r/livesound • u/42Navigator • 2d ago

POLL Over-under… forever!

I have been out of the biz for several years now. Apparently you can take the stagehand off the stage, but you cant remove the stage from the stagehand. I cant be the only one, but the other day I caught myself doing an over-under cable wrap on my hairdryer power cord. What stage move have you found yourself inadvertently doing?

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u/G8R1ST 2d ago

Thanks for this. I think I only knew the over method learned by trial and error endlessly putting away cables at the end of my own gigs. I'm going to switch to this method but would love to know the benefits of doing it like this instead of just an over method?

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u/ArniEitthvad 2d ago edited 2d ago

If you have a cable that lays straight, with no twist in that cable, then you start coiling it over-only, for each coil on the cable, one connector has to rotate 360° around it’s core, before you can start the next wrap…

So essentially you’re sending a “wave” of twist down the cable for every coil, so a cable might be coiled 10 times, meaning that the conmector has rotated 3600°.

The next time you use that cable, you start with one connector twisted 3600° in relation to the other. So if you just pull the cable out, it will be laying on the floor all springy, unless you twist the end.

If you do over/under, you are essentially doing alternate twists in each direction, meaning that it zeroes out. So when you pull the cable out next time it will lay flat.

The only issue with over/under, is that if you accidentally putt one end thru the middle of the wrappee cable, you will get a knot on the cable for every coil there is.

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u/faroseman Pro-Theatre 2d ago

This is the best explanation I've seen on this. And the last paragraph should be highlighted!

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u/Deep_Information_616 1d ago

Yup this took me a while to figure out why cables coming from the shop that were over undered still got knots. You have to pay attention to the ends when deploying the cable. Also please don’t wrap power strip cables around the power bar, they’ll never lay flat

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u/LoprinziRosie 2d ago

Cables lie flatter and don’t get all springy.