Parapoetica

• This layout is for three 96-point ADC patchbays, which have two rows of 48 points.

• It’s impossible to fit equipment names on a TT patch bay, so most of the equipment is assigned a number. My old layout had a simple “A1” through “F48” grid, but that was hard to remember, so in the new one, each device type has its own numbering sequence starting from 1, and each type has its own color. This has the huge advantage that inputs, outputs and inserts for a single device bear the same number, making equipment labelling simple. Stereo devices get one number, not two.

• The equipment itself has corresponding colored P-Touch labels. The colors I picked – red, green, blue, yellow, black – all are available as P-Touch colors. For devices that have both an input and output, I’ve (mostly) colored the outputs lighter than the inputs to visually distinguish them. (Mnemonic: signal loss.)

• The layout itself is mostly straightforward. Signal flows downward in any given bay, and most everything is half-normalled, except of course for the panel jacks and mults. I had to play a few games, denoted below. I have four 8-channel A/D converters; I divided my A/D channels so that I have 16 source inputs, 16 monitor/misc outputs, and 16 effects sends and returns. This is a purely artificial designation, of course, and any input or output can be used for anything, but this defines how I normalled things, and helped lay out the patch bay.

• Oddity #1: My mic pres will automatically use their inserts if they’re connected, so the insert sends need to be normalled to the returns in the patchbay. To simplify that, the send and return had to go in the same rack unit, which forced stereo sources 9 through 12 down to row #3. This was incredibly confusing before, but the color makes it much less so. On my particular patch bay, I have all normals sent out to the back, so I could actually avoid this cheat, but the punchblocks are not near each other and it’d be a pain, so I’m not going to bother.

• Oddity #2: There are 4-space gaps between some of the A/D converters; this is a remnant of an old layout that tried to accommodate hardware-level (TotalMix) monitoring at both 48k and 96k. It was very confusing, and I’ve eliminated most of that, but I’d have to move a LOT of patch points around to get rid of the gaps, so I skipped that too. This is, of course, particular to my own setup.

• Oddity #3: A few sources (guitar processor, sampler) have line inputs. I could have made a separate section for those, but then I couldn’t normal them to DAW outputs, so I just stuck them in the bottom row with all the monitor inputs and colored them appropriately. This does break the top-to-bottom flow somewhat.

I hope folks find this helpful. Any questions or comments are welcome.

Patchbay layout in Excel 2002 (includes equipment names):
http://www.jay.fm/files/patchbay.xls

Patchbay designation strips in PDF:
http://www.jay.fm/files/patchbay.pdf

Original InDesign CS file to create that PDF:
http://www.jay.fm/files/patchbay.indd