only tricky bit was the drawer. I found a couple of heavy duty ball bearing runners eighteen inches in length and attached them to the inside on a 1″ x 3″ bracket. I used some trim to hide the plywood edges and slathered the whole lot in stain and polyurethane.