We spend a lot of time sitting in a studio, either in front of a computer, a mixing console or both. It’s essential we invest in taking care of our backs. In this article the Experts explain what chairs they use in the studio, and in some cases the chairs they don’t use.

The Problem

Before there were computer-based recording systems, we spent most of our working time in front of a mixing console, sometimes turning away to use racks of outboard gear and a tape machine or two. When DAWs first started to appear in studios, they would often end up on a separate trolley or perched on the mixing console, but as computers have taken over more of the roles traditionally done by dedicated hardware, they have taken centre stage in our studios and we have become glued to our chairs in front of a computer screen.

The concentration of so many different functions within the computer means that although we are sitting down and not moving around much, we stress our bodies in so many different ways without realising it by extending our wrists, slouching, sitting without foot support and straining to look at poorly placed monitors.

All of this can lead to what health professionals call 'cumulative trauma disorders' or repetitive stress injuries (RSI), which if not dealt with can cause serious, irreversible medical conditions. Symptoms of these may include pain, muscle fatigue, loss of sensation, tingling and reduced performance.

So what can we do about this? In this article, we are going to focus on the chair we use and a selection of our team share details of the solution that works for them, bearing in mind that no single solution is the right answer for every person and every problem and please do not use this article as a replacement for taking medical advice.

Posture And Right Angles

It should be emphasised that the best approach to 'cumulative trauma disorders' or 'repetitive stress injuries' is to avoid them in the first place, and that means making sure that your working environment is set up ergonomically. Ergonomics is a field of study that attempts to reduce strain, fatigue, and injuries by improving product design and workspace arrangement. The goal is a comfortable, relaxed posture. 

How you sit and the height of the work surface, are both crucial. Everything should be at right angles: for example, the height of your chair should be adjusted so that your knees bend at a perfect right angle. If the chair is too high you won't be able to place your feet fully on the floor, while if your chair is too low, you will have to move your feet forwards or backwards so that upper and lower legs no longer form that perfect 90-degree angle.

Your upper legs and your body should likewise form a right angle and you should be sat up straight: no slouching or leaning forward. The height of the work surface should be such that your elbows also bend at 90 degrees, and — most importantly — a significant part of your lower arm should be supported and resting on the work surface. Having your keyboard or mouse close to the edge means you are going to have to hold your arms up, as they are not properly supported and that will bring on RSI much quicker. In fact, if you have to hold any part of your body in tension, you will be much more prone to pain and damage. Remember pain is your body's warning system that something isn't right.  Being relaxed and correctly supported is the key here.

General Advice

Make sure you have a decent chair, not just a cheap office chair as we can be in front of my computer for eight to 10 hours a day, and you should also make sure that your work surface is just the right height for you too. Studios with multiple operators often have motorised desks that enable each operator to set the work-surface height to achieve that right-angled position referred to above.

In addition, the position of the screen is critical too. The generally accepted distance for the screen is where your fingertips are when you put your arm straight out in front of you. There is some debate as to the height of the screen, though: some advise that the top of the screen should be level with your eyes, while others suggest that the centre of the screen should be level with your eyes.

If you need to use glasses to assist your eyesight, you could consider a set of glasses that are optimised for screen use. 'Office' glasses can make a huge difference and stop you from leaning forward to read the screen.

We asked the team to share what studio chair they chose, why they chose it, how much it cost and has it worked for them…

James Richmond

This topic reminds me of the ‘Boots Theory’ of Economics by the wonderful Terry Pratchett, which essentially says that a rich man spends less on his shoes than a poor man does because a poor man’s shoes need to be replaced so often.

I’ve had a number of chairs in the studio over the years, mostly £100 chairs from Staples or similar places. They would last 2-3 years and then need replacing.

I’d always viewed Herman Miller Aeron chairs as an unnecessary and expensive indulgence. In the ’90s or ‘00s, they seemed to be everywhere and priced at about £1,000. Are you MAD? Imagine the mic preamps or compressors I could have instead.

Then I tried one.

We now have three of them here, one in the studio, one in my office and one in my wife’s office. Two bought new and one bought from a refurb store.

The new ones cost £1,000 (in the studio and my wife’s office) and the refurb (my office) cost £350.

They are worth every penny.

My back pain is not entirely absent (I’m still a fairly clumsy 50 year old with numerous creaking ailments) but it is markedly improved. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I’d made the switch sooner.

Mike Thornton

I have had a selection of office chairs since I started working from home in 1990. Following a back problem, which involved surgery in 2013, I decided that a proper chair was in order. I remembered that a colleague had a chair made to measure and that it had worked miracles.

I got an Orthopaedia 6 from TCI Seating here in the UK who offer a bespoke option. I had to send off a number of measurements, including the length of my lower and upper leg as well as my back and then a couple of weeks later my made-to-measure chair turned up. From memory, it cost around £350 and it is still in use today and has made a significant improvement to my posture, all the angles are correct as it was made for me.
I write this sitting in the same chair and providing I make sure my posture is correct and I don’t lean in to read the screen, and having ‘retina’ grade screens has helped with this too, then all is well.

Graham Kirkman

Basically, my back is screwed. Has been for years but since I've hit the big 50 it's just getting worse all the time. I've already got an amazing Sit-Stand desk and I use that a lot but when it comes to mixing, standing up still feels…..alien).

I used to have a cheap office chair but it was killing me, I'd literally be crying in pain by the end of the day and could barely walk. It wasn’t until I did a stint at a post house and by the end of the week realised that my back wasn't anywhere near as bad as usual, that it was their chair.

So I immediately bought one - no matter the cost. Talking of which it was £493,78 and is a Herman Miller Sayl Fully Loaded All Black, Black Base from office chairs uk.

Unfortunately, my back will never be pain-free, but this chair and the sit/stand desk literally make working for me a possibility.

Russ Hughes

I had back pain for a long time and was advised to buy a good chair. Like Graham, I put my money down on a Herman Miller Sayle, blue upholstery and grey finish. However, it made improvements for me but not to the extent that I expected.

This article is not just about chairs, it’s really about posture and making sure we don’t end up with back issues.

I solved mine not with a chair but by investing in a Sit-Stand desk. This came in the form of the Yoyo Desk Desk 80s that I reviewed in September 2020. When I reviewed it I said this…

“To be honest I purchased the Yo-Yo 80-S as a bit of a punt to see if it lived up to the claims and secondly if I would convert to using it. I’m in love with it, so much so that I’ve completely redesigned my studio and workflow around it. In the last week, I’ve probably worked in a standing position about 80% of the time - so I think that speaks for itself.”

A year on, I haven’t changed my mind. In fact, I use it 100% of the time and my back has never been better. The answer to your back problems may not be a chair at all, it may be a standing desk.

Dom Morley

I don’t have the best posture when I’m concentrating on a mix and I found I was having to spend a lot of money in osteopath clinics as a result. Then one of the osteopaths (I guess not too commercially-minded) recommended I try a kneeling stool to push me into a better sitting position. £100 later and I’ve not been back to the osteopath since.

It takes a bit of getting used to, and a lot of your weight is on your shins, which don’t have a lot of natural padding on them, but, I swap between the kneeling stool and a Herman Miller Aeron that I got cheaply for round £300 from an office supply store on eBay that deals in liquidations.

Most of my day is kneeling, but after about 4 hours I start to feel it on my shins so I do an hour or two of the Herman Miller, then back to kneeling. I can’t see myself changing from this setup now.

Korey Pereira

I graduated from university in 2008 and spent the first few years of my working life using the same ratty office chair from college. By the end of 2011 I was finally making some decent money working on films, so come January 2012, I treated myself to an upgrade.

I was set on a Herman Miller Aeron, but not quite ready to pay full sticker. I started keeping my eyes on Craigslist and after a few misses, found a law firm that was moving offices and had a storage room full of Aerons to choose from and let me pick the one I wanted and I managed to talk them down to $300. Score!

The only thing it didn’t have that I wanted was the optional lumbar support but was able to order one of those online for $55.

Move forward to 2021 and I am still happily using the same Aeron with ZERO issues. I have seen a number of other facilities go with other premium brands like Steelcase, but often find some or all of them with at least one of the controls broken. The Aeron was innovative when it was released and is durable enough to last over a decade of heavy use. I’d call that a win!

Julian Rodgers

Last year I got a sit/stand desk. I’ve spoken about this quite a lot on the blog. You can read about the first iteration in this article where I have it installed in my temporary studio in my old house. The important word here is sit/stand desk. I still have the option to sit and I’ve settled on a fairly consistent but random pattern of sitting and standing days. I can change the configuration in under a minute but I tend not to change it during the day, it’s more of a first thing in the morning decision.

An unexpected bonus is that for ages I haven’t crawled under my desk to run cables or access the back of my rack, which rather cunningly hangs from underneath the tabletop and so moves with the desk. I just raise the desk to its full height and crouch - ideal!

However this does leave my chair rather out on a limb. I use it some of the time but usually when I’m feeling lazy, tired or under the weather. Because of this a chair isn’t part of my “best self”. It’s not something I aspire to have in my life and as a result my chair situation is neglected. My very old, very free, office chair which was selected from my partner’s work when they were clearing their offices was the one which squeaked and rattled the least, an important and overlooked feature of any studio furniture where microphones are opened and something to which anyone who has recorded someone playing while sitting on a drum stool can attest. This was the only selection criterion.

This tatty office chair has continued to decay for most of five years and since the fabric has given up on the back it now looks like something which would be thrown out of a skip for being too far gone. The problem is that I don’t want a chair at all so I’m really reluctant to replace the one I have. The longer I keep it the longer it stays out of landfill. At least I don’t have clients visit the studio!

Michael Costa

In Australia, we have the German supermarket chain, Aldi. I don't know if the way Aldi operates in your part of the world is the same, but aside from normal discounted supermarket items, our Aldi has weekly eclectic specials. A week’s special offers may feature large HD TVs, lawnmowers and sewing kits, for example. These specials can often be very good buys ... and sometimes terrible mistakes, but Aldi are very fair with their return policy, so you are fairly safe.

Like many, I'm sure, I too have been lusting after a Herman Miller chair. About four years ago my existing chair died and I was not in a position to make my Aeron dream come true, but Aldi's weekly special that week was a mesh looking office chair priced at - and I kid you not - AU$50. That's about US$38 in today's money. I thought, how bad could it be? If it dies in a week or two, it goes back for a refund. I intended to have it for 6 months maybe, and then upgrade.

So here I am four years later still using it. The left armrest has recently snapped away from the base, but that's all on me for constantly pushing my whole weight up off both armrests as a combined stretch, muscle push.

The obvious question is - Is it comfortable?

It's not brilliant, but it's OK. It's not that much worse than previous chairs I've had that cost into the hundreds of dollars. I wriggle around and stretch a lot, and I'm much more conscious of my posture than I was in my younger days, so I’m managing OK.

Learn More

If you want to learn more about other things you can do beyond choosing the right chair, then check out our article Back Pain, Posture And RSI - What Can We Do?

We covered the whole issue of standing desks, including how large facilities with large consoles can have Standing Desks too in our article Is Prolonged Sitting Bad For Us? How Your Studio Lifestyle May Not Be Helping And How To Fix It.

We also have a great podcast in which Julian Rodgers, Dan Cooper and Sara Carter discuss what we’ve done to ensure our studios don’t damage our bodies, and hopefully our minds, before moving on to what have we done and what changes would we like to make to create spaces that don’t risk RSI, poor posture and all the other issues extended sedentary work can cause.

Looking after ourselves isn’t just about good ergonomics, its about choosing what we eat, the amount of exercise we take and how much sleep we get. In our article, Your Studio Lifestyle May Be Killing You - Here's How To Stop It Happening Fast, Russ Hughes covers all these issues and more by sharing his own personal story.

James Ivey chose to buy a Herman Miller Aeron chair by buying a reconditioned Herman Miller Aeron Size B for £399 which is around 2/3 of the list price of a new chair, but the deal got even sweeter because over the Black Friday Weekend they were offering the same chair for £364.99 with free delivery. In our article, Herman Miller Aeron Chair - Not All Studio Essentials Are Rack Mounted Or Covered In LEDs, you will be able read about how James set up his studio chair to maximise the benefits a good chair offers.

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