Hi all,

I just realized I'm at that early stage in learning to wire a medium ambitious
home studio where I'm experienced enough to have some advice, but not so
experienced that I forgot one even needs to mention these things, so it's a
great time to share. If this makes anyone else think of good advice in a
simiar vein, please do share, or if anyone disagrees with any of this, I'd
love to know.

I have found that the following rules save so much time in understanding and
using the studio that it even ends up saving vast amounts of time just in the
rest of the wiring process itself because you don't have to repeatedly trace
things down to recall what you were doing or find out what didn't get done the
way you thought.

Here goes...

1. Don't try to make your mixer do all your routing. Routing that way is too
obtuse, and it will get in your way, and waste time during recording. Use
your mixer for the kinds of routing it's good at, and use patch bays for
everything else.

2. Don't try to do all your routing with patch bays. Use the mixer for the
all kinds of routing it can be used for in the manner it was designed to
do well. Use patch bays for the things mixers don't do well.

3. Before you start wiring - I have tried many systems for diagramming my
wiring plan before hooking it up. All of those systems failed miserably
until I came up with this one.
- Begin with your mental picture of what the major stations are, and what
physical order they are in. Come up with the closest thing you can to
a sequential arrangement of them, and write them down the left edge of
a page (an Excel spreadsheet is great).
- Now, list all the gear to hook up across the bottom of the page not
including mixers and patch bays which should be well represented in the
column on the left. If something has both inputs and outputs, list the
input and output as separate items.
- Now, draw lines in the columns under each piece of gear showing the
normal route of the signal to or from the device with dots at each
connecting point along the path. If the path reverses direction, just
make a U shaped line, and keep following the path. If the path
connects to a point in another column, write a letter next to the
point, and the same letter next to the matching point in the other
column.
- If there are common alternate paths you will need, draw the lines for
those paths in a different color. Use letter designations as above
where needed.
Now, finally, you're ready to see how many balanced and unbalanced lines
you need from where to where, how many patch points at each station, etc.
As you start working that up, you'll find minor problems with the earlier
planning stage, so clean them up. The diagramming system above is
simple enough that it's not too time consuming to redraw from scratch if
corrections get too messy, or use artists tape to cover up a column, and
redraw it.

4. Follow the standard rules for wiring patch bays without exception, so you
never have to wonder which are the exceptions - there are none. If you
need just that one extra connection, you are so close to needing another
patch bay anyway, that you might as well buy it now.

In case you're wondering, standard rules for patch bays include...
- Always using the top row for signals coming to the patch bay from the
back (even when non-normalled).
- Always use the bottom row for signals going from the patch bay in the
back.
- Always put left channels on odd numbers.
- Always put right channels on even numbers.

5. In addition to the standard rules for patch bays, invent your own more
detailed usage pattern rules, and stick to them as much as possible.
Create standard rules for exceptions to the main rules, when exceptions
are required. Some of my favorites are...
- Always connect the same colored snake cable connector to the top and
bottom points in the back of a 1/2 normalled connection.
- Always route mixer channels Aux sends, etc., to the same numbered
points on the patch bay if possible. If not possible, add or subtract
exactly 10 if that is possible. Yes, I know your patch bay has a nice,
intuitive divider in the middle between 12 and 13. I don't care - use
offsets of 10.

6. Pick a standard order for the colors of your snake cable connectors, and
always use it. A few judicious exceptions are OK, but just a few.

I hope someone finds this info as useful as I do.