Cheap Advice On Music

As the sound man for Rusty Strings, I usually set up the PA gear somewhere in the listening area. We run a snake from there to the stage to carry the microphone and instrument signals back to the mixer. We used to also run a fairly heavy cable from the PA output to the main speakers and another cable to the monitor speakers. It’s a lot of trouble to run (and tape down) three separate long cables, especially in a restaurant where customers are already having dinner!

I soon realized that the snake had four unused connections terminating with 1/4″ TRS connectors at the stage box and pigtail. Aha! At an on-site rehearsal, I tried running the monitor signal down one of these snake leads instead of using a separate cable. It works great! Even though the wires in the snake leads are very thin, it didn’t seem to affect the monitor level. And now we only have to run two cables.

[An expanded version of this tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Live Sound.]