Hi all - I've just started making my own cable snake for my DM10 kit, and I figured I'd post some info and pix as I go along. The idea is to use CAT7 network cable instead of regular audio cable. I've used network cable in the past for audio and it works great - the signal (in my experience) is usually very clear, and you get 4 twisted pairs of wire, so you can have multiple signals going down a single length of cable. You can use CAT5 or CAT6; I'm going with CAT7 because each individual pair or wires is shielded - some of the others only have one piece of shielding around the whole 8 wires, or no shielding at all. The downside of the CAT7 is that it is more expensive (but still not bad) and it's a little thicker. But I figured it would be worth the downsides to have the cleanest signal possible.
I found the cheapest CAT7 cable I could get was actually as a ready-made network cable - of course I don’t need the connectors, so I just cut those off, and then I could cut lengths of cable as I needed them.
Since the cable has 8 wires, you can connect 2 TRS triggers and one TS trigger with each length of cable. So I figured out how to divide up the kit so I could use as few pieces of cable as possible, and then measured how to cut the cable so I could run just the length needed for each set of triggers. You can see the first cable is going to run to the hi-hat, the snare, and crash cymbal #1 - for that one I needed 7” between the module and the ‘body’ of the cable, then 10” of cable, then individual sets of wires running 8” to the snare and hi-hat, and 20” up to the crash.
Working on the snare / hi-hat / crash cable: here is what the cable looks like when you strip off the outer plastic - these are the 4 twisted pairs with the foil shielding around each pair.
Now I have the wires all cut to length - the 7” wires are at the bottom, and the 8” and 20” stretches at the top. Since I need 3 sets of wires for the snare and crash (since they use TRS connectors), I had to split one pair of wires to supply the third wire for those triggers. The hi-hat has a TS connector so I just needed one pair of wires for that one. (Note - the individual wires are unfortunately not all different colors; in each pair there is one white wire plus a colored wire. So it means that when you split pairs of wires to make TRS sets, you are going to end up in some cases with two white wires going to the same connector. I found it was very helpful to have a multimeter handy to make sure that when I got to actually soldering the connectors, everything was wired correctly.)
I bought a bunch of 5mm heat shrink tubing, and used pieces of that to enclose each set of wires. Then I soldered on all the connectors, using the multimeter to make sure I had everything wired up right.
This is the only cable section that I have all put together so far, but I’ve tested this one out and it’s working perfectly. The plan is to make all 4 cables, and then fasten them together with black electrician’s tape to make a single snake. I’ve ordered some black velcro straps, and I’ll use these to fasten the finished cable to the rack. I think the final result will look pretty good because there should be no extra wire hanging, since the pieces are all cut more-or-less to length, and it should be pretty easy to remove and reattach for gigs. And while the finished snake will be fairly thick near the module because all 4 cables will be fastened together at that point, it will be thinner as you get to the more distant pads - because the first cable stops after the 1st crash, the next one stops after tom2, the third one stops at the ride cymbal and so on. It’s going to take me a while to get the whole thing done - but I’ll post photos when it’s finished.