10 years of refinement. The ultimate patch template (and other resources). From me, to you.

Festival Patch Template

Patch is one of the most important roles in audio, a direct correlation between the amount of yelling and how many channels show up in the right place in a timely manor can be observed. While I enjoy the occasional patch gig, I’d rather not it be every show. I’ve been refining this template for the better part of 10 years and find myself re-doing below-average patch sheet often. So, it’s time. My gift to you. Free, no strings, the mother of all festival patch sheets. An all in one, automatic, collaborative google sheet to make life easy.

Patch Template

Just like the festival template, but for your band and a support. All the frills, none of the fusss. Auto colour, count mics and stands, provide an up-to-date list of what makes your set sound great (hopefully).

Colour Convertor

Everyone seems to use a different colour scheme. So, this utility in 3 easy steps makes it easy to paste valeus, choose colours, and copy out. A B C D box lables? Pfft, let’s set those to Red, Yellow, Green, Blue - or whatever flavour of colours you use - and you’re done. No more recalling what number you’re up to, what boxes you’ve used, just simple, copy and paste.

FESTIVAL PATCH / PATCH TEMPLATE RELEASE NOTES:

I’m happy to take feedback and requests. It will forever be a work in progress, tweaking and adding functions that are suggested, or I find myself requiring. For now, it will:

  • Manage 10 bands in a 1 day festival

  • Provide overview and a quick summary of requirements (Consoles, Outboard, Engineers, Wedge / IEM counts, etc)

  • Support a 64 input channels and 6 extras for HW IEM returns and such

  • Supports 10 stage boxes - resistor colour code

  • Show a festival patch, or allow 1:1

  • Show duplicates, ie if you’ve used Blue 3 in a previous channel it’ll highlight

  • Count Mics / DIs and Stands, a total and a 3 act minimum count

  • Supports dedicated Mics / DIs and Stands for those bands you’ve already sound checked or don’t share - counts will be automatically adjusted

  • Supports BYO mics and stands that will automatically update counts

  • Room for heaps of other information - extra stands, monitor sends, notes, stage plots

  • A sheet for showing a breakdown of each band’s stage box for easy labeling

  • General all round data copying and validation

Things it won’t do:

  • Anything if you don’t put the data in.

  • “Oh, yea, sorry, that’s the old rider. let me get you the new one, a few things have changed - we have 6 toms and a full brass section now … wow, I don’t know how you got that rider, let me … oh have you got the wifi? let me get Chad, he’ll know - CHAD … CHAD, HAVE YOU … HAVE YOU GOT THE RIDER? THEY HAVE THE OLD ONE … OH BRIANS GOT IT? … let me find Brian .. BRIAN, WHERE’S BRIAN? … CHAD HAVE YOU SEEN BRIAN? … OH BRIAN … HEY BRIAN HAVE YOU GOT THE LATEST RIDER? THE ONE WE UPDATED YESTERDAY?”. Oof. Been there. My condolences.

The patch sheet is provided as is where is, and will probably contain some bugs. Let me know when you find them.

COLOUR CONVERTOR RELEASE NOTES:

Hot on the heels of the Festival Patch Template, I was tired and dyslexic having to constantly translate random box colours or letters to my patch system. Everyone seems to use different colours, so this, makes it easy. paste in the channel list, or even just the patch, select what should go where, and viola, copy the result out. As always, happy to take thoughts and suggestions.

  • Supports 64 channels, 10 Stage boxes

  • Auto detects the patch names minus the numbers and adds it to the drop downs at the top.

  • Select the patch from the drop down, and select a colour beside it. Flexible to choose your colours to the ones you use most often, or preset to the resistor colour code.

  • Copy the results out to your patch

  • If you're having trouble the first suggestion is to use "Values Only" when pasting - both in and out of this sheet.

  • Highlight duplicates - Shows the breakdown of each stage box in Stage Boxes sheet. No need to edit that page, all the data is populated from the Colour Convertor sheet.

Things it won’t do:

  • Recalculate if your box is an 8 channel and the patch is based off 12 channel. Still pondering this sort of problem.

The conversion sheet is provided as is where is, and will probably contain some bugs. Let me know when you find them.

Creative Commons License
Festival Patch Template & Colour Convertor Sheet are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.