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Cases & Brands
Protecting the investment, and knowing what you are buying.
UK Rules & Licensing
How To
About Cases & Brands
Equipment spends more of its life in transit and storage than in use, and most of the damage it suffers happens there. These guides cover protecting it and building it into something a crew can move, patch and service quickly.
Flight cases and racks covers the choice between padded bags and hard cases, why a gig bag is a different tool rather than a cheap substitute, and how rack units and depths work when you are matching a case to equipment you already own. It also covers shock mounting, which earns its extra weight and bulk on touring stock and is unnecessary on kit that lives in a cupboard.
Building a rack picks up where the case leaves off. Planning the layout with spare U for what comes later, powering the whole rack from one inlet, ventilation and blanking panels so amplifiers do not cook each other, and cable management that a tired person can trace at midnight. It includes two worked examples, a front-of-house rack and an amplifier rack, plus a pre-show check.
Both guides come back to the same principle: build for the person who has to open it in a hurry. Label the loom, leave slack where connectors take strain, keep heavy items low, and choose a case size that leaves room for the accessory you will inevitably add. A rack that is a pleasure to work in gets looked after; one that fights you gets bodged.
The cases, racks, panels and cable management hardware themselves are in the Cases & Racks section of the shop, alongside the rack drawers, vented panels and PDUs the guides refer to.
