Pro Rig Builders Don't Want You To Know This SECRET!

hi i'm mason maringela aka the rig doctor and today i'm going to give you my top tips and tricks for clean lines perfectly routed looms and beautiful cable management for your audio and your power cables many of you ask us in the commentary of instagram pictures or in youtube videos how we get our routing so neat and it's really not that hard of a trick as long as you follow a few basic steps you too can have beautiful cable management in perfectly straight wiring looms using a few simple and easy steps in having the right tools and materials everything that we use today by the way is going to be linked in the description below so you can get the exact same tools the exact same materials that we're using in order to make sure that we have beautifully routed cable lines for dc and for our audio what's the reason that this is even important why would you even want to spend time having your cable routing look really neat and perfectly set in line well there actually truthfully isn't really a huge sonic difference whether you have a mess of cables or whether you have things routed neatly the big misnomer that a lot of us have is that we can't put our dc or our audio cables too close together and the truth is is that is blatantly false the type of signals that we run for guitar related stuff is just not going to be a problem with the low voltage and low current that most of our pedals have and you know we're talking low current we're talking relative to you know big ac lines the type of stuff even at one one amp or two amps it's just not enough to make a difference when we're talking about dc so bottom line is having your cables nice and neat from a sonic perspective it's not really a huge advantage where i do find it to be advantageous however is that it allows troubleshooting to be much easier when you have everything nicely laid out and you have it all tied down neatly in place it's easy for you to identify where things are going and if you have a problem you can easily remove that cable make substitutions easily and not have to worry about shifting through a mess of yarn that your cable has sort of become and trying to figure out what goes where routing your pedal board in this fashion additionally will help i guess in some ways in a sonic perspective in that you'll have the least amount of cable between each pedal and as we know capacitance can be an enemy of good tone and so eliminating as much cable as possible in your signal chain will just give you a more direct path from the guitar back to the amplifier even though you're running through let's say 10 12 15 20 pedals so how do you do it the first step that i always like to use is i like to insert all of the plugs into the pedals that i'm going to be using to kind of create a template for how much space and how much clearance i'm going to have again these are just the plugs not terminated to anything so i'm putting in the quarter inch jacks and the quarter inch plugs together and then i like to take some of the adapting cables and things like that that i get with a lot of these power supplies and insert those into the dc jacks so i know exactly how much depth i have or how much width i have available to route either other cables with or that i need to avoid certain things because i have too tight of an area in order to route cables this helps make that really clear which is something that a lot of those pedal board planners that are online don't really allow you to account for it you don't get to see how much space you're going to have to route you don't get to see how much extra space some of these jacks are going to take up in relationship to the pedal itself the second thing that i do is i tape out the depth that i have available and i tape that in a straight line and basically what i'll do is i'll just measure from the front of the pedal board to the back of the deepest pedal and that will determine the line that i'm going to use to route then my cable ties to and i'll make sure that i leave enough space so that i have clearance for that depth of cable tie down mount typically i'm either using a three quarter inch or an inch and a half cable tie down mount now the one that i choose depends on two things one the spacing if it's really tight and i don't have a lot of space i'm of course going to use the smaller cable tie down mount if i have sort of an intermediary amount of space i'll use the one and a quarter inch one and if i have lots of space i'll usually use two of the three quarter inch ones and i'll have one that carries all of the dc and one that carries all my audio again i'm not doing that for a sonic reason i'm just doing that because i don't want to overload any one of those bundles i want to be able to keep them nice and tidy and not have them sort of spilling over each other so after i tape out that line i'm then going to use my blue painters tape to basically become sort of my measuring tool or my ruler with which i'm going to butt up against each one of the cable tie-down mounts so that allows me to keep a straight line that's based on the depth of my deepest petal in that first row and i have a nice first row here so you can kind of see how i'm doing this and i just go progressively down the line and i populate all of the tie-down mounts that i'm going to need and you know if i do a few too many i can always pull some off if i don't need them but i have them all there if i want them now if you want to do it sort of in the brian o'million technique which i call it where he uses lots of cable tie-down mounts you can certainly do that it just means if you do need to make a change you're going to have to just clip a lot more zip ties but it's pretty negligible in the scheme of things you know if you're going to have to cut a couple of them the difference between cutting six cable ties and cutting three is a matter of seconds so i don't know that it's that big of a deal but realistically if you wanted to keep them together i think maybe doing every other is probably an acceptable way and so usually what i do is i sacrifice one of those cable tie-down mounts and i use that as the spacer and then i go every other space i'll put a cable tie down now and then route that into whatever it is whether it's power supply whether that's an interface box whether that's the next cable that's coming in the series of pedals or whether that's a switcher this very same technique can be used and i always like to start at the pedal and then work my way toward the source so this would be pedal into the power supply or pedal into the switcher or pedal into the buffer interface box i start at the pedal i route toward the source now today what i'm going to be showing you is how i do this using our dc power cables because this is always the first thing that i start on when i'm building a new rig i already have all my pedals laid out where i want them i've put the plugs in so i know how much space they take up and i'm going to start routing all of my cables going toward the power supply because again the power supply is my source and i'm going to use the existing cables that actually came in this case with my true tone cs7 and i'm going to put the molded end on the pedal so that's going to be feeding into the dc input of the pedal and then i'm going to route them toward the power supply and i'm going to cut them to length and then re-terminate them with my kobe con 2.1 millimeter barrel connectors now you'll see once i do this and i've routed them all into it it actually makes it really easy for a series pedal board like this where it's just one cable into the next i can just have the actual audio cables that come after the power just simply route one to the next and i don't even really need to use any zip ties for that because i've already segregated the zip ties behind them with the dc audio and i can just very easily just go one cable into the next into the next into the next and i don't need to actually even occupy any of the real estate with zip ties because i can just go one into the next and if i didn't have that if i had a switcher of some kind then i can actually just repeat this exact same thing using a secondary row where i might want to keep my audio cables or if i didn't have a lot of room i could use one of the one and a quarter inch tie down mounts and i could use that to bundle both the dc and the audio together or if i had enough room again i could keep them separated keep dc on one and keep the audio on the other and that would be an easy way for me to keep them separated neat and easy to troubleshoot if it ever came to that so you've seen my routing tricks using some nice painters tape is an easy way to create that nice line so that you always have a reference point as you're putting together your pedal board you're putting down your cable tie down mounts you're putting through your zip ties and you're routing it you also heard that you can do it in a number of ways you can use the omillion audio style where you just have a bunch of cable tie-down mounts that are going one after the next that route right into the source or you can skip and do every other for me it really depends on what i think is going to work best and how solid the actual board is going to be if the customer is not going to be very modular in their pedal board and the items that they have on there pretty fixed then i'll use quite a few more zip ties and tie down mounts than i ordinarily would if somebody's going to be changing stuff up a lot but if you think that you're going to be pretty modular then you don't need to be as stringent about using as many zip ties as many tie-down mounts because you're probably not going to need to utilize that many if you're going to be changing your rig with some amount of frequency again reiterating that when you route your cables you want to start at the pedal and work toward the source so when you saw us doing our dc audio cables we started at the pedals and then we routed everything in one direction going toward the power supply re-terminating there if i were doing this with my audio cables i would do the same thing whether it's a switcher whether it's going into a buffer interface box or whether it's just going one pedal into the next you're going to start at one you're going to route it into the other if you need to make a second row of zip tie tie-down mounts to accommodate that you can do it if you want to go with a bigger tie-down mount to accommodate dc and audio in one loom you can do that this is just a good standard practice that not only i use but many of the pro rig builders are using and this has kind of been a standard that has been established completely independently of me but i want to democratize that and make sure that everybody is using the same useful information another thing you want to make sure that you're putting in your cables into the actual connectors themselves not terminated just the connectors themselves this is just helping you determine the depth that you need for clearance how much routing space you actually have available by doing that in advance and plugging in those plugs for dc and audio first and not terminating them with a cable yet that's just going to help you create an idea of spacing and what's actually available to you so you're not overestimating or underestimating the available space on the board for routing and looms of cable so that was my top tips for cable management and how to have a beautifully wired and neat pedal board if you like what you saw today i highly recommend that you like you subscribe you leave us a comment and tell us some of your best practices maybe there's some things here that i didn't talk about that are things that you utilize that could be really valuable for people who are watching this channel and if we feel like it's a good idea we will definitely share that information as well or maybe even implement that in a future video or tutorial so please do put something in the comments if you do have a good idea or something that goes even further than what we did here and if you want to support the channel we have a couple different ways you can do that you can head to vertexfx.com purchase one of our pedals purchase one of our paddleboards these are all things that help support us and support our channel also if you want one-on-one coaching you want more instruction on stuff that we learned about today or things that we've covered in other videos we have our patreon page where you can hire services from us either email consulting or one-on-one consulting with our team so please do check that out on patreon also we have merch available in the links below and then of course we have tons of links for all the products and materials that we use today from tie-down mounts to zip ties to velcro so you can get everything that you need in order to make a rig look just like the stuff that we're doing using the same exact materials that we use until next time i'm mason marangilla aka the rig doctor see you later [Music]

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 133,084

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Omilion Audio, la sound design pedalboard, la sound design buffer, tone merchants rack systems, Robert Bradshaw pedalboard, bob bradshaw, bob bradshaw rig, bob bradshaw custom audio electronics, pedalboard cable management, guitar pedalboard cable management, rack cable management, rack cable management best practices, rack cable management tips, pedalboard, pedalboard build, pedalboard tips, pedalboard wiring tips

Id: WREXyC2PUNk

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021