Stage Cable Management Techniques

we'll hello I'm Frank we're in the cafe I'm gonna do a cable management demonstration this is cable management for the stage like how do we organize what I would call the play area that's a theater vocabulary term the play area is where the musician is going to stand and we want to keep this place free of trip hazards you know so there they've got a place to work and they can perform and maybe move around and not get caught up in trip hazards so we've got our monitor on the floor first thing I'm going to do is get out the mic stand proper etiquette for a mic stand I'm gonna loosen up this lower bass we're gonna hear it click right when it hits the very bottom and when it's kind of locked it's gonna it did it it locked all the way in but one of the things I see folks do is that they don't get that all the way to the bottom I did a good job didn't I and I see mic stands that look like that right so I want to make sure the deck goes all the way to the bottom I'm gonna orient that fairly close to the monitor this very important that we get both of the the neural nuts on the same side if you're OCD we're gonna like hone in on your OCD Ness that you like you won't be the same after you've learned all this those in my brain that has to be right there the mic and I'm gonna hold on to the microphone in my hand and I'm gonna spin that very end part of the mic like stand right so I'm the mic is always in my hand no chance of dropping it I'm gonna hold on to that and I can tighten that down one of the things that I see is folks that are learning how to do this we see a lot of this especially for a larger microphone the potential of having that drop or fall Plus this is a lot easier I can look at you and have a conversation while I'm tightening this thing up with no problem the other thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna orient the XLR or the locking tab is at the 12 o'clock position on the the microphone that makes it easy to get the mic cable in and out I'm judgmental if you didn't didn't know that I judge people based on mic stand etiquette when I walk on to a stage in a nightclub or anywhere else first thing I'm gonna do is look at the mic stands and if the mic stands are organized and they look correct like this that I'm gonna think this person knows what they're doing they're educated they've been shown how to how to organise this when I see you know mic stands that are in just wonky conditions and the XLR is flipped and things are messy I go well they probably tried you know they came to work that's a good thing the last time I really saw it all like this was Elton John was playing at the Bridgestone Arena and I walked onstage and the first thing I did was look at the orientation of that locking tab and it was like how nice is this because all the mic stands were the same okay we're gonna get the mic clip my cable I'm sorry okay there's not can't imagine and and this and I got to do this I just have to like spend them in it I've been doing this for 30 years is it important for you to watch your instructor on tangle of my cable the answer is yes that's I'm gonna wrap this around once maybe twice and then my 12 o'clock my locking tab goes in that's really as simple as that needs to be I see people that wrap just the cable just all around the problem with that is if for whatever reason that vocalist decides to walk around or if we need to move it for whatever reason and it's wrapped all the way around the cable around the stand rather it's just gonna take time well that one's even simpler that just went around one time that's probably what I would do now part of this is I'm thinking about loadout like I'm trying to go home at the end of the night and if we have a mic cable that's wrapped all the way around a stand that can be problematic now there's a couple exceptions to that exceptions would be keyboard writte if we've got a long extension right we want to wrap that cable around a couple of times if somebody's at a keyboard whether they're sitting or standing at a piano that would be a time and the other time would be overheads right if we've got a drum kit and we've got overheads you might want to wrap that cable around a couple of times just to keep things neat but otherwise most of the time we're gonna do very simple okay where does this part go where does where does that boom arm end up being I see this as a popular option where people raise the stand all the way up let's get the camera back here let's let's say you're the camera for the audience what are you largely looking at when you're looking at this frame and you see all of this real estate and this stuff is in front of my face if you're the artist if you're the reason why we're watching the DVD I mean let's face it everything it gets video these days we want to have this be as clean as possible so I want to keep that boom arm down and I want to get the height as much as I can with the rest of that structure keeping the smaller bits lower like I wouldn't want to do that because that's less stable right I want to use the bigger lower portions of the mic stand first before I do that extension so there's a sub snake and the sub snake what I would do is do one or two coils and then the rest would go back to the main tank whatever that would look like yes I know it's not gonna move I'm gonna tuck it underneath the mic stand plug it in to channel number one we're happy with that monitor cable find the locking I'm gonna put two coils here two coils there and then the rest is gonna go to the power amplifier right because that's speaker level so the question is where do I put the excess so we've got this 50-foot monitor cable do I pile all of the excess cable at the monitor or do I put it back at the power amplifier and what I like to do is one or two coils at the monitor and you put the rest at the amp amplifier rack what inevitably happens is someone's gonna say can we move this somewhere within a foot or two and you're gonna say well of course and then you move and you've got a little bit of extra space in there and you're fine if we don't do that and we just run the exact amount that we need and who knows where that's running that could be going anywhere on stage and then we try to move that a couple of feet and we're stuck so we always want to do a couple do we put the excess on stage right because then the artist is looking at a dad or do we route it on this side so there's a clean path for the artist that is subjective that is a judgment call neatness counts there's arguments that if we put it on the downstage lip of the monitor then the audience will see that pile of cables right they're gonna see that mess if we put it on the upside stay inside of the stage then the artist is going to deal with that the overall directive here is neatness counts so those are judgement calls as long as we've got a couple of coils and we can things I think we're good next I'd like to demo the DI and the quarter inch cable I would I would try to get a shortest cable as I can what we've got this is a 25-footer I can tell to look at it as a 25-footer if I had a 10-footer and I knew this is where this was going I would probably use a 10-footer to get that di and we're just plugging it in and right there's our di and then on the other side we've got our quarter inch connectors taking my quarter inch cable plug it into input 4 because this is a service industry we work in right we're providing services to musicians or talent whoever it happens to be I want to take the and I'm just gonna drape it over the edge sideways look at that that quarter-inch cable I know this person sings I know they play acoustic guitar rather than have the artist like look and say where is that cable very intuitive to say well this must be my di I like doing that for folks the other thing we're gonna demonstrate is a short boom stand just a little bit there's that smack when it hits the bottom open that all the way up you know this could be for a kick drum I'm imagining that this is a guitar amp I'm gonna take my microphone hold it in my left hand or right hand doesn't matter I'm spinning that last little thing and I'm gonna put it next to my guitar amp we're gonna find the speaker right wherever that hole is and get close to the edge very similar ideas where the excess goes underneath I'm not gonna plug it into the sub snake because there isn't one go around once maybe twice and I would do the same exact thing for a kick drum you let's talk about how we're gonna gas tape how do we use gaff tape gaff tape is expensive it is not duct tape gaffers tape is a cloth backed tape duct tape is a vinyl back tape duct tape D you see T is designed for the HVAC industry heating ventilation and air conditioning right and it is designed to seal ductwork we don't need anything that's nearly that sticky if you've ever noticed like duct tape gets really sticky that's what it's designed to do because when you're sealing up metal ductwork you want it to get sticky because then it seals out or seals in the airflow we need something that's got a nicer adhesive we start talking about tensile strength how much force does it take to pull the tape off of something I've studied gaff tape I've found the most the highest tensile strength I've spent way too much time thinking about gaffers tape just get some good cloth back the adhesive isn't as strong as duct tape could be certainly not as sticky but then we're able to take gaff tape and we could tape a microphone on 150 thousand dollar Steinway piano and not worry about pulling off the fittings right so that's one of the benefits how I tape things down now you may not have a boss that's happy about this but this is the foolproof method the problem is that it takes a lot of tape right that's why some employers are like don't tape it down like that but this is foolproof I'm only going to do just a short amount here I would tack it down you know this is a this is a pathway right we're we're walking somewhere trying to keep people from you know tripping here but I would plan it go to the other side stretch it out I'm not going to do this whole thing is it gonna take a love tape I go down one side we're going about half way right about half way over that and then let's just assume that I go all the way down then I'm gonna take another stripe of it and go on the other side again I would go all the way down I have that thing is secured it is not coming up I can guarantee you that takes a lot of tape at the end of the night and again I'm about the low down it doesn't matter how long this thing is I get one of the ends because the side markers went down first pick up one of those I stand on the cable and I walk and I pulled that all the way off if we use just one piece of tape if we use just one piece of tape it might hold it down but then it's entirely possible that the tape wraps around the cable and sticks to itself and when it sticks to itself then it's it's impossible to get off it's very challenging to get off you're doing load-out and you throw it in a flight case and then we have cables that have tape stuck all over them I hate old labels I hate old tape if you look none of my stuff has that one of the ways that we do that again takes more eight but now let me see if I can reuse some of this another method for this is to certainly more economical you could every foot every two feet do something that looks like this now is that valid yes and I might do this depending on where it is like if I've got a cable that's long the side somewhere that needs tack not high-traffic area and I've got to cover a lot of lot of distance I would tape it down like this because that's gonna save a lot of tape and there's if it's not a high-traffic area but four spaces where I know people are gonna be walking on an off stage I would certainly tack it down with both sometimes you get administrators ministers at podiums right at a music stand and they've got to deliver their address and the only way to get power to that podium because sometimes they have lights and clocks and stuff in them the only way to get power there is to come straight back like I've experienced that I would I would do the double tape I would do tape and tape do a strike do a strike I've had administrators from the university say man that's a good tape job look I didn't trip I didn't worry about it a lot of times you know like you want them to focus on what they have to focus on so that is my my gaff tape election the other thing I'd like to address is quad boxes how do we deal with ac management on stage if this is a guitar amp I would be running from behind I would probably lay this give it even the same thing as give it a couple of coils and then we're gonna run this off wherever it needs to be it is entirely possible that we could have somebody downstage center that needs a they've got a pedal or they could have a keyboard this could be of this could be a keyboard stand we need some AC to it and you know we go well is it okay if I ran the electricity right next to the audio cables to the to the microphone cables or the speaker cables either one officially we want to keep those separated as much as possible we want probably several feet in between those two random parallel for each other the concept is that there is an electromagnetic field around the AC cable because we have electrons flowing through a wire we're gonna generate magnetic field we're putting an electrical signal next to an audio signal oh my goodness technically that's all true we see more problems with feeder cable like big transmission pipelines than we do for little extension cords if we have a properly grounded system and we have good mic cables that work this is a non-issue in my career I've laid them side by side with no issues you know the problem with cable management on stage is a lot of times we're limited to pathways like how can we get to the drum kit how can we get to the keyboard we're trying to keep the play area nice and clean so we do end up running cables side by side on a regular basis I'm sure that's gonna spark some controversy no no we can't do that practically speaking it is certainly doable if there are problems like we do have buzzes or hums in the system then I would look at that and I would consider well maybe this is an issue let's resolve that but on a day to day basis everything is working and it's all in good quality good condition not a problem in my opinion

Channel: Frank Baird

Views: 2,911

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Id: lc6HD1un02g

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020