Back in the early 1980s, when I was still in college chasing my electrical engineering degree, I volunteered to be a stage hand for a 24-hour charity dancea- thon at the college field house. Being a reasonably good musician and a novice sound person, I did not vie for the coveted Front of House mix position, as every wannabe techhead was already competing to "hang-out" at Front of House and hoping that the hourly change in bands was not accompanied by band engineers. But I had a blast practicing change-overs onstage, calling out new patches on a new-fangled wireless intercom and keeping the less-than-reliable racks and stacks working around the clock. But my biggest take-home lesson on that production was watching and minimally asking my 20 questions to the local volunteer soundco owner, who setup the rig and used us college kids as grunt labor. As part of setting up, I noticed a large metal green-painted tackle box near the Front of House location. When the owner opened up the tackle box, I gazed upon the myriad XLR adapters and other connector adaptors with wonderment. From that day on, I vowed to assemble my own version of the green tackle box, to be prepared for any handy use. Now that my own tackle box is filled, I want to infect you with the idea carrying your own tacklebox with similar just-in-case (JIC) adapters and miscellany.
The Box
Like my green tackle box supermodel, I selected a large tackle box from Target Stores that had three cascading trays that could fit larger fishing lures; or in my case, XLR barrel adapters, sharpies and other goodies. Today, the fold-out tray tackle boxes are mostly out of style, but you can still find many used boxes at yard sales. I also looked for a tackle box with a large lower cavity to stow odd items like tape and hand tools, as they do not fit into lure shaped boxes. Figure 1 shows an "as is" picture of my tackle box. To convert my tackle box to a JIC box, I just wrote my name topside, and adorned the box uniquely with bumper stickers of products I use and radio stations I listen to.
My box is plastic and shows signs of age, cracking from things bouncing off it during transport. But I still can get a few more years out of it, in a gaff tape purgatory. But it has seen a lot of inventory changeover in the last three decades of service.
Toys In The Box
When I first started filling the JIC box, my head was in the 1980s, and I was not totally compelled to wire everything with balanced patch cords. So I made a few missions to Radio Shack to stock up on both XLR to Phone transformer adapters, and other between-connector adaptors.
Having seen many barrel adapters (XLR-male/female) in the green tackle box for attenuators, polarity flips and on/off switches, I bought a bunch of Shure blank barrels and made my own essential XLR-through adapters. Armed with my Audio Cyclopedia balanced attenuator tables, I made my own 6dB and 20dB pad attenuators that have served me very nicely through the years. And simpler items like polarity flips and 2/3 pin short switch adapters also were found to be handy. Every adapter and widget got labeled and brushed with clear fingernail polish to not get misplaced or pilfered easily.
Unique Items
Besides adapters, sharpies, many kinds of tapes and hand tools like screwdrivers and pliers, I added other unique items that gave me inspiration to the JIC. One item very handy is a cheapy half-inch paint brush, for herding dust off of console work surfaces. Even with the best coverings and diligence, consoles do collect dust, and a brush is much more neat than your greasy fingers. Keen observers will note my collection of 3-prong to 2 prong grounding adapters. These are mostly for historical purposes, and only used to appease the hum gods if desired.
Lately the well of my box is filled with mic clips, homebrew Speakon-to-banana plug/jack adapters, spare Littlite bulbs, a Gerber multi-tool, a pocket digital multimeter and my last gadget: a battery-powered soldering iron. At six watts, I do not do large wire soldering, but it is more than handy on line-level cabling. Another handy item picked up at winter NAMM 2005 is a high-output clamp-on white LED "BIL-LITE" made by QED Inc. For the $10 I laid out for this, It has paid itself off many times over on briefcase gigs where no console lamp is available.
One item I have used sparingly, but is really handy, is a key receptacle lock-out. It's a red 2-prong receptacle that you can place over important plugs (like console power supplies) to prevent someone from firing up your rig, should you not be present between gigs. There is nothing so worrisome as walking into a venue and some stranger (or musician) powered up everything, making you wonder how many pops and thumps your speakers endured while that person fumbled through the initialization sequence. While I have mostly safe confines and security personnel at the gigs I do, the lockouts offer additional piece of mind to keep the ambitious away.
Your Turn
If you have unique items in your JIC box, please write us at FOH Magazine and share the wisdom of your unique JIC box items. While I can not carry big things in my box, little necessities like my Caig Labs Deoxit pen, my Fluke Volt-Alert pen, and NL4 Speakon cable extenders (NL4MM) make handy case stuffers.
