What a band needs from the venue

You booked the band. A week later the venue sends a form with four questions on it, and three of them are about things you’ve never had a reason to think about. They want to know how much stage the band needs, how much power it needs and what time the truck arrives. There’s usually a fourth box asking for a certificate of insurance, and that one has a deadline.

None of these are hard questions. Somebody just has to ask the band, and what usually goes wrong is that nobody does until the week of the event, when the answer can upend a floor plan you signed off on months ago.

Search this and you’ll land on stage-rental companies, who publish recommendations by band size. Stage Rental puts a seven to ten-piece band on 20 ft by 24 ft at the small end and 24 ft by 24 ft in the middle, all at 4 ft of height.

Now look at what our own bands ask for. For each band size, we list the stage the band is comfortable on and the smallest stage it can play on. Learn more about stage sizes on our technical page.

Take the quartet, for instance. The rental company’s middle recommendation for a band that size works out to 320 square feet. The quartet asks for 140 and will play on 96.

Both numbers are right, and they answer different questions. The rental company is planning for guests who need to see over seated tables, and for events where the stage is a rented structure in a venue that doesn’t have one. The band is telling you the smallest stage where the musicians can play without bumping into each other. In a hotel ballroom, the difference between those two numbers can be a couple of tables you’d like to keep.

So plan around the band’s number. Ask for the rider before you promise the venue a footprint.

The John Parker Band’s published requirement is two standard 20-amp, 120-volt circuits within 25 feet of the stage, with 15 amps as the minimum. That kind of requirement is typical, and two parts of it tend to trip people up.

Circuits. Two outlets on the same wall are very often on the same circuit, so a venue can check the requirement off on paper while the band still has just one circuit. If one circuit can’t handle the load, it may fail at the worst possible moment, right as the first song starts and everything comes on at once.

Within 25 feet. It’s best to treat that distance as a firm limit. A band running power from across a ballroom has to run cable across a path that guests and servers will be walking for hours.

The person who can answer both of these is the venue’s engineer or head of operations. Your sales contact will likely forward the question to them anyway, so ask for them directly, and ask early enough that the answer can still change your plans.

We coordinate load-in with the venue in advance, and the questions are usually the same: when we can use the dock and the elevator, how far the door is from the stage, where the cases can go during dinner, and what time the space has to be clear at the end.

That last one is worth pinning down before you sign anything. The band can only start packing up (we call that strike) after the last song, so a hard curfew at the venue decides what time the music has to end.

Properties in the mountain corridor run on their own rules, and those rules differ by property rather than by town. The venue sets its own decibel limits and curfews and writes them into your contract, and we’ll honor them as written. Get them in writing from the property and send them to the band.

Travel can add to the cost, too. For events along the I-70 corridor, meaning Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Winter Park, you can expect to pay for the band’s drive. For events in Aspen, Telluride, Steamboat and Crested Butte, plan on that drive plus a night’s lodging, and it’s a good idea to confirm that cost before you commit to a date.

This is the part that can hold up a booking, often late in the planning. Most venues won’t let a vendor load in without a certificate of insurance, and accounts payable usually won’t pay an invoice without a W-9 on file.

Three documents usually take care of it:

• A certificate of insurance naming your venue as additional insured. The venue will look for its own name on that document.
• A W-9, before accounts payable asks for it.
• One itemized invoice, with everything on separate lines, in a form finance will accept the first time.

We’re happy to send ours along with the contract. It helps to send them before anyone asks, because each one needs sign-off from somebody else, and that person may have a long list of other things to get through.

You’re the one holding the contract, so the venue’s form comes to your inbox with a deadline on it.

This goes best when you can forward the question and get a quick answer from somebody who’s loaded into that building before. One person will be your personal point of contact for the event. That’s what they’re for, and the job starts weeks before anybody plays a note.