Hey Everyone!
This video will discuss how I installed a 12 channel XLR Snake in my new Home Recording Studio.
Part 1: Project Description (Concept)
We’re the first tenants of a newly constructed basement suite, and I’m fortunate enough to be allowed to make some modifications to the bones of the structure to make it more optimized for recording.
I want my home recording studio to have a live room for recording performances, and a separate control room for monitoring & mixing.
Unfortunately, these rooms are not adjacent to each other.
This is great for isolation, and monitoring, but makes for a cabling conundrum.
How can we get signal from the live room without cables cluttering the living areas with tripping hazards?
Part 2: Running the Conduit
For this project, we decided to use Vacuum conduit tubing to connect the control room to the live room.
The conduit tube would travel through the ceiling joists and have an opening in the ceiling corner of both rooms for the snake cables to come through.
Back in the summer, I used a hole saw to drill through each joist between the two rooms.
Then we ran the conduit tube through and used PVC cement to attach the pieces together.
We had to angle the conduit to go over an air duct, so there was a lot of measuring, moving each hole up of down an 1/8 or 1/4 of an inch to get the slope right. But I’m very happy with how it turned out.
Each side had a 90° end on it that was screwed to a joist, and covered in tuck tape until the end of construction.
We had originally ran a piece of jute twine through the tube using gravity, before putting each piece up, but the twine broke during the drywall installation so we needed to use another method to run the snake thru the conduit tube.
Part 3: Running the Snake Cables
To get the snake thru the conduit, we need to use something sturdy enough to push through the tube.
We used 2 hoses from an air compressor. We connected them together and taped 2 pieces of nylon string to the front end of the hoses, then sent them through the conduit.
On the other side I waited while my partner continued to push. Then pulled on the hoses until they came thru
Once the air hoses were through, I taped the snake to the strings and pulled both through.
For this project, I ran a 12 channel snake for XLR microphones, with another 4 channel snake for 1/4” headphone sends, and an HDMI cable for a Television to monitor the session from the Live Room.
I made sure to have enough slack on both ends to reach my gear in the control room, and reach the floor of the live room.
Before running the snake thru the conduit, I had already built the male end that would live in my control room.
In the next video, you’ll learn how to finish the female end of the snake for your live room.
The process for constructing and soldering each side is the same, so you can repeat what you see in that video with the male end as well.
If you have to run this snake a long distance thru a wall, or ceiling like I did, I would recommend running one end of the cable to where you want it before finishing that end, to avoid damage, and to make it easier to get thru.
Much easier to feed one cable than an XLR hydra with 12 heads.
Conclusion:
Make sure to check out the next video where you’ll learn how to build and solder an XLR Snake.
AND If you haven’t already please consider subscribing to the channel for more videos like this delivered to your new feed.
Thank YOU for watching
I will see you in the next video.
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