I like to cut out paper dolls - a pad of 3x5 Post-Its, one for each
piece of equipment (stick some together for mixers since there are
lots of connections) and stick them on a large sheet of paper, drawing
lines between them with a pencil. That way, you're sure you don't
forget anything, and you can easily move the blocks around to make
your drawing neater and easier to follow.

Label every cable at its end. This is easy if you're making your own
because you can print a label on your computer or with a label
printer, stick it on the cable lengthwise, slip a piece of clear heat
shrink tubing over it, and it's done. Label individual cables in a
snake, and give the snake a descriptive name (Mixer Direct Outs) as
well.



I agree with the labelling of every cable, at BOTH ends. I've gone
with a numbering system, its not as obvious to someone else trying to
trace a cable, but now that I have my own place, I don't have to worry
about anyone else. If you have Excel or a similar spreadsheet
program, its easy to set up a multi page workbook with separate sheets
listing each category of equipment. Every piece of gear gets a unique
number and each piece of cable is indexed to the gear at either end.
Building it all inside of a single workbook allows you to set things
up so that a single change gets carried throughout the various pages
with minimal fuss.

There may be some slick way of doing this in a database, but I like
the ability of sketching basic diagrams in Excel to help with the
endless lists. I've found Excel to be a surprisingly good program for
drawing wiring diagrams - just set up square cells at an appropriate
scale and take advantage of the grid system.

My final comment concerns do it yourself cabling verus pre-fab. While
I have wired a couple of studios "from scratch" starting with thousand
foot coils of Mogami 2944, there is an alternative worth considering.
There are several custom wiring shops out there that will take your
detailed sketches and fabricate exactly what you need for surprisingly
fair prices. I recently took delivery of a complete cable "system"
from AVCable.com for my monitoring system. These guys must get some
amazing prices on parts, connectors, cable, etc. because their final
price for a dozen pre-fab'd cables was less than I would have paid,
for the same parts they used! And instead of spending countless hours
measuring, stripping, tinning, soldering, labeling, shrink tubing,
etc., I just opened a big box and plugged the cables in. They all
were fabricated to the exact dimensions that I had supplied and the
quality of the work was definitely better than I could have done.
While any studio owner should know how to build whatever cable they
might need, these pre-fab places can save you an enormous amount of
time that you can then spend on other work. Highly recommended.

Good luck.

Steve