What’s a good color convention for cables?
The Reddit modular community mostly uses colors to indicate cable length:
What’s your cable color scheme?
Do you color code cables?
That’s not very useful for VCV Rack, of course, so color can show the cable function. Omri Cohen does that in a video where he uses the four default colors to match four signal kinds:
- pulses (clocks, trigger, gates)
- control voltages (modulation, LFOs, envelopes)
- V/oct (special CV for note frequencies)
- audio
This is useful already but we can have more colors, either by directly editing the settings-v1.json file or by using the awesome Submarine Wire Manager module.
Here is the scheme I came up with:
- Purple, #e000e0: clock. Periodic short pulses.
- Blue, #2070ff: trigger. Short pulses.
- Teal, #409090: reset. Short pulses.
- Cyan, #00d0ff: gate. Long pulses.
- Green, #00d000: V/oct, note CV.
- Brown, #905000: LFO and envelope CV.
- Orange, #ff9030: timbre CV.
- Yellow, #e0e000: amplitude CV.
- Black, #000000: audio-rate modulation (sync, ring, FM, etc.).
- Pink, #ff90ff: mono audio.
- White, #ffffff: left channel audio.
- Red, #ff3030: right channel audio.
- Grey, #808080: miscellaneous.
(Can’t set the background color, natch.)
It groups colors into three groups: cold colors for pulses, warm ones for CV, hot ones for audio.
What is your preference? Do you use cable colors in a similar fashion?
More prior art
A previous discussion on this topic:
Choosing cable colors in VCV 1.0
The Nysthi plugins color conventions
The XOR plugins color conventions
The Submarine Wire Manager module
In addition to allowing one to easily choose one’s favorite colors, this module has two very useful features:
-
enabling a subset of colors, so one does not have to cycle through all of them all the time;
-
highlight the cables connected to a module when the mouse cursor hovers over that module.
Thank you so much, David O’Rourke. 