What a band needs from the room

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 have never had a reason to think about. How much stage. How much power. What time the truck arrives. There is usually a fourth box asking for a certificate of insurance, and that one has a deadline.

None of these are hard questions. They are just questions somebody has to actually ask the band, and the failure mode is that nobody does until the week of, at which point the answer has consequences for a floor plan that was signed off in June.

Search this and you will 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.

Then look at what a working band actually asks for. The John Parker Band publishes its own setup requirements: an eight-piece prefers 12 ft by 24 ft, with a minimum of roughly 10 ft by 16 ft. Ten to twelve-plus pieces prefer 16 ft by 24 ft, with a minimum around 12 ft by 20 ft.

The gap is the useful part. Take an eight-piece, which sits inside both sets of figures. The rental company’s middle recommendation works out to 576 square feet. The working band asks for 288 and will play on 160.

Both figures are honest, and they answer different questions. The rental company is sizing for sight lines, for audiences who need to see over seated tables, and for the version of the event where the stage is a rented structure in a room that has none. The band is describing the smallest footprint where nobody hits anybody. In a hotel ballroom with a built-in riser and eleven round tables you would like to keep, the difference between those two numbers is a few of those tables.

So the number that binds is the band’s, and it should come from the band rather than from an article. 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 floor. That shape of requirement is typical, and there are two words in it doing most of the work.

Circuits. Two outlets on the same wall are very often the same circuit, which means the requirement gets ticked off on paper while the band still has one circuit. When that fails it fails at the worst possible moment, because everything switches on at once, and that moment is the downbeat of the first song.

Within 25 feet. Distance is a hard constraint. A band running power from across a ballroom is running cable across a path that guests and servers will walk for four hours.

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

Load-in gets coordinated with the venue in advance, and the questions are always the same ones: dock times, elevator windows, how far the door is from the stage, where the cases sit during dinner, and what time the room has to be clear at the end.

That last one is worth pinning down before you sign anything. Strike takes as long as it takes, and it starts after the last song, so a hard curfew on the room sets the time the music has to end.

Properties in the corridor run on their own rules, and those rules differ by property rather than by town. Decibel limits and curfews are set by the venue, written into your contract with them, and honoured as written. Get them in writing from the property and send them to the band. Anybody who quotes you a number for a mountain venue without having read that venue’s own terms is guessing.

Travel is its own line. Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Winter Park add $600. Aspen, Telluride, Steamboat and Crested Butte add $600 plus lodging at cost. Lodging is billed as what it actually cost, which in that corridor is a number worth confirming before you commit to a date in February.

This is the part that stops bookings, and it stops them late. A venue will not let a vendor load in without a certificate of insurance, and accounts payable will not pay an invoice that arrives without a W-9 on file.

Three documents settle it:

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

Ours arrive in the same email as the contract, and net-30 is available on approval. The reason to send them unprompted is that every one of them is a gate somebody else controls, and each gate has a queue.

The venue asks you. You are the contract holder, so the form comes to your inbox with a date on it.

The version of this that works is the one where you forward the question and get an answer the same day from somebody who has loaded into that room before. Every booking here comes with a named contact for the night, given to you before the event. The reason they exist is this, weeks before anybody plays a note.