“I have recently upgraded to using patch bays in my studio. I have 4 of them. I have everything on my mixer into it except the individual inserts, all my recorders going direct, and all my outboard gear and sound card connected. I’ve tried to make somewhat of a system with it and it is all labeled. I’ve noticed a lot of patch bays in professional studios have different colors on them. Are these some sort of color coding or are individual pieces of gear written in the colors. Also, is there a certain way a group of patch bays should be set up, such as one for processing, one for sound modules, one normalled, etc.”
Keep in mind that the sole purpose of patch bays is to make your life easier, so anything you do should be to that end. Therefore it’s entirely up do you how you organize and label them. That said, there are some conventions you can follow, more or less.
Some people put all of their processing on one bay, all of the mixing console points on a separate bay, etc. This can work well if you plan ahead and leave room to grow. Also there is the issue of where to put things that normally stay connected to the console (tape decks, power amps, etc.). You’ll have to take those on a case by case basis. Most people put their multitrack on a separate bay, or a separate part of a bay, depending on how many tracks it is. In general it’s a good idea to put similar types of things near each other on patch bays, just to make them easy to find. That means all the two track recorders will be near each other, all the effects, compressors, aux sends, etc.
Once you do all of this, color coding becomes more obvious. Again, it’s just a tool to allow you (or other users) to more easily find your way around and locate things. Identifying groups of inputs on the bay with colored labeling makes a lot of sense when you have several large patch bays. If you employ a lot of patches during most sessions you’ll also make life easier if you color code your patch cables. This makes tracing down patches in the middle of a session a lot faster.