In a nutshell, get a snake if you want to make sure your floor space is uncluttered, you need to manage more than 4-6 mic cables, our you have an issue with how far your mixer and or recording station is from the instruments. We bought a 100 foot 16 channel snake that also has 4 returns for our rehearsal space.
The rest of this post is a long description of how we have our space set up and with what types of gear. My answer to your snake question is above but if you’re interested read on. I am waiting to catch an airplane and had a little time on my hands so I thought I would describe our rehearsal and recording rig. Please forgive the long post.
Our mixer (old Tascam 2400) and digital recorder (Zoom R16) are on the other end of the room. The room is 28' x 36'. With the snake set on the stage( 24’ wide by 8’ deep), it is about 32-36 feet away from the mixing board. We got a 100 foot snake because running it off to the side walls, across and back over to the mixer in the rear center of the room is more like about 68-70 feet including getting up to the height of the mixer stand.
It is a wonderful convenience but if we were running only 2-4 mic cables, we wouldn't bother.
On my drum kit, I am using 7 mics. BD, SN, two toms, pencil condenser for the ride, another condenser for my hats and a large diaphragm condenser as a single overhead. Four vocal mics and three mics for 2 guitar cabs and 1 bass cab. So that's another 7 mics. That leaves us with two more inputs for guests. We run our monitor return out of the board directly to 4 daisy-chained wedges. The guys say they can hear themselves sing and they can find the sweet spot between their amps and the wedges so they can hear themselves well. I can't tell.. ..well not when it gets loud.
The primary purpose of our space is to be able record rehearsals so we can all listen back and improve. We are also (slowly) recording select songs as we polish them up so that we have a bunch of songs recorded as best as we have yet to play them. Mostly for posterity, to one day be able to play the recordings and say this is what we played and what we sounded like. None of us are doing this to make a living or even attempt to sell records.
One monitor return back to the snake comes to me and through an old Mackie 4 channel mixer that I do two things with. I am the one who tweeks and manages our recording scenario so I like to have a monitor mix back out from the R16 recorder so I can listen and tweek if Tom, our sound guy, is not around.
We have an old Onkyo Pig 1600W amp running 2 pairs of PA speakers each side daisy-chained. A Crown 1200 powers the sub-woofer and a Crown 1000 runs my Buttkicker(s). A single ddrum trigger on the bass drum goes to an inexpensive (bottom of the line, ha ha) Simmons drum module that sits next to my 4 channel mixer and I send an 808 type bass drum sample to the BK transducer mounted under my throne for bass drum monitoring. Heaven!
The room sound is fantastic because of the size and the hard wood floors and vaulted ceiling. The monitor mix for everyone is pretty good. I am in heaven with my monitor mix because I am running a well leveled and EQd mix from the mixer to the recorder which gets tweeked a little before it leaves the board (some EQ but mostly panning). A single large condenser mic positioned near the mixer captures the overall room sound from the board position and goes directly into the R16 digital recorder; tweeked again on the R16 for a well-balanced sound. Combine that with feeling my bass drum through my whole body and I always feel like I am “on-point”.
We keep a small line rack cabinet on the stage for my Crown amp. It also has an effect rack unit on there that has some compression, gating (currently not need or utilized) and most importantly a limiter on it so I can wear my in-ears from time to time and not risk blowing out my ear drums. So my monitor mix goes through that effect rack and out to my headphones or in-ears. I have a splitter from my little Mackie so that one of our guitar players who like to sometimes wear his in-ears can do so without needing his own little patch mixer.
The Onkyo amp that runs the PA speakers has an effects rack unit on it as well that we add mostly reverb and chorus too to help out our vocals. We’re getting older and don’t sing as well as we used to so we need a little help
The Crown amp that powers the monitors doesn’t have any effects on it so the monitor mix from the wedges is more subtle with very little carry over reverb and chorus from the PA speakers picked up by the mics.
The Crown that powers the sub-woofer is adequate but the woofer itself is sort of lame. I think we need a bigger one. Everybody else but me likes it but I think it muddies everything up. I think I might try gating it a bit to see if that helps. I only have a couple of years of experience with sound reinforcement and recording techniques and there is so much to learn.
When we do longer (all weekend) recording sessions, we sometimes hook the R16 up to a desktop computer running Cubase. I am learning to do more work on the front end and mixing and mastering become a little easier afterwards.
I highly recommend the Zoom R16. Bo Eder recommended it to me a long time ago and I have been very happy with that $400 purchase.
I am very satisfied with our live room sound and getting happier session by session with our recorded sound. It has been a true joy to play music in that space. I highly recommend putting in the effort to get your space the way you want it. It is very rewarding.