Saturday, June 14, 2008

Labeling Your Studio

If you have a fair number of hardware synths in your studio, you probably have a mess of different cables snaking about. Power cords, audio cables, and MIDI cables can quickly become a confused mess. This becomes an even bigger problem when you need to rearrange your studio or troubleshoot a MIDI connection, etc. Suddenly you have to figure where all those cables are going to and coming from. My solution for this is mailing labels. Just the standard Avery 5160 mailing label. These wrap around a cable nicely, and the resulting 'flag' can be written upon to label what the cable belongs to and where it's going. This can be especially handy if you have lots of extra cables and power supplies laying around. Especially with power supplies, there are sometimes proprietary connectors that might only work with a specific piece of gear. Before I started doing this, I had a whole drawer full of power cords I no longer knew the origins of. But now, I just label the cord when I get it and I never have to worry about forgetting what its purpose is. This works great for all the weird USB cables that come with cameras, proprietary cell phone chargers, marking all the plugs in a power strip, etc.

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