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[Scott Holtzman]

Bad Boys R-!# our young girls but violet gives willingly.  Yeah like I am going stand on stage and try and remember the resistor color code.  I bet you know the tolerance rings and the inductor codes too.  That's cool but my addled old brain can't deal with that nor do I have anyone working for me that knows the code.

I can however read a 40pt font laminated on the lid of a case.  After about 200 shows I may even remember it.  Maybe.

Did I close the garage door ?

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[Scott Holtzman]

Here's the other part of the system- cable trunk labeling. I just whipped this up in Word. Print it, and either laminate or put in a sheet protector and tape it closed. THEN, use a rivet gun and permanently attach it to your cable trunk lid.

Everything you see here is in one quarter-pack cube. The "patch kit" is a bunch of Husky branded black zipper pouches from Home Depot- one has short XLRs (something like 16, from 12" to 3'), one has 1/4" inserts (not like we use those anymore... haha), one for iPod cables/rat tail, one with MM XLR barrels (8) and one with FF XLR barrels (8). One has 1/4" M to RCA-F adapters, ground lifts, phase reverses, and XLR-F to 1/4" F barrels. One has a selection of 1/4" cables, and one has 1/4" to XLR adapter cables. Finally, there is an "Accessory" pouch-- Sharpies, extra AA batteries, Thunderbolt to VGA adapter, extra Cat5e cable, extra Audiopile drawer keys, and (seems to be the most important here--) a couple of USB bricks and USB-iPod and USB-Lightning cables. People ALWAYS forget iPod/iPad charging materials, amiright? All of the cables, barrels, adapters, etc, [IN THIS KIT] share the yellow labeling with yellow e-tape.

Now, when you're at a show, and you have "volunteers" or even audio techs that don't work with you normally, they can easily find things. They know how to determine which cables are 25' long. They know how many are in there, so if they've only used a couple 25 footers, or maybe they wish they had a 100 footer-- they'll know there are two in this cube.

When the pack comes back to your shop, the warehouse guy can QC the kit and based on that sheet, determine whether or not all of the cables, adapters, etc made it back OK!

-Ray

edit: added code to make the (8) display correctly

That is awesome.  I already was doing the lid sheet just not assigning. cables to packs.  Then we grew in spurts and cables got bought and just tossed into a pack and never coded

That all ends starting Monday morning. 



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[William Schnake]

I already was doing the lid sheet just not assigning. cables to packs.  Then we grew in spurts and cables got bought and just tossed into a pack and never coded

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Scott, we are upgrading all of our mic cable, about 400 of them all together.  Most of them 15 years old or so.  I have ordered the first 100 new ones from Horizon.  They are all 25'.  On the male end of the cable I am having a Neutrik with a red boot and my company name and phone number added to a piece of shrink wrap.  Our system is Yellow = 15' and under, Red = 25' and White = 50' or over.  I just decided that it was time to do it right.

Bill

[Steve Eudaly]

The one thing i REALLY appreciated about my first sound company is that their color code was based on resistor code. Yeah, it might be Proprietary but it was based on something.

There are some other folks in our area that do this to, so when the time came for us to color code we did the same. While most don't know "resistor code," many remember the colors of the rainbow which make up the bulk of the code. We skipped black for obvious reasons, used brown for short jumpers that you don't see often then move up from there.

Brown=3'
Red=5'
Orange=10'
Yellow=25'
Green=50'
Blue=100'

Odd sizes outside of that are combinations of the above; O+R=15', G+Y=75', B+B=200'

And a few colors left over for future needs.

[Jay Barracato]

I don't think you really need a color to tell the difference between lengths, and I like looms so I prefer the color to tell the difference between cables within the loom.

My standard "backline/utility" loom is 3 25 ft cables with about 1 ft free at the male end and 10 ft free at the female end.

A basic drum setup might be 1 loom at the front of the kit (k,k,r), one RL (s,s,hh), one RR (t,t,t), plus possibly one extra (oh,oh, pad).

The same three lines in a loom can also cover an extra percussion position, or a keyboard position, or a combination of bass and guitar.

Three cables sit nice and tight in a triangle, and still coil nicely.

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[Dave Pluke]

... the red stripe to the right of my asset tag is the case code (All RED cables go here!) and the purple stripe to the left is the length indicator (purple is either 10 or 50 feet).

Good idea, but some folks may struggle to tell the difference between red and purple - especially in a dimly lit venue.

Is there anything sacred about your color scheme?

Dave

[Yoel Farkas]

Good idea, but some folks may struggle to tell the difference between red and purple - especially in a dimly lit venue.

Is there anything sacred about your color scheme?

Dave

+1 or color blinded

[Doug Fowler]

One local regional uses male end shrink wrap for both color (length) code, and clear shrink over the barcode which also has the company logo.

Virtually no one knows the resistor code, unless you were trained a discipline that required it.

5'  - green
10' - yellow
25' - red
50' - blue
75' red and blue
100 ' - white

These get racked on a wall.  When they go to a show, they are scanned into the workbox.  In the workbox (double wide clamshell type) they go into plastic tubs, shorts together, middle length together, then longs together.

When they return they get scanned back in and hung on the wall.

There is little that irks me more than having to pull a 50' cable for a last minute addition that needs a 5 or 10, or for a comms cable.  I love having plenty of shorts in the workbox

Small operators can get away with A rig - B rig - C rig, but when you grow to the point you have a lot going on, that model falls apart.  You then have to allocate your resources on a per show basis, not a per rig basis.  And for most, the transition from rig based to show based resource management causes them to change the way they do things.  Which can be painful.

While I'm at it, a large touring operation I'm familiar with uses "red white blue" to indicate "1 2 3" in a fly loom, and for other things.  It's an Americanism, but it's handy to know, just like "red right return", which will fall out of usage when the last person who used analog inserts dies.

[Dave Garoutte]

When we made our cables, I just whipped out the label maker and put the actual lengths on the male XLR bodies.
"20  20  20" ,  "30  30  30" etc. and when wrapped around, shows the number from any angle.
It also identifies them as my cables.

[Dave Garoutte]

We keep them in a 5 gallon bucket (blue of course).
600' total feet fit when you pack them like tires.

[ProSoundWeb Community]