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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