Eli5: How are large bands able to move from one city to another so quickly?

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It just occurred to me when I saw a band on tour go from Connecticut on the 20th to South Carolina today the 29th while playing at various venues between the two states.

Like logistically it’s insane to me plus how are the singers voices not burnt?

12 hours later: Thanks everyone! Absolutely fascinating for sure, especially the Wendover YouTube links. Didn’t know that channel existed.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m a venue Technical & Production Manager in Aus, I mamage the Staging of all evnts accross the three theatres in a complex that can all have different shows on concurrently.

The ELI-5 answer is something like this…. you like playing with your blocks, but you also want to be able to take your blocks to Dave’s house and play too. You’ve built a nice big block castle and you need to get it to Dave’s, set it up, play with it and bring your block castle home again all within 24 hours. So you design your block castle to be easy to build and take apart, it’s modular. You glue (weld) some blocks together but others are just a couple of bolts. You’ve designed it to go together and come apart easily into segments. To really speed things up, you design these segments to fit into trucks efficiently, that is to say they fit in a plastic tub on your mums car.

Now that you have a plan of how you block castle goes together, you draw this up and show it to your mum (Touring Production Manager) who really likes seeing accurate drawings of how your block castle goes together. She will suprlervising the packing and driving of the car to Dave’s house. Your mum alsp communicates the plan to Dave’s mum ( venue Production Manager) after all it’s her house you’re setting up your block castle in and she has to say it’s OK and will fit in the loungeroom!

So now that the plan is set and in bith mums diary, you pack your blocks into their boxes and put them in the car. The car travels to Dave’s house, you know how long this will take and you specifically booked your play-date on the weekend when you knew you had enough time to get to Dave’s house. So you get to Dave’s and what do you know, Dave’s mum has also roped in Dave’s big brother (stage crew) to help you unpack your boxes from the car and set up your block castle.

You both play together for a few hours until it’s time to go to bed, then Dave’s brother helps pack up the blocks and repack the car and then your block castle gets driven home again, or to Rodger’s house, so that you can play there tomorrow. Mum’s nice like that, she’s planned a Friday and Saturday play date!

Meanwhile, Dave’s mum is now getting ready for Natalie to come and play Barbie sing along block castle with Dave next weekend, and so the cycle continues.

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