How to get lost - fast...

We’re a funny lot by nature, we have a gift for making things way more complex than they need to be at times. Instead of planning for what works 90% of the time and keeping things simple, we like to live in the “what about if” and try to allow for every possibility under the sun, and by necessity therefore everything gets complicated.

It happens a lot in installations and particularly so in the audio patching. It may only be say 32 channels of audio, but the stage box multicores go to a patchbay side of stage, then to a 2-way split (where they split off to FOH and Monitors). Then at FOH the core terminates in a bunch of connectors which then have short patch cables that plug into the console.

But it doesn’t stop there, the outputs (or returns) also patch with short cables back to the returns core, then at stage they connect to another cable running off to the amp room where the terminate in a rack and then yet more short patch cables into each amp.

So now lets see what happens when something simple goes wrong. The Acoustic  Gtr becomes intermittent. Let’s follow the fault finding process.

Scenario 1:

“What channel is it plugged into?”
“It’s channel 17 onstage”

So you go round the back of the console, trace core line 17 into your patch bay, follow the short patch lead, discover it’s plugged into ch12 on the console which is Electric Gtr 2 for you.

“No 17 is El Gtr2 for me, not Ac Gtr”
“Oh yeah sorry, hang on I’ll check the split………(wait a minute or two while they go offstage to check the patchbay there), it’s crosspatched into 21”

So you go round the back of the console, trace core line 21 into your patch bay, follow the short patch lead, discover it’s plugged into ch14,  Ac gtr, the right channel.

So having spent 5 minutes just looking for the right core line/patch/console channel, you’re finally ready to actually start trying to fix things.

“OK phantom powers on, can you see the it on the DI?”
“Nope, no light”

“OK Let’s patch into a different stage line”
“Channel 23 is clear, I’ll go into that!”

“So is that core line 23 or stage line 23?”
“Stage 23, which is cross patched into…..hang on (wait a minute while they go offstage to check the patchbay there) core line 30”

So you go round the back of the console, trace core line 30 into your patch bay, unplug the short patch lead from core line 21, patch it instead into core line 30.

“Try that, see phantom yet?”
“Nope sorry, nothing”

So you unplug the short patch lead, hunt around for another one, and plug it in instead.

“Now?”
“Yep I see it, lets try the guitar”

Gtr plays fine all is solved and well, BUT it took over ten minutes to find a simple faulty cable.

Now lets look at the simpler alternative.

Scenario 2

32 channels of audio onstage, the stage box multicores go to a 2-way split side of stage, where they split off to FOH and Monitors. No patchbay at the stage OR the consoles. Additionally the patch is kept “1 to 1”, meaning simply that channel 1 on the stage is plugged into channel 1 of the split, 2 to 2, 3 to 3, etc.

Same problem, dodgy acoustic gtr.

“What channel is it plugged into?”
“It’s channel 17 onstage”

So you check your console channel for AC Gtr, confirm that it has core line 17 in it (it does).

“OK phantom powers on, can you see the it on the DI?”
“Nope, no light”

“OK Let’s patch into a different stage line”
“Channel 23 is clear, I’ll go into that!”

So you patch 23 into your Ac Gtr channel

“Try that, see phantom yet?”
“Yep I see it, lets try the guitar”

Gtr plays fine all is solved and well, same problem (a bad cable, this time the core line though) but solved in less than 2 minutes.

Now when it’s ‘live’ the pressures on, there’s an audience, it gets even more complicated as you feel the pressure and the need to rush through and fix things quickly, so the simpler the better.

The moral to the story is to keep things as simple as you can to cover 90% of the things you do.
If most of the time (remember we’re talking about installations, such as a church or a school), your set up and layout is pretty standard, then set up the system to deal with that, no more. Resist the temptation to make it more complex to deal with the “what if we have a choir sometime?, what if we do a big show sometime?” situation.

Truth is, when those big events come up, it’s easier to hire in the extra stuff you need or to entirely clear the stage and set for the event, and then reset back to your ‘standard’ layout later than build a system that is always incredibly complicated to allow for those one or two times you’ll actually need that degree of flexibility.

It goes without saying that the more patchbays and connectors inline, the easier it is to get lost and have things go wrong, the more likely a connector or patch lead will fail.

The above scenario also only involved one console, add a monitors console to the story, patched differently again, and you can take forever to solve the simplest things.

Finally, in this day of digital consoles, there’s little reason to ever be anything than “1 to 1” with your physical patch, as you can software patch (soft patch) the physical inputs on the back of the console or stagebox to whatever fader you want.

The old adage of Keep It Simple, still applies!