Tour Route Planning Tips

Series Summary

For musicians, traveling is simply part of the job. Most musicians are required to travel to support themselves, play to new audiences, and build up a fan-base. Problems arise when musicians consider the logistics of traveling with expensive equipment to a wide-variety of not so accommodating destinations. Whether it’s by boat, train, plane or car musicians must transport instruments to the next venue safely for the next show. The protection of assets, livelihoods, and gear are top-of-mind for touring musicians everywhere. If you are a professional traveling musician or you just like taking a guitar along while traveling, this fantastic series offers great tips on traveling with instruments. It covers tips on traveling by train, plane and car and offers advice for several different instruments including drums, guitar and keyboards.

Video Transcript

"Now to some of you some of these ideas for traveling are going to sound really boring and really absolutely obvious, but I'm telling you so many times you get caught up in booking things and booking shows and going where you need to go in order to make money that you forget something really important which is plan your route out in advance. If you don't know where you're going to go you're going to end up with a show in New York on one day, a show in LA the next day and only a van to get you in between the two. You have to be realistic about how much you can actually stand in order to be able to still show up and play your show really well. So my advice is, and don't plan things that are more than six hours driving time away from each other unless you are flying there the next day because you're going to be worn out if you're trying to drive more than six hours for a show, and if you do it more than six hours make sure that only happens like one day, and then the next day make sure you plan for time off someplace that's really short between the next two. Just know your limits you know."