Why are patchbays confusing?

I have a studio space that is shared with a few people. I have a patch bay set up. For some reason people unplug things from the back of the patch bay to set things up.

Patch bays are confusing unless you think about it the right way. Ideally the studio is set up the way you want it when you walk in. Hit record and go. No patching.

That is the ideal so when a patch bay is introduced it should not change anything. The only difference is that now there is the potential to change something. Ideally there are no wires connected in the front of a bay. Everything goes in the top and out the bottom from the rear. This confuses people because they think only of the front which is visible. The front of the patch bay is not the important part.

Signals go from top to bottom. Always. If you don’t do this your patch bay will be confusing to everyone and also to you and other engineers that know what they are doing otherwise.

Think about your guitar amp. You plug into the amp with a 1/4″ cable. Then you are like, “gee I wish I had some distortion”. What happens then? You put a pedal in between the guitar and the amp. How does that happen? You add one more cable.

Now imagine that instead of a distortion pedal inline there was a patch bay. Normally (no pun intended) the bay is normalled, which just means the top and bottom are connected if nothing is plugged into the front. Looking at the back of the bay your guitar would be plugged into the top, and the amp would be plugged into the bottom. Hit a chord and hear the sweet music. Ok so what about the pedal?

Remember how things go top to bottom? Well looking from the front the guitar signal is available on the top jack. Plug a cable in there and you have the guitar signal. You know what to do now, plug that into the input of the pedal just like you would if there was no patch bay. If you play the guitar now, you get no sound because plugging something into any front jack of the bay breaks the connection.

Now to complete the circuit the output of the pedal goes into the bottom jack of the patch bay in the front. Please do not touch the rear! Play the guitar and hear the sweet distortion.

There are more sophisticated setups possible. The pedal could be patched into the bay on the rear so the pedal is always available and can be patched in just with connections on the front of the patch bay not the pedal itself like in the example I gave.