Over-under helps save lives! Pure awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Awweeesuuummmm

Richly satisfying.

I too am dyslexic! Maybe that's why I thought to teach it in the way I did. It genuinely makes my day that I could help.

@@davidmckenna858 Same for me. The other videos were of no help at all. Thanks for the instruction.

@@effigies7896 Thanks for the kind words. Glad I could help!

Glad I could help!

Glad to help! I remember I had to do the movement in slow motion and really break apart the components to be able to explain it in this way.

You bet! Glad to help.

Exactly like me but I was a percussionist/drummer before that and now I can sleep well lol. Thank you so much for the video!

Glad to hear it! I actually thought about using the "touch wrists" verbiage but decided to keep things related to the thumbs for consistency. I also had to resist the urge to describe the arm rotation maneuver in the under loop as feeling like a disco dance move.

David McKenna yeah you did it perfectly. As they do it they’ll figure it out for themselves anyway lol. And lmao!! The accuracy! Indeed it does. Especially when breaking things down and wrapping cords in a hurry after a gig. And they say disco is dead 😂

Glad to hear it helped out. Just as a heads up, should you accidentally unwrap your over-underfed cable in the wrong direction, you will actually put a knot in it every other wrap. You might have been wrapping it correctly with your other attempts and just got unlucky. While I don't have a video about it, you can stack all your knots in the same direction and run the cable through all of them at once to pull the knots through. It's an extra benefit of the method that I didn't add because the video was getting long. Hop that helps.

Glad it helped out!

Glad you liked it. Just tell your techs to not throw the cable as I do in the video. That can have a tendency to break solder connections over time.

David McKenna Going to start teaching them to repair the cables as well. They break em they can repair em

NICE!!!

You are very welcome. I have extended family in Malaysia who I don't get to see enough of - such fantastic people!

HA! Well played!

Glad it helped!

THANKS!!

Thanks.

Interesting concept. How do you avoid crimping the middle of the cable in the process?

I leave the final loop fairly loose. If you want to make that more secure against crimping, then when tying up the coil (which I do with velcro ties) then leave one end of the loop outside of the tie.

Also, another good tip, especially for obnoxiously long cords... start in the middle and coil one half of the cable, then rotate the coil so the 'back' is now at the front, and coil the remainder. :)

Yes, the matter of how to correctly UNwrap the cable is worthy of its own video (like how to correct all the knots in one go). I used to wrap cables just twisting them back and forth as you suggest, but I always got the feeling I was stressing the cable in the process. I've found this method (minus the throwing the cable bit at the intro which I've regretted ever since) yields the least stress. And yes, people who plug the ends into each other are foolish. We use color-coded velcro relative to cable length. All the Best.

@@davidmckenna858 Gotta be honest. I wasn't fussed by you tossing it out there. Have folks been giving you grief? When teaching the technique, I'll usually have one of the students or a friend walk the other end out, but if the area is safe and I'm sure of the wrap and we'd benefit by just getting on with it, I'll toss it out with just the right amount of force for it to go so-far-and-no-further. You know your coil and you know your cable and you know how to get 'er done without causing harm. Granted, maybe you don't want your students emulating you, but there was no cringing on my end. I'll often re-wrap it up the tried-and-true, dad-taught-me-this-in-the-nth-grade, method of over-over-over with large gentle loops and then have someone walk out the other end far enough to show the full-twist per 2-loops, but not far/tight enough to nudge the sheath or shield free of the conductors. Nothing makes me cringe more than doing tear-down and some helpful-fellow comes up and tells me, "I used to be a roadie for so-and-so back in the N-ies." and start cranking a cable around his wing. You're preaching the good news to the unwashed :) "I'm grateful you want to help, but could you please, slowly, keeping your hands where I can see them, place the cord on the ground and take two steps backwards?" If he then goes for the multi-pin snake.... flying tackle! :) I thank heavens not just for the velcro wraps but also that they are available longer and cost a fraction of what they cost 10 years ago. I used to grumble at the abuse of that one orange power cable that looks like it was shorn from the peyot of a particularly devout orthodox jewish friend (the best simile I could think of), but now I'm glad to have at least one at church and one in my own work kit because nothing drives home the rational better than a cord that will never again be made to look like anything other than the circa 1979 purchased at 25' (now 60') coil-spring telephone handset cable in the hallway of a house with three dating teenagers who want to be private on the phone in some other room of the house (better simile?). If I ever catch another friend in the contracting biz who over-over-over coils his pneumatic tool air hose in small loops and then leaves them in his steel truck-bed toolbox in a sub-zero Missouri winter again, I hope to remember not just to help him by teaching him how not to destroy the replacement hose, but also to cut off a few sample sections before he throws the old one away. That was a missed opportunity. :) Best to you too. Grateful for this video.

Thanks. Glad it helped!

Thanks!

Cables Wow so 40 years ago get you some airpods

Yeah, it's the string that lets when you know you've gone too far.

Thanks!

I made the video for my intro audio students here at UCLA. If they are going to go out into the real world and carry my name on their backs in the process, I wanted to be absolutely certain they did not make a hash out of it. Glad this vindicates you!

Glad I could help.

What's the technique for properly elbow coiling? If you don't have some equivalent for countering the twist like over-under you will necessarily (there's a whole branch of math around this) either leave the cable twisted under stress while coiled or cause twists/knots when uncoiling (or some of both).

No. NEVER elbow loop!

You are very welcome! Always wanted to go to Chile as apparently it has the closest climate to California in the world (and I love the California weather). All the Best my weather brother!

@@davidmckenna858 I'm from Chile too! You need to come to the 4th region (Coquimbo's region) and see the beatiful valleys. Btw thank for the video!

@@Jonathan-jm8ns Chile is rapidly moving up my list of places I want to go! Thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks for the suggestion. While this was always intended to be a basic mechanics demonstration, I may have to create a supplemental video to cover some of the minutiae. To your point, I was wrapping several 100' cables this past weekend and I found that the internal torque problem you describe could be countered by starting at the OTHER end of the cable. If I found myself fighting after only two or three loops, I'd just put it down and walk to the other end. Granted, in the cases of long abuse, I'm more of the mind one should just chop the cable into shorter ones and solder new ends. Which is of course what this video is about trying to prevent in the first place!

My Dad raised me on the elbow method. Makes me wonder what else he told me was wrong...

I have some students who also prefer to do the wrapping with the left hand. Diff'rent strokes. Regarding the Velcro strap, I always have that on the female end so I can add a layer of security at the mic stand. On boom stands it's not as important, but for straight tripods it's a good ounce of prevention beyond just wrapping around the stand.

Very welcome.

I've always done the same. I learned how to coil high pressure hoses years ago, which are also finicky and critical, but I've never used the over/under method. All my cables I just wrap like it came when I bought it, and they still look like that years later. I've never tried throwing one across a room to see if it unravels without knotting, but I suspect they would. With high pressure hoses, each col got one twist. IF you got the twist wrong, you would know it because the coil shape would get screwed up, and 300' of high pressure hose, forcing it into shape without the twist is not even a possibility like you could with a garden hose. I've been doing the same with my cables and had no problems. My coils are perfect like new. I've also worked on loads of productions, been asked to "wrap cables" and when inspected, my wrapping has always passed without a problem. On one occasion I was asked if I used the over/under method, which is what prompted me watching this video, but that was the end of it. There was no complaint or re-wrapping of that cable. I'm going to have to do some experimentation to see if the end result is the same. Is the over/under method the ONLY correct way to wrap a cable? Why am I not experiencing any problems? My extension cords re even perfect. I can't not wrap a cable like a hose, so learning this technique is not intuitive for me.

Not at all. Happy to help.

Interesting bit about the ends. So by that do you find yourself having the last loop either a little short or a little long as the situation merits? Funny you mention the multicore... I used to work at Oakland Coliseum and we'd have races from home plate to the left field and right field walls down the base line = 330 feet. Two big spools of camera multicore on home plate, grab an end and run to the wall, then over-under the entire cable on the way back to home plate, then run BACK to the wall without tangles. The wraps had to be your entire wingspan and your arms were completely on fire by the time you hit the infield. Thankfully, I won, largely because I never tangled.

@@davidmckenna858 Yes the last loop or two might be a little shorter than the rest in order to get the XLRs to sit right. Camera cable is now tri-axial fibre and much easier to deal with. But it still needs to be wound onto a drum, or figure eight-ed.

I've been doing the over/under coiling for years now. I still now and then get a knot even though I try very careful to do it properly. Do the knots have to do solely with the XLR ends and where they end up after coiling or can something else cause knots?? I'm going crazy here I always do the over/under so carefully!!

As someone who used crochet when I was a young live-gigging engineer, I've found that crochet puts a LOT of tension on an audio cable and can significantly reduce its life. One argument for crochet is when you only have one really long AC extension cable but only want to use a small portion of it while keeping large sections of it still looped. At that point, you are trading off incremental cable life for the time of not having to re-wrap100' of cable every time. Of course, the real solution is to have cables of multiple lengths so you have the right one for the job. I have 6'/10'/15'/25'/30'/50' cables that are all color-coded. A bit overkill, but when you are dealing with cables all day long it saves time. Another reason people may gravitate towards crochet is the fact that the cable is "contained" and cannot get tangled with itself or others. To that argument, I just say that I have velcro ties on all my cables to achieve the same end AND I get the added benefit of velcroing the cable to the mic stand to ensure a mic absolutely never hits the floor unless it takes the whole stand with it. Hope that helps.

Technically you can do that in the other direction as well; however, when you create the coils by twisting you are adding torque to the cable that over time will fray the internal ground shield. That said, there is a way of not releasing with your dominant hand that I consider an "advanced" way of doing it (but it uses a lot of "yoga" and also a bit of "zen" so I don't show that here) And yes, I know that by me throwing the cable at the start of the video that I lose all credibility when I talk about issues of maintaining cable life.

VERY impressive. You should take that act on the road!

@@davidmckenna858 My act has been on the road for 47 years. Every gig ends wrapping cables.

@@alcraig1 Solid.

Hmmm, trying to think about the enemy attacks that these two motions would defend against...

Once your cable has bad memory with stiff kinks that won't come out, there is already irreparable damage to the ground braid inside. In such an instance, don't just throw out the entire cable. Instead, cut around the problem areas and solder on new connectors to create two (or more) shorter cables. Remember, the shortest cable run is the quietest cable run, so there's no point having a 25' cable when you only need to go 6'.

David McKenna Thanks very much for the info.

What has worked for me is trying your best to coil them properly and let them sit on the sun for a good 2 hours. Ideally in 80 - 85 degree weather. Then bring them back in and store them. Next time you have a gig they will be molded to the new coiling. It works pretty good. But you have to be careful.

That's interesting. We use over-under for all our stingers here at UCLA Film. If your production house wants it over-over I guess that's their call. Where over-under works really well on production is that you can set the stinger coil on the ground and just walk it to whatever gear needs it without getting any "pig-tail" effect over that distance. The only place I recall seeing over-over is for the TV Camera cable for short cable runs on the studio floor. Once it got to long camera cable runs we switched to figure-8s.

@@davidmckenna858 Thanks for your response, actually I have always done over-under..[I teach it that way]..I saw over-over for the first time on a KZfaq, someone brought it to my attention...took me back....I never had anyone say otherwise...kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pd-dobCmvcudlmg.html My response was...that's interesting.

Mike, as a dyslexic myself, I can relate. I'll try and keep that in mind for future videos (which I have planned but never have the time). Best.

I know that videos are time consuming and are not easy to get everything in to but when possible to work the dyslexic angle in I bet that a lot of folks would appreciate that. Thanks, Dave. @@davidmckenna858

Thanks for the kudos. In fairness, I never promoted the video as it was made for my students at UCLA. Given the I only have about 100 students a year in my audio program, that makes about 43,300 more views than expected.

It's literally easier to copy as a lefty. The verbal instructions are identical. You just have to mirror what he does instead of having to flip yourself around.

Remember that when you started the coil, it began with the jack/plug facing you so the end of the coil has the jack/plug facing away. When you take the cable out of storage, begin by unwrapping your coil from the facing away end. That should prevent the problem most times. However it's still possible that the jack/plug managed to get itself through all the loops and create a long series of knots. In which case, you can actually stack all the knots on top of each other (have them all facing the same way) and then run the jack/plug through the middle of your stack of knots to untie them all at the same time. I thought about covering that info in the video but I figured it was already getting a bit long. Hope that helps.

@@davidmckenna858 Thanks! Mucho! But don't be afraid to add that part to the video.

GAH! I know your pain.

Nope.

While not one of the focal points of this video, by alternating over/under you get a net 0 torsion on the cable. This means you could set the cable down, grab an end and walk to the device you want to plug in without the cable wanting/needing to rotate in your hand lest it start to curly-q like a pig's tail. As far as "remembering" where you are, after enough practice it eventually becomes second hand such that you never get lost. Even if you do, you can look at where the cable is resting (inside or outside the loop) and just perform the opposite. Whenever I can't easily tell due to a REALLY long cable, I just unwrap one or two winds until it becomes obvious.

Thanks for the info. This is one of the most useful things I've learned in a long time! I wonder why they don't put these kind of instructions on the cable packaging. I re-tried doing "over-under" on a 25', 14 gauge extension cord. I threw it 10', and it had some tangling. If I do "under-under", and throw it 10', it's curly, but no tangling. I can then pick it up, and reduce the curliness. The width of it when wound up "under-under" also seems less. This way of winding it makes it like a spring. Do you think there could be any reason to do one or the other, based on the wire gauge? It seems like another way of saying what's going on with "over-under", is that it's accounting for how there needs to be a slight twist in the wire, to keep it from kinking up. It seems like to teach "over-under": do the whole wire "over-over" . . . then "under-under" . . . see the difference . . . then do "over-under" What I'm thinking is: Over-Over is standard for most people, and tangles . . . Over-Under is good for thinner cables . . . Under-Under is good for thicker cables, like 14 gauge

Wait, I see how the twist works, better, in this vid: How to coil cable - KZfaq . . . This method works for garden hoses, too! . . . The twists cancel each other out, resulting in no net twist . . . kzfaq.info/get/bejne/Y9d_ZpleqMy-e5s.html She holds the end away, and you see the wire as a circle, not head on . . . Also shown is how "over-over" gives you a tangled wire I also now see from my own try, how "under-under" gives you a curly pig-tail wire.

@@slack7638 In retrospect I regret throwing the cable in this video. For one, it can easily damage connectors on the cable. For two, it does require some practice to not get tangles. It is best to just set the cable on the ground and walk out the desired length so that it remains partially coiled and less obtrusive in the work environment. Again, the curling you are noticing is undesirable torsion that can decrease the overall lifespan of the cable. Regarding cable gauge, thicker cables like 6 core tend to be wrapped using a large figure of 8. As this video was intended for my film and audio students here at UCLA using thinner cables, there was no point in mentioning that.

Torsion, how do you explain that - makes me think of this video, where they can simulate all kinds of sea "waves": The Navy's Indoor Ocean - KZfaq . . . kzfaq.info/get/bejne/j7GoZLWT1tbFn5s.html I'm just thinking, for me to learn, it helps to see the big picture first - all the possibilities - and then just focus in on what you want, or the right way to do something.

I've found that if someone does everything exactly the opposite as what I describe here, it still works. Different strokes for different folks.

Visually it will look very similar with two distinct "unseen" differences. The first is that by alternating the wraps the braided shield on the inside stays straighter and increases the life of the cable. Striaghter is a relative term here in that with each warp you are veering in a particular direction just a little. So with over-under, it's like driving your car turning slightly one way and then turning slightly the other. Over-over would just keep turning in one direction which ultimately puts tension on the braided shield that can lead to fraying. The other difference is that -try as you might- there will always be the time when you accidentally unwrap the cable from the wrong end and you create a string of knots. With over-under, you get half as many knots to untie as over-over. There's actually a method of stacking the knots so it's not such a chore, I just did not have time to cover that as well in this video.

@@davidmckenna858 thank you.

Over long cable runs (20+ feet), you will get a kind of "pigtail" effect as you run the cable out using only overs. By alternating the wraps, it returns the cable to a relaxed state on the floor. This ultimately extends the life of the cable and makes for less of a tripping hazard. Hope that helps.

@@davidmckenna858 thank you for explaining, feels weird but I'll practice it

Preferably not. If you are cramming, that is probably an indication that you can make the wraps smaller in diameter. True, you will have to make more wraps, but at least the shield of the cable is not damaged in the process. In many cases you can go to about as small as a soda can in diameter and still be okay, which would be much smaller than needed to fit in the pouch of a back-pack. In this video I talk about using a "face-sized" loop for when you plan on hanging the cable on a peg (which we do here in our studio) so as to have enough wraps to help support the weight cable. If the wraps are too large, the weight of the cable on the peg results in a kind of egg shape that puts excess strain on the inflection point. The video was already getting a bit long, so that extra detail seemed less essential.

@@davidmckenna858 You shouldn't throw the cables in order to avoid damage to the soldered joints due to the impact created when male/female end hits the ground. Not to mention the plastic ends cracking or the clip mechanism snapping off.

Dear @@billfallon2372. You are 100% right about this. I have regretted that demonstration for years -especially as I am the one who has had to re-solder all those cables after enough abuse.

This video is easier to follow if you're lefty. The instructions are identical except you get to mirror his movements instead of having to flip it around in your head. There's nothing directional about his instructions.

As a side note to this post, technically any time you make a loop in an audio or video cable you create an antenna that will introduce noise into your signal. So unless you are in a well-shielded studio, you will want to completely uncoil your cables when in use. This of course begets the question, "But what about any leftover slack?" Answer: Always use the shortest cable possible to minimize the excess. Then hopefully you do not need to make so many loops.

@@davidmckenna858 Good to know. I did not know this.

If you're desperate, you can double the cable back on itself, rather than coiling it, so the EM fields cancel out rather than amplify, using the tightest bend that's healthy for the cable. The longer cable will still add resistance, reducing your signal, but at least keeping the noise relatively similar. As David mentions, coiling will make it an antenna, amplifying any RF noise received or transmitted. But the cable won't heat up meaningfully more when coiled (and if your cable is heating up you're running WAAAAAY too much power). And the cable would melt far before it had enough power for the EM field to be even vaguely dangerous.

The issue with the knots can be frustrating; however, if you stack all the knots facing the same way and then run the cable end through all of them at once you can clear this problem in 20 seconds. I thought about doing a separate video for that very process because, as you pointed out, this video was already a bit long to include that information here. Sorry you felt my description was too complicated and took too long. I genuinely made this video for my audio students at UCLA expecting 50 views a year. The internet had other plans.