Suggestions for cable storage?

[AnotherScott]

I've got tons of cables of assorted types, and having them all thrown together in a box makes it too hard to find things. Is there any kind of storage system or creative approach that anyone can recommend?

 

For example, for data cables, I've got 5 kinds of USB cables (A/B, C, Mini, Micro, 3.0 Micro) of varying lengths, plus lightning and firewire cables. For signal cables, I have straight and right angle 1/4" TS and TRS, 1/8" cables, 1/8"-to-1/4" cables, and various adapters/extensions. My figure-8 power cables are a mix of regular (fully rounded) and polarized (squared off on one side). I have MIDI cables in 5-pin (straight and right angle) and TRS-to-5-pin. Currently all of this is in 4 cardboard boxes grouped as I described (data cables, signal cables, power cables, MIDI cables), but there are still so many total cables in each box that it can be a nuisance to find what I'm looking for, plus the cardboard boxes themselves are unsightly and awkward to place conveniently.

 

Maybe there's some kind of tower of small-ish drawers of varying sizes that works for this, maybe something modular?

 

 

[D. Gauss]

[cassdad]

If you’re want something NOT mobile (ie. for your studio), I have a friend who uses these wall mounted cable hangars:  https://www.amazon.com/Gator-Frameworks-Mountable-Organizer-GFW-CABLEHANGER/dp/B084C8P6YZ

 

[I like D. Gauss’s solution for mobile / live gigging.]

[DroptopBroham]

I use one like this that I picked up at army surplus. Built like a tank. Have all my cables, sustain and expression pedals, MIDI cables, IECs, AC adapters, powerstrip, extension cord, and mics in there. Works great and will probably last 50 years if no can wear like a backpack and have hands free to carry boards. It's great having everything in one place. Rugged af and only about $30.

 

[fziegler]

I have a few IKEA boxes (transparent) for XLR, USB, power/power plug and line cables. Each cable is in a ZIP plastic bag. Best system for rarely used cables.

It takes time to always put them back into the bag, so for the most used cables, they are just together in an extra "stage" box.

[voxpops]

I use one of these:

 

 

 

Here's an Amazon UK listing - but I'm pretty sure you'll find them in the States:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/VonHaus-Storage-Trolley-Supplies-Accessories/dp/B01EAPK3KW/ref=sr_1_18?nsdOptOutParam=true&sr=8-18

 

I also use coat hooks in my studio for cables that I need to access more frequently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[stoken6]

And obviously a velcro cable tie for every last cable. 

 

Cheers, Mike.

[DeltaJockey]

A life long dilemma for me too. I agree with the comb style wall hanger. But if that's too messy on a wall, or nowhere to put it, compartment draws are the next best thing in my view. I currently have looped up each respective cable type in bunches and recycling the wire twists which come with the packaged cables to hold them together, if not using velcro ties or removable cable ties.

 

Or...you could just plug every cable into the next one via the appropriate adapters, and string it between the power poles! ha ha

[Baldwin Funster]

Coil them up and use about 4 or 5 Square milkcrates. 1 for long 1/4", one for xlr ect. And one or 2 for whatever I take to a gig. I have guitar gigs and keyboard gigs but never both. I pull what I need before the gig and over the course of the next couple days I inspect and put back. I don't have a permanent rig because unfortunately I don't just play the same band, same songs, same needs everytime. I wish I did except knowing me I'd get bored. 

[cphollis]

For band use, I use a mixture of translucent storage tubs ("all the XLR cables are over there") and rolling suitcases packed as kits ("here are all my spares", "here is everything you need for lighting", etc.).  Setup time is much easier that way.

 

However, things never find their way to the proper place afterwords,  so there's always a unpack/repack cycle between gigs.

[D. Gauss]

10 hours ago, cassdad said:

If you’re want something NOT mobile (ie. for your studio), I have a friend who uses these wall mounted cable hangars:  https://www.amazon.com/Gator-Frameworks-Mountable-Organizer-GFW-CABLEHANGER/dp/B084C8P6YZ

 

 

 

i can tell you that from my expereince, these racks suck for the intended purpose.  IF they are in the studio and holding patch cables that are ALL identical in size/lengh, then they are fine.  you just grab the first one in line.  HOWEVER,  if you've ever been belt shopping at the mall and tried to get your size off the rack from the back of the varied selection hanging on the same pole, you'll quickly understand how horrible these are.

 

 

 

 

[Stokely]

I keep all my live gigging cables in one of two places:  the "definitely need what's in here" case, and a backup case with an assortment of stuff in it (that usually stays in my car).   I do my best to never use anything from my live rig at home, lest I end up forgetting it.  My mic is the one exception right now.

For home, I have a ton of small drawstring bags from my wife's business.  Lying flat, they are about 10" by 12" or something like that.  Any single cable that I'd use (longest is 35 ft) is able to fit in there rolled up.   I have them labelled like "XLR long", "TRS", "XLR short", "midi" and so on.    These bags all go in the closet.   This is not the best system if you are constantly using various cables.   I rarely do, I leave one XLR out with a mic stand for vocals, and normally anything else is software "in the box" so 99% of the time the bags just sit in the closet.

If I was constantly using cables I'd go maybe with that hanging system or something easier to find and use a particular cable quickly than my bags.

The PA owner of my band has some kind of portable holder where a bunch of cables can be coiled up and attached with little bungies that come with it.   In his case just about everything on it is XLR so it's great for "hey, we need a mic cable over here" and just grab one off this thing.

For usb and other small assorted cables, I've been using one of those plastic tower drawer units.  Micro, mini, usb-c, printer, lightning...argh.   Super annoying.

[skipeb3]

[BluMunk]

1 hour ago, cphollis said:

However, things never find their way to the proper place afterwords,  so there's always a unpack/repack cycle between gigs.

 

Heh. Yes. Speaking as someone with chaos brain, I have definitely had one or two great systems over the years. Unfortunately, after 1-3 gigs or a studio re-arrange, the system broke.

I currently have a small rolling suitcase where I keep everything "extra" for my main theater rig (laptop, charger, audio interface, switch and expression pedals, audiofront midi expression adapter, and the USB and 1/4" cables required to connect that all up). I don't use anything in the bag for anything else, so it gets unloaded at gigs, and packed back up again when I leave the theater. It's been reliable because I am able to follow one simple rule: "don't ever borrow anything out of this bag, and it will always be ready to go." For the rest of my gear... I imagine I have a whole host of cables, PSUs and adapters hanging out with all of my missing socks from the laundry. 😛

[AnotherScott]

11 hours ago, D. Gauss said:

 

11 hours ago, cassdad said:

I like D. Gauss’s solution for mobile / live gigging.

Thanks for the lead, D. It's not really what I was asking for, but I do like the looks of that for gigging as cassad said... and it's possible that something like that might also be useful for my home use, not instead of but rather in addition to the kind of thing I was talking about, for organizing those things that I just have a small quantity of.

 

So I just ordered this one for gigging... similar, but it looks like it might be a more comfortable (smaller) size while still being big enough for my gig purposes, plus I liked that it had a tablet/laptop compartment. After I use it, I'll see if I might still find another of this type useful for home use.

 

11 hours ago, DroptopBroham said:

I use one like this that I picked up at army surplus....Have all my cables, sustain and expression pedals, MIDI cables, IECs, AC adapters, powerstrip, extension cord, and mics in there...wear like a backpack and have hands free to carry boards. It's great having everything in one place. 

 

As I said, my cables are currently sub-divided into 4 boxes (data, signal, power, MIDI) and it's still too much jumble in each box to easily find what I'm looking for, and this answer is to put it all in one big bag, so this was kind of the exact opposite of what I was asking for!

 

Maybe it wasn't clear that my question was about organizing large quantities of a wide variety of cables at home, rather than the smaller quantities of fewer kinds of cables one would take to a gig, though I'm kind of glad that things veered in the gig direction as well, since that discussion is also worth having and there have been good thoughts about that here as well. 

 

For gigging, I do like the backpack approach if it allows you to cut down on trips. Depending on the quantity of cables you need, I might want to sub-divide with small nylon or canvas bags inside the backpack, to keep all guitar cables in one bag, all power cables in another, etc.

 

9 hours ago, fziegler said:

I have a few IKEA boxes (transparent) for XLR, USB, power/power plug and line cables.

 

I didn't think about checking Ikea, or The Container Store which would be another possible source for these kinds of things. Are your Ikea boxes stackable, and do they come in different heights?

 

9 hours ago, fziegler said:

Each cable is in a ZIP plastic bag.

 

An interesting alternative to twist-ties or velcro wraps. Harder to lose, at least! Speaking of which...

 

6 hours ago, stoken6 said:

And obviously a velcro cable tie for every last cable. 

 

Yeah, I know, I know. I'm going to start doing that, right after I start exercising and eating right.

 

9 hours ago, voxpops said:

I use one of these: 

 

Here's an Amazon UK listing

 

Yup, found something similar:

 

 

and assorted variations in sizes and colors from the same and other brands. Looks promising.

 

Kind of along the same lines (and pictured below), I found this 10-drawer organizer, which could also be combined with with the 7-drawer version. I wish it were modular, so I could combine any combination of "short" and "tall" drawers in any order. And I think I'd want dividers within some of the drawers, but I could probably find some way to create that. (One more thing for that 3D printer I keep thinking about getting!)

 

Here you can see the 10 and 7 tier side-by-side, on the left. Each is about 12" wide, 14" deep, 42" high. Aesthetically I think I prefer this to the style above, but I don't know how they may differ in usability, capacity (in a given drawer) and durability/longevity.

 

4 hours ago, Baldwin Funster said:

 milkcrates

 

I do use a couple of them for some things sometimes. But for this purpose there are two issues with milk crates... one is that you'd keep having to lift off higher ones to get to stuff in lower ones, and also,  each one is quite high, which is okay for some things but way too much wasted space for others.

 

3 hours ago, cphollis said:

things never find their way to the proper place afterwords,  so there's always a unpack/repack cycle between gigs.

2 hours ago, Stokely said:

I keep all my live gigging cables in one of two places:  the "definitely need what's in here" case, and a backup case with an assortment of stuff in it (that usually stays in my car).   I do my best to never use anything from my live rig at home, lest I end up forgetting it. 

 

Like Stokely, I mostly keep my gigging cables separate. The only time I remove cables, pedals, etc. from their travel bags between gigs is if I need to use them at home, and I've tried to minimize that. I'd like to duplicate some more things so I'd never have to worry about remembering to put something back in a gig bag. (But all the different wall warts, ugh!) And yeah, I have that emergency box of spare stuff in the car, too. Hopefully we don't need to park the cars too far away!

 

2 hours ago, Stokely said:

For home, I have a ton of small drawstring bags from my wife's business.  Lying flat, they are about 10" by 12" or something like that.  Any single cable that I'd use (longest is 35 ft) is able to fit in there rolled up.   I have them labelled like "XLR long", "TRS", "XLR short", "midi" and so on.    These bags all go in the closet. 

 

Soft bags as opposed to hard boxes is an interesting alternative. In a closet, you could possibly hang them on a rod, or put hanging nails on a wall. In my case, there's no closet in my music room. Though in terms of separating the different kinds of (for example) data cables that are in a data cable box, I could have soft bags inside the box which could be used to segregate the different sub-groups. In my case, I'm actually also trying to get rid of the ugly (and not easily stackable) boxes, but just as a general idea, I can see that as another potentially useful strategy. (Also similar to what I said about how canvas/nylon sub-bags could be used in DroptopBroham's duffle bag.)

 

2 hours ago, skipeb3 said:

 

What I can't figure is how they snuck into my house to take that top photo.

 

 

[stoken6]

5 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

Yeah, I know, I know. I'm going to start doing that, right after I start exercising and eating right.

😁

5 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

And I think I'd want dividers within some of the drawers, but I could probably find some way to create that.

I've put smaller plastic food-storage boxes in these kinds of drawers for smaller cables.

 

Cheers, Mike.

 

[Moonglow]

How about a standing toolbox? The different sized drawers could be used for larger/smaller cables. You might even be able to fashion partitions within some of the drawers, if needed. Disadvantage is that they (obviously) are not transparent, so you might need to label some of the drawers. Can be rather expensive, as well.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/HomJoones-Organizers-Multifunctional-Organizer-Warehouse/dp/B0D5QPVC8C

[fziegler]

17 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

I didn't think about checking Ikea, or The Container Store which would be another possible source for these kinds of things. Are your Ikea boxes stackable, and do they come in different heights?

 

An interesting alternative to twist-ties or velcro wraps. Harder to lose, at least! Speaking of which...

 

Well, standard XLR cables are velcroed, but my smaller cables and adapters sit in those ZIP bags that have a line to write on. I initially meant to either note the content or put in a paper with the content, but usually that's not necessary.

 

Those IKEA boxes are called SAMLA in German IKEA shops, you can use them with or without lids, they are stackable also between their different 4 sizes, partially in 2 heights. Their durability is OK, but I also broke two of them while gigging. There are always enough of them in the house to replace or add one.

 

It's the 15 ¼x11x5 ½ " version I use most for cables (the higher ones for pedals, the smaller ones for accessories).

 

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/search/?q=samla

[AnotherScott]

13 hours ago, Moonglow said:

How about a standing toolbox? The different sized drawers could be used for larger/smaller cables. You might even be able to fashion partitions within some of the drawers, if needed. Disadvantage is that they (obviously) are not transparent, so you might need to label some of the drawers. Can be rather expensive, as well.

 

Yeah, I can see where that could work pretty well. Especially if you could take the wheels off one and then stack that one on top of the other. (The stack would still be under 5' high.)

 

6 hours ago, fziegler said:

Those IKEA boxes are called SAMLA in German IKEA shops, you can use them with or without lids, they are stackable

 

Ah. I realize now that when I'm thinking about stackable containers, I'm thinking about things that are stackable but with pull-out drawers, to avoid the milk crate problem of having to remove all the higher ones any time you want to get to the contents of the lower ones.  I'm thinking of individual drawers of different heights, so you can mix-and-match different sizes as needed. Some more searching brought up these stackable drawers, which could be a way to go. Two of the sizes--the 16 quart at 6 7/8" high and the 27 quart at 10 1/4" high--have the same width and length, so they can be stacked interchangeably (you can see them used that way in the two left-most tiers in the picture below). Though personally, I'd want shorter drawers too, i.e. an 8 quart at half the height of the 16.