Spreadsheet/chart/table for audio routing?

I find it easiest to use good old fashioned graph paper, it’s just the easiest to deal with ever changing set ups.

What do you mean routing?


I have a Google sheet i use for gigs that tracks the songs, takes, takes by lyrics, microphones used, and what bus they went to and what channel they are patched to.

Have another for work thats to track our patching from the hall, to the patch panels, to the mic pres.

I mean go for it. I don't see the point of full signal chain routing like that. But certainly session recall notes are very important. The more gear you use the bigger the notes become and more of a pain it all becomes. Price to pay to play with analog stuff. Console recall notes are always a pain. 

Google draw is free and can probably come up with something similar. 

I find my spreadsheet and using Session Recall App is good enough for me. Because most everything else is in the DAW anyways. 

I have an Excel spreadsheet I made for keeping track of my patch bays. I have 3 of them so there's a lot of cabling terminating there. I color coded all of the multi-conductor snake cables and used shrink tubing to color code each individual channel input and output. I have all that info color coded onto each point in the patch bay. I have no repeating color codes on any of the wires. It required banding more than a single color on each cable so I could keep them straight. I made the spreadsheet before I ever started making cables. I even documented the internal color coding of the + and - conductors inside the individual channel wires. Then I used that for reference when making and connecting the cables. As a result of a lot of planning and documentation, everything worked the first time I plugged everything in. If/when I have to do any reconfiguring or troubleshooting I can go to the spreadsheet and find the color codes and trace the connections by looking at the shrink tube colors at the ends. That eliminates a lot of confusion.

The spreadsheet looks like a mess but it makes sense to me. I even made extensive notes at the bottom of it so I could figure out how many, and what types of plugs I would need. That way I would have everything ready when I started soldering. I also had all the colors of shrink tubing I have and all the ones that are/were already used so there would be no duplicates. Here's what it looks like. This just the patch points. All of the notes are further down on the page.

i.postimg.cc/wjjvpkL1/Patch-Bay-Spreadsheet-Image.jpg

Exactly the type of thing I'm thinking about. So I can figure out chains before I actually crawl under my desk or pull out all my racks.

so i have this too but to make my patch bay labels. Do you use this for each song you mix/record somehow? 

Tracking Signal Flow.pdf (113.89 KB)

Not sure if this link will work, but I took a hack at this with LucidChart. This is an attempt to route my tracking plan for these live in the studio recordings running through a 24 channel board (representing in the middle but not labeled).

I have to say, it was cool being able to drag boxes around and have the connections follow them. Fun exercise.


EDIT: I can never figure out how to get images to display

For tracking I use a simple spreadsheet that maps mic’s to studio patch panel and then to pre inputs.

For mixing I take phone photos of all analog devices and my patchbay and I store those photos in a handy free AU plugin called Snapshot by Non Lethal Applications. All it does is store photos inside the actual plugin within the session.

I have a few DIYRE Colour channels where the modules installed can vary from mix to mix. To document those, in Logic (and I dare say most DAW’s) you can write notes into individual tracks as required.

Logic’s Insert IO plugin has in and out gain settings that store with the session so often I will attenuate/ boost here to avoid changing an analog setting on a device when mixing to try and standardise the analog processing part of things as much as I can. Particularly handy as a threshold control when sending to a compressor and saturation amount when sending to those types of analog processing.