Reference
Marking a length, and agreeing what the mark means
There is no standard for this. Not a weak one or a contested one — no standards body has ever published a scheme for marking the length of a production cable, and every convention in use is a house rule that happens to have spread.
Two are worth knowing. One applies the resistor colour code, so the mark encodes the number and anybody technical can read it without being told the scheme. The other assigns one colour to one length, which is faster to read across a dark stage and has to be memorised, because there is no logic in it to work out.
The tables below are generated by encoding each length through the colour code, and the encoder is checked by round trip at build time — every length is encoded to bands and decoded back, and the build fails unless it returns what it started with. That reversibility is the entire argument for the first scheme, so it seemed worth demonstrating rather than claiming.
The colour code
IEC 60062, the same code on every resistor ever made. Read the bands from the connector outwards, most significant digit first — the same direction as a resistor with its tolerance band at the far end.
Lengths as bands
Metres
- 1 mBrown
- 2 mRed
- 3 mOrange
- 5 mGreen
- 10 mBrown · Black
- 15 mBrown · Green
- 20 mRed · Black
- 25 mRed · Green
- 30 mOrange · Black
- 50 mGreen · Black
- 75 mViolet · Green
- 100 mBrown · Black · Black
Feet
- 5 ftGreen
- 10 ftBrown · Black
- 15 ftBrown · Green
- 25 ftRed · Green
- 50 ftGreen · Black
- 75 ftViolet · Green
- 100 ftBrown · Black · Black
- 150 ftBrown · Green · Black
- 200 ftRed · Black · Black
The unit is not encoded, and that is the scheme's one real weakness.Green–black is 50 of something. A shop that works in metres and a shop that works in feet will both mark a cable green–black and mean lengths that differ by a factor of three. If your looms travel, mark the unit too, or commit to one and never mix.
Both directions
Type a length to get its bands, or read bands off a cable to get the length back. Being able to go both ways without a lookup table is the entire case for this scheme over the one below.
Length to bands
—
Bands to length
—
pick the bands in the order they appear, from the connector outwards
These need JavaScript. The tables above cover the usual lengths in both units.
Neither direction encodes the unit, which is the scheme's one real weakness and the reason the tables above are given twice. Green–black is 50 of something.
The one-colour-per-length convention
| Band | Colour | Length | Class |
|---|---|---|---|
| White | 1.5 ft | Patch | |
| Grey | 3 ft | Patch | |
| Black | 6 ft | Patch | |
| Red | 15 ft | Stage | |
| Orange | 25 ft | Stage | |
| Yellow | 40 ft | Stage | |
| Green | 50 ft | Stage | |
| Blue | 75 ft | Run | |
| Violet | 100 ft | Run |
Widespread in North American touring. The lengths are the ones that get made, not a sequence — which is why it cannot be worked out and has to be learned.
It is genuinely better at the thing it is for. One band, read at a glance, in bad light, at distance, by someone who is coiling at speed. Two bands take a moment and an assumption about which end to start from.
And it fails the moment the rack contains something it did not anticipate. There is no colour for 35 feet and no way to derive one, so the scheme grows exceptions, and exceptions are the thing a colour code exists to avoid. It also collides with the resistor code in a way that is worse than either — green means 50 ft here and the digit 5 there, so a shop running both has cables where green means two different things.
Pick one, write it on the wall of the store, and put it in the hire paperwork. The scheme matters far less than everybody using the same one.
Making a mark that survives
- Mark both ends. A cable is coiled from one end and grabbed from whichever end is nearest. A mark on one end is found half the time.
- Coloured heat shrink outlasts tape by years. Tape unwinds, leaves adhesive, and collects the dirt that makes the colour unreadable. Shrink placed just behind the boot is out of the way of the connector and is still there after a season.
- Neutrik's coloured rings and boots are the tidiest answer for XLR, etherCON and speakON, and they come off with the connector when it is replaced — which is either a feature or the reason your marks disappear, depending on how the shop works.
- Put it on the male end if it will be visible. On stage the male end is usually the one in a fixture or a box, so a mark there is hidden from the audience and still visible to the person patching.
- Do not encode purpose in the same marks as length. A colour that means both "50 ft" and "front fills" is a colour that means neither. If purpose needs marking, use a different medium — printed labels, a different position on the cable, or a numbered flag.
- Colours read badly in blue light and worse in the dark. Red and violet in particular disappear under stage wash. Anything that has to be read during a show wants a printed label or a tactile difference, not a hue.
Sources
- The colour code itself — IEC 60062, the resistor and capacitor marking standard. It is the only part of this page that a standards body has anything to say about, and it says nothing about cables.
- The one-colour-per-length lengths — a convention reported by touring practitioners rather than published anywhere. No authoritative source exists; the table is the arrangement most consistently described, and local practice varies. Treat it as a starting point for writing down your own, not as something to conform to.
- Everything about marking practice is craft rather than specification, and is presented as such.
Assembled 7 September 2026 with AI assistance. The band tables are generated by encoding each length through the colour code and are verified by round trip at build time, so they are internally correct — but the convention itself is not standardised and no scheme on this page has any authority behind it. The useful output is not which scheme you pick; it is writing down the one you picked somewhere the next person will find it.
Companion page: multipin looms — where an unlabelled cable stops being an inconvenience and becomes a hazard.