5 Things to Make Your Touring Life Easier

Touring can be a lot of fun, but it is also undoubtedly a lot of hard work. If you're smart about it, however, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by making sure to have a few extra things with you to make your life easier. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but here are a number of things I've found useful when we do one of our DIY tours of the US.

1.) Gridwall - It's safe to assume that if you are in a touring band, part of the point of your tour is to sell merchandise. Given the tight schedule bands are sometimes under, however, setting up the merchandise display night after night can be a real pain. Obviously, it takes time to do this, but also different venues have different policies as to whether you are allowed to tape, staple, or hang your t-shirts on their walls. Even if you can, sometimes it doesn't always want to stay hanging on the wall. Gridwall provides a great solution to this and makes setting up easy regardless of the environment. Gridwall, as the name suggests, is simply a panel of metal framework usually used for displaying garments in stores. With a couple of these, all you have to do is lean it against the wall, put your shirts on hangers, hang those off the gridwall, and you're done. You can find these fairly easily with a little internet searching. They're not always cheap, but they are usually built like tanks and will last many tours.

2.) Hand Truck - Of course, displaying the merch is only half the battle. Night after night, you have to load in and load out box after box of shirts and CDs, sometimes up or down stairs and other obstacles. Having your own hand truck can greatly decrease your load in and load out time and is really useful for loading in your equipment as well. Look for a model with large tires, which makes transporting it up and down stairs much easier. Some models are 'convertible' too and allow you to transform the hand truck into a rolling cart, which allows you to load even more at one time. These should be available at most hardware or building supply stores. Be sure to mark your hand truck with your band's logo, too, so there are no mix ups at the venue as to who it belongs to.

3.) Vehicle Diagnostic Code Reader - If you're touring extensively, sooner or later, you are going to have problems with your tour van. Most of the time, this happens far away from home and your trusted mechanic, thus putting you at the mercy of whatever is available locally. Mechanics can smell desperation, and to them it smells an awful lot like money. The good news is, you can go into the situation better informed, and thus, less likely to get ripped off. All recent vehicles have diagnostic computers on board. What you may not know is that you can buy a code reader that interfaces with this computer and tells you precisely what is wrong with your vehicle. On most vehicles, there is a small port under the steering wheel. You hook the code reader up to this, turn on your vehicle, and the code reader displays one or multiple diagnostic codes. You can reference these in a book or online and walk into the auto repair facility able to tell the mechanic right off the bat what is wrong. If they know you've read the codes yourself, you are less likely to fall victim to expensive, unnecessary repairs at the hands of unscrupulous mechanics. These are available in most auto supply stores, or even from places like Amazon.

4.) GPS - Touring involves a lot of driving around in places you might not be very familiar with. In the past, this meant dealing with road atlases, or, more recently, directions from services like MapQuest. While these are great, they can also fall prey to human error. It can be easy to miss turns, and there is no guarantee that the maps you have are even current. GPS Navigators can be a godsend for tours. Not only will they give you turn by turn directions, they can instantly reroute you if you miss a turn, or if the preferred route is closed due to construction. Better still, many can find the nearest gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and other points of interest all based on your current position. These units aren't perfect (for example, tall buildings can sometimes interfere with the signal...), but you will be amazed at how helpful having one of these in your vehicle is. Dedicated units can still be somewhat pricey, but check with your cell phone service provider, as many of them now offer this service directly on your cell phone for a very reasonable price.

5.) Ear plugs - The most obvious use for these is to protect your hearing in loud venues, but where they can be even more valuable is in letting you get some rest. Sleep deprivation is pretty much an accepted part of touring, and oftentimes, you have to grab sleep whenever and wherever you can. Unfortunately, your surroundings might not always cooperate. Hotels can be filled with loud guests, the driver of your tour van might need to listen to some music to help stay alert on long drives, and the less said about the conditions in the backstage, the better. A good set of ear plugs can help block out the environment and allow you to grab some much needed on-the-run shut eye. By the same token, a sleeping mask can be helpful in blocking out light, but if you get one of these, expect rampant abuse from your fellow bandmates.

Obviously, there are many other things that can be really useful on tour, but the ones listed above are a good start and can really go a long way towards making your touring experience easier and more pleasant.