My cat kind of invented this brand.
He loves jumping on my desk, and by extension, on my Akai MPC Live. Cute until you're worried about a scratched touchscreen, drum pads, or a knob getting stolen. So I went looking for a Decksaver cover to protect it — the obvious choice, the brand everyone in this space knows.
The local store I asked had bad news: they restock from Decksaver in the UK roughly every six months, and they'd just placed their order. Six months of hoping my cat would find a new hobby wasn't a plan.
If you live in the Middle East, you already know what I'm talking about. Even when something is actually in stock in Europe or the US, ordering it here rarely stops at the sticker price. A 300 AED stand can show up with another 250 AED in shipping tacked on — sometimes more — before customs even gets involved. It stops feeling like a purchase and starts feeling like a project.
The detour that became the plan
I'd done CAD and 3D Studio before — nothing professional, just school and hobby work, years back. So instead of waiting, I opened up Fusion 360 and started modeling a cover for the MPC Live myself.
I paid a local 3D printing freelancer around 400 AED to print my first version. It didn't fit — close, but not right. I went back to the model, fixed what was off, and paid another 400 AED for a second print. That one was perfect.
Somewhere in the middle of that process, the actual problem I was solving shifted. It wasn't really about the cover anymore.
What I'd actually been missing for years
I've been producing music for over 20 years, and for most of that time I've been building my own gear stands — out of metal, wood, whatever was around. Not because I couldn't afford furniture, but because nothing I could buy actually fit what I had, or looked the way I wanted my desk to look. I've always loved studios where everything feels hands-on and intentional, like a cockpit — every piece of gear within reach, angled right, nothing just flat on the table because there was nowhere else to put it.
Good metal stands for specific gear were either expensive, or they simply didn't exist for the device I owned. So I'd fabricate something. A rolling rack, built from plans I found and adapted. Wood and metal brackets holding things at the angle I needed. Foam I had lying around, repurposed to stop something from sliding. At one point I even started building my own studio desk from scratch — got as far as realizing that sawing and sanding wood in an apartment isn't exactly comfortable, and stopped. My actual desk today is a dining table with a drawer I built myself out of wood and hardware-store brackets. It's not a proper studio desk. It works.
Once I'd solved the cover problem for myself, the obvious next question was: why was I still doing all of this the hard way, every time, for every new piece of gear?
Going all in
I bought a 3D printer. I wanted something reliable that would just work, not a machine I'd end up spending all my time maintaining, so I could focus on actually designing.
The first plan was to make a stand for my Roland System 8 and for my Maschine Studio. The depth of them are pretty similar, so I wanted to create an adjustable stand that fits both. The first versions of what's now the AS-6 stand were rough. Multiple pieces, glued together, held on with more hope than engineering. I spent a lot of time learning and researching real 3D-printing and design techniques — including how to print a working hinge as a single piece, no assembly, no supports needed. Each version got simpler to make and sturdier to use. Now the AS-6 has an AS-6K version, which holds the System 8 perfectly - no wobbling, adjustable, massive and stable. The AS-6 turned out to be a perfect solution for many other stuff: Maschine, Maschine Studio, Native Instruments MIDI keyboards, Novation Launchpad, Ableton Push, Traktor S4, Presonus Faderport 8, Arturia Drumbrute, Yamaha RM1x and it also holds my Moog Messenger stable.
Along the way I made myself a custom lid for the MPC Live too, and kept going from there — one product at a time, each one solving something on my own desk first.
Then it stopped being just about my desk
Somewhere along the way, I started meeting other producers — through the brand, through mutual friends, just by talking about what I was building. A lot of those conversations started with a simple question about whether I could make something for a specific piece of gear.
One of those questions turned into the stands for the Roland Boutique series. Two producers I'd gotten to know owned a multi-level stand imported from Europe, and it had one very frustrating flaw: it stacked the synths in a way that made it impossible to actually reach the cables on the lower unit once everything was mounted. Great looking, unusable in practice.
So I borrowed their synths, took my own measurements, and started designing. We went back and forth with photos through the whole process — them telling me what still wasn't quite right, me adjusting the model and printing again — until it actually worked the way it was supposed to. I made a new product, and I made two new friends too.
That's become the pattern since: most of what Deckra makes started with someone's specific, annoying problem — mine, or somebody else's.
Then, about six months after that first conversation, the store called — just checking whether I still wanted the cover. It still hadn't arrived.
By that point, I didn't need it anymore. I'd already made my own, and built a whole brand along the way.
Why it's still built this way
I'm not a manufacturer who decided to make studio accessories. I'm a producer who got tired of hacking together solutions with wood, metal, and whatever else was on hand — and who happened to end up with the tools to actually build the thing I'd been improvising for 20 years. Every Deckra stand starts from the same question I've always asked about my own desk: does this actually fit, does it actually hold, and does it make the setup feel like somewhere I want to work.
If you've ever built your own version of this with brackets from the hardware store, I get it completely. I hope what we make now saves you the trip.