Shortening gig setup times on the cheap

By Dan Willis

“Squeak,” “pshhh,” “ewa-ewa,” ah, the sound of brand new tupperware in the morning. One of the most un-commonly thought of products when thinking about music, but none-the-less it is one of the most important objects for gigging on the cheap.

When my band first began playing around Pennsylvania with all of our own sound equipment, it… was… chaos. Although the show only lasted from 11pm-2am, we wouldn’t get home until 5am sometimes. And by then, we were way too exhausted to unload our cars until the next afternoon. I was fed up! So I took matters into my own hands.

Now I knew I couldn’t cut down on the quantity of equipment, so I decided to start shaving off the minutes it took to setup and tear down the system. My first stop was my local Wal-mart. I’d seen one of my friends, who ran live sound and DJ’d around town, had all of his equipment organized into these large plastic bins. So I bought the biggest plastic bin with wheels (wheels are extremely important) I could find and brought it home. I quickly realized throwing everything into one bin wasn’t exactly organization and didn’t help the timing problem. So I went back to the store and found ten or so smaller plastic bins in assorted sizes that fit together to fill the entire rolling bin. So I organized everything into the bins and the next show we had, we cut the setup and tear-down time in half!

But I wasn’t finished yet, I knew I could cut it down more. So after some very short pondering time, I picked up a set of velcro cable ties from the music store, masking tape and a sharpie from an office store and went on organizing within the boxes. By the time it was all said and done, we had cut our setup/tear-down time from 2 hours to 45 min!!!!

Take it to the next level if you want and blow the bank on those overpriced gig rack cases. They are about the last things I would buy, except maybe if you go on an international tour.