Whether in the studio, on the road, or in your garage, having an organized cable system can save you a ton of time and a lot of hassle. Clean setup and easy breakdown make for much less stress. This will also save time when you need to determine what cable has gone out because you won’t have to search each cable end to end to see what’s plugged in where. You’ll know.
Start by coming up with a color coding system that works for you. Use colored tape to mark each end of every cable so that you can easily see at glance what goes where.
Here’s how to do it:
- Determine a color for each cable type, like blue for mics, red for power, yellow for MIDI and so on and then put that color at each of end of each cable of that type.
- Add a color for each additional cable of that type so that they’re essentially “numbered” – in which case, power cable one would be red, power cable two would be red and white, and power cable three would be red, white, and blue. Just make sure that the red stays at the very end so that you don’t get confused with a blue, red, and white mic cable.
- Do the same for your pedal cables so that you don’t mess up the polarity by plugging in the cable into the wrong power supply.
You can find the colored electric tape in multipacks at the hardware store.
An additional benefit to this system is that you’ll be less likely to lose cables and better able to identify cables you’ve lost if you run across them in someone else’s gear.