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Author Topic: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding  (Read 33984 times)

John Roll

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Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« on: November 23, 2011, 02:59:44 PM »

The longest part of load out at the end of the night is winding mic cables. I work alone and this seems to be 80% it. I was thinking of winding in groups, i.e. front stage mics and monitors (jbl prx) and backstage mics and monitors (jbl prx ) Does anyone have other suggestions which could save me some time at the end of the night with that part of the tear down? It's not feasible right now to hire more RELIABLE help.

John
« Last Edit: November 23, 2011, 03:06:38 PM by John Roll »
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John Roll
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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #1 on: November 23, 2011, 03:30:13 PM »

The longest part of load out at the end of the night is winding mic cables. I work alone and this seems to be 80% it. I was thinking of winding in groups, i.e. front stage mics and monitors (jbl prx) and backstage mics and monitors (jbl prx ) Does anyone have other suggestions which could save me some time at the end of the night with that part of the tear down? It's not feasible right now to hire more RELIABLE help.

John

My idea of luxury would be to have drop snakes for bi-directional stage feeds.  If my stages were all the same layout I could have nothing but a few 10' XLR's to coil, then a few drop snakes and done.  10 footers coil 10x as fast as 20 footers........
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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #2 on: November 23, 2011, 03:35:04 PM »

The longest part of load out at the end of the night is winding mic cables. I work alone and this seems to be 80% it. I was thinking of winding in groups, i.e. front stage mics and monitors (jbl prx) and backstage mics and monitors (jbl prx ) Does anyone have other suggestions which could save me some time at the end of the night with that part of the tear down? It's not feasible right now to hire more RELIABLE help.

John

How long does it take you to wrap 20 cables?

Unpatch everything at the snake, unpatch at any subsnakes, disconnect the loudspeakers and start wrapping. 

Please post a video of your cable wrapping technique.

In fact, if anyone wishes to offer up videos on things like this, maybe we can find a place for them.

BTW, if your mics ride with the clips, look into Atlas LO-2 quick release devices.




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Justice C. Bigler

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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #3 on: November 23, 2011, 03:36:37 PM »

Not sure what you are asking about cables in groups. If you have the same or very similar set ups every night, you can lay out your cables and loom them together with e-tape or friction tape and coil them all at once. I.e. all the drum cables get loomed together, all the front line vocals get loomed together, all the bass and guitar cables get loomed together, etc...

Or, you could go all wireless and not have any cables to coil up.

I hope you aren't winding them on a cable reel or something.
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boburtz

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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #4 on: November 23, 2011, 03:58:29 PM »

BTW, if your mics ride with the clips, look into Atlas LO-2 quick release devices.

+1 for this. I find the "on-stage" brand to work equally well, and can sometimes be had on ebay in multiples for a good deal...They are a little expensive, but save so much time. Every mic, every stand, period.

Jay Barracato

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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #5 on: November 23, 2011, 04:23:13 PM »

Not sure what you are asking about cables in groups. If you have the same or very similar set ups every night, you can lay out your cables and loom them together with e-tape or friction tape and coil them all at once. I.e. all the drum cables get loomed together, all the front line vocals get loomed together, all the bass and guitar cables get loomed together, etc...

Or, you could go all wireless and not have any cables to coil up.

I hope you aren't winding them on a cable reel or something.

looming definately makes things quicker if you have consistant setups.
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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #6 on: November 23, 2011, 04:30:27 PM »

The longest part of load out at the end of the night is winding mic cables. I work alone and this seems to be 80% it. I was thinking of winding in groups, i.e. front stage mics and monitors (jbl prx) and backstage mics and monitors (jbl prx ) Does anyone have other suggestions which could save me some time at the end of the night with that part of the tear down? It's not feasible right now to hire more RELIABLE help.

John
What I used to do was to use a garden hose reel for the mic cables.  The kind that you turn vertical rather than horizontally. Make sure it has a stable base.

At the end of the night-strike everything else except the mic cables.  I always grabbed my mics first-put them away-then moved the stands off to a side near the stand box.  This cleared the stage (except for monitors) for the band to strike their gear.

Hopefully by the time you have everything else taken care of (FOH-amps-speakers etc) the band will be off the stage.

Now you plop down next to the stage box with the reel and wind them up end to end.  Unplug just one at a time.  Grab a damp rag in one hand if want to clean them a little bit while winding them up.

Only take a couple of minutes, and is a lot easier than trying to get them from around the band gear while it is on stage.

When setting up, just place the reel near the snake head and grab the outermost female end (the male ends go on first) and just pull it to where it needs to go.  unwind as needed to plug into the stage box.

This works best if the mic cables are all pretty much the same length.  Yes you end up with slack, but you can usually put it around the mic end of the cable.

If you like to keep the cables seperated by length-this doesn't work well at all.

If you put a piece of colored tape around each end, you can quickly tell the length.  Just one piece and have the cables in multiples of 10'.  So brown is 10' red is 20' orange is 30' yellow 40' etc.

Anyway it worked well for me.
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John Roll

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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #7 on: November 23, 2011, 04:44:07 PM »

Not sure what you are asking about cables in groups. If you have the same or very similar set ups every night, you can lay out your cables and loom them together with e-tape or friction tape and coil them all at once. I.e. all the drum cables get loomed together, all the front line vocals get loomed together, all the bass and guitar cables get loomed together, etc...

Or, you could go all wireless and not have any cables to coil up.

I hope you aren't winding them on a cable reel or something.

Justice,
No cable reel. I guess what I meant by cabling in groups was in other words looming the way you described above.
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John Roll
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Ray Aberle

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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #8 on: November 23, 2011, 05:01:38 PM »

What I used to do was to use a garden hose reel for the mic cables.  ...
If you like to keep the cables seperated by length-this doesn't work well at all.

If you put a piece of colored tape around each end, you can quickly tell the length.  Just one piece and have the cables in multiples of 10'.  So brown is 10' red is 20' orange is 30' yellow 40' etc.

Anyway it worked well for me.

I used to just dump back in the bin, and sort when I got home! (Yeah, added lots of extra time, but as a "weekend warrior" -- I made it work, I guess). I have been diligent in the use of velcro tie straps, though, as well as colour coding the lengths. I used to use electrical tape, but now I've been buying my XLRs from Audiopile (www.audiopile.net) they have the coloured rings for the cables, and I have been investing in those. I've kept the same colour coding scheme as I was using before, just they look way better now.

My last trip out there (I'm in Seattle, so I can just drive...) I got some extra drawers and built out a toolkit with 6sp empty (for sub snakes) and 3 drawers for varying lengths of cables/XLR/patches/DIs. This beat out the old method of all signal cable in one cube... You need an XLR to 1/4" and you would spend five minutes digging through all of the cables.

Now, I am discovering I need more XLR cables, now that they're organized so I know how many I actually have... *sighs*

Ray
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Bob Charest

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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #9 on: November 23, 2011, 05:09:30 PM »

What I used to do was to use a garden hose reel for the mic cables...  Grab a damp rag in one hand if want to clean them a little bit while winding them up.
We used to do exactly this before we went wireless. It worked well for us and didn't cost much. We still have the hose reel with a slew of XLR's on it! I especially liked cleaning the cables as they went on the reel - made it nice for the next gig. We got pretty fast at it.
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Re: Load Out advice - Mic cable winding
« Reply #9 on: November 23, 2011, 05:09:30 PM »


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