8 Things You're Forgetting To Do On Show Day
Ari Herstand 
I meet (and play with) too many musicians who don't want to get to the venue early enough. Some like to arrive shortly before they need to play, others slightly before doors and others feel they're being responsible by allowing the bare minimum amount of time they believe they'll need to load in, setup and sound check before start time or doors.
Until you have a tour manager, you will need to designate pre and post show duties within the band. These jobs cannot be overlooked.
I always schedule my load in time as early as the venue is comfortable with. Typically 2 hours before doors if there are just solo acts on the bill or 3 hours before doors if there are bands on the bill. And always 3 hours before start time for my solo show at colleges. Colleges are a different beast altogether.
Most musicians don't understand everything that needs to get done before the doors open. The obvious necessities of loading your gear in and setting it up is understood. Many bands don't fret over sound checks with an "it'll be fine" attitude.
Leave Enough Time For Sound Check Fret over soundcheck! It's incredibly important. Sure there will be shows with venues that are so put together that everything runs smoothly and sound check takes 10 minutes or the engineer mixes you on the fly with no major issues, but you can't plan for that. Always plan for something to go wrong: A faulty DI box, a shoddy mic cable, your tuner mysteriously stops operating, and the list is endless. Even if the equipment all works flawlessly, every room is different and responds differently to your sound. The room wasn't built for your band so you have to allow time to let the engineer feel out your sound in the room. You don't want the first three songs of your set to sound like butt, cluttered with feedback, because the engineer is attempting to mix you on the fly (giving the audience an unsettling opening feeling about you).
You want time to feel it out on stage and get comfortable with the space. I've played too many shows where a sound check wasn't possible or was cut too short and I hated performing because it felt awful on stage and I couldn't settle in to my performance and therefore put on a bad show. This can be overcome by setting aside enough time for the sound check.
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Imagine this…you’re in the local hospital’s pre-op ward waiting for the removal of your pesky rupturing appendix. You wait and wait in side splitting agony while your doctor chats it up with the nurses, gathering phone numbers from the hot ones. After what seems forever, he gets you prepped and begins the surgery. What should have been a 20-minute procedure turns into two hours. He cracks jokes and talks about his cherry red Ferrari, while you’re lying unconscious with your abdomen split open. Finally, you’re sewn up and ready for recovery but super surgeon and his crack anesthesiologist are having a heated discussion about the science of their golf games and have seeming forgotten you’re passed out underneath them with tubes stuck in every orifice. If this were your surgery experience, you’d freak out, sue the hospital and your hot-shot doc would wind up cleaning bedpans at the state convalescent hospital.
Guests will appreciate a nice cold drink, and it's even better spiked with a little jolt. Here's a fantastic summer drink from our friends at Feastivities Events (
When you promote yourself via e-mail or with the words you use on your web site, you have a choice. You can be straight-forward and matter-of-fact (also known as bland and boring). Or you can communicate with pizzazz.
When promoting a concert or special event, the effectiveness of one's street team can be the difference in losing money, breaking even, or making a profit. Wikipedia defines a street team as "a term used in marketing to describe a group of people who 'hit the streets' promoting an event or a product." Their duties include: distributing promotional items and flyers, putting up posters and stickers, and a lot of word-of-mouth promotion throughout community. These foot soldiers, who are mainly volunteers, can be the single most important element to a successful promotion when adequately deployed. Here are a few tips to help you develop and manage your own street team.
Collage of artwork by Kelly Dombrowski. Alcohol ink on Yupo paper.
