Most of us intrinsically understand the importance of dedicated items for dedicated pursuits. Even in the age of multitasking, we still tailor the different items in our workspaces to be useful for what we want to accomplish. For example, while many of us can program drums on a keyboard, if we can actually play the drums, we prefer to and will get a better performance out of them. Things that do a lot of things tend to become a master of none.
Having a purpose built music production desk allows us to focus better on the task at hand of making music, assuming it’s organized for that task, and has proper ergonomics.
One of those specific ergonomic measurements we wrestled with was the height of the Platform Studio Desk.
The first thing we did was consult our ergonomic source of truth. Everything we build is around the measure of a human, and we get those measurements from ‘The Measure of a Man & Woman, Human Factors in Design’ by the Henry Dreyfuss Associates. This book is an encyclopedia of human sizes and averages of everything from how large a pregnant belly is while sitting, to the average angle of bifocals when sitting for best display height. Below are a couple of very well worn pages we used while designing Platform.
If you’re designing a desk to put a qwerty on, it’s pretty easy. The desktop will need to be about 28” high, and if you want a qwerty tray, about 30” high to give leg clearance for the keyboard tray below, putting the qwerty at 28” (depending on material thickness), giving you about 27” of leg clearance that accommodates 99% of men, and these heights don’t compromise things for those who are shorter in stature.
If you’re designing a multi-tiered studio desk where you need to accommodate an actual piano keyboard on the lowest tier (and maybe a qwerty and mouse), a qwerty and mouse as well as other control surfaces on the middle tier, and a display on the top tier while also being a good ear height for studio monitors (while dealing with rack U height standard increments)--it becomes a bit of a challenge. Especially considering the ideal is having 27” of knee clearance, a keyboard height of 28”, and the top of your display not exceeding 49”. However, we weren’t designing a desk for typing, we were designing a desk for a musician, so once we wrapped our brains around that, we started testing heights.
We designed the first Platform without a standard keyboard tray, which introduced a lot of compromises on height, size and width because it was an add on that had to fit in between the legs and hang from the desktop. This also compromised the tray opening height (distance between the tray and bottom of the desktop). However, the take rate on the keyboard tray was over 95%--put another way, out of 100 Platforms sold, 95-97 (depending on color) had the keyboard tray. With that in mind, we decided to make the keyboard tray standard which not only allowed us to widen it to accommodate the S88, but dial in the height and opening, allowing a larger opening without completely compromising the leg clearance below, and not putting everything above into the stratosphere.
Also, the ergonomics of playing a keyboard, or really any kind of instrument is very important, and the standard height of a piano keyboard (measured to the top of the white keys) is in the neighborhood of 29” (I say neighborhood because different pianos are slightly different). Since the reason for this desk is music, this became the baseline height we built from. However, keyboards, especially piano action keyboards, are thick, there’s usually 3-4” from the bottom of the keyboard to the top of the white keys, so if we put the tray at 29”, the keys would actually be around 33”, way too high, so we needed to drop the tray.
We settled on a tray height of 25.5”, which will put most keyboards at a playable height of 28.5”-29.5”. This only allowed for clearance of 24.75” below for our legs, which is great for the shortest 1 percentile of men (and a lot of women), but for the rest of us, it’s why we added a knee cutout. We also included a higher setting for the keyboard tray putting it at 27” if you have a thin controller, or want to use the bottom tier for a qwerty. These are also heights that don’t interfere with Sidecar tray heights. We designed the Sidecar tray increments specifically to not interfere with Platform heights so they can overlap.
Building from the bottom up, we wanted a 5” opening for the keyboard tray as that would accommodate most controllers. Anything bigger than that, and it’s either going to be too low, or make the desktop too high. This put the center tier front desktop at 32” (Remember, the updated Platform has a hidden tier behind for cables). This is higher than most desks, but as this is a production desk, and the same height as the first Platform on risers (which most people used per our surveys), we kept it. This is a very good height for control surfaces and any kind of desktop instrument. In design studies we noticed that when people would be playing their synths on normal 28” desks, they were bending over and crouching. We also realized that most synth benches are pretty high for that reason. We were confident that rolling with 32” was a good height for most production workflows, we weren’t going to break what wasn’t broken. This isn’t a writing table.
This leads us to the next tier, the bridge (or hutch) above the rack spaces. On the first Platform we went back and forth between 2U and 3U. We didn’t feel that 6U’s of total space was enough, and a 38.5” height put most 5-6” two way monitors right in the sweet spot (We also figured that most people with 8” monitors would use stands.), so we rolled with 3U. The one compromise with that height was the display was arguably too high, but we decided to go with it. Turns out, it was too high, so on the updated Platform we added the adjustable middle hutch allowing people to choose the height of their display, fixing the only real ergonomic compromise we had in the design.
You can’t really see the other major ergonomic change we made from the first design. It’s the hidden cable deck tier that sits below the middle tier in the back. We wanted to make it accessible from the front of the desk if gear isn’t racked, where you could reach it if sitting, because while the first Platform had good cable management, it was also kind of a chore to get to. We’ll get into that tier in the next part of the series where we get into the depths chosen, and why.
We took great care, with many prototypes and people of different sizes sitting at those prototypes, when deciding the dimensions of Platform. We tested and designed specifically to enhance production workflows. We didn’t create Platform for you to type on, we created Platform for you to produce music on.
