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Question:

When touring outside of Australia how do you manage transporting your music equipment? What do you bring with you on the plane vs renting or borrowing at the venue? Do you ask the promoter to guarantee certain equipment? Do you find yourselves improvising at all?...

Answer:

Hello dan. Thank you for your question. This is a very good one. A lot of planning and organization goes into this. So I would say that it is about half organized, but then also half improvised. So to start off, we need to really think about where we're touring and what we have there. So like a lot of our really large gear, so like our rack units and I E M s and things like that. We'll try to keep or source from whatever country or continent were touring and so say that like we have the big heavy rack unit of ours in the U. K. Sometimes we can't get that back to Australia. So then we need to hire a few things in Australia. The majority of our live show though, we do bring on the plains with us. So, and then the parts where we have to improvise with that is bringing it on the plane can be very expensive if we don't, you know, sort of ration out the weight evenly between all of us because there's four guys in the band, we'll have mitch our Guitar Tech and then potentially sound guy or someone else to run with us who can lend an extra hand in taking the gear, but it can get very expensive if we get caught overweight with all this kind of thing. And so I guess, yeah, this on this end of things is where the improvise comes from because not everything goes according to plan all the time. Like I think in the first couple of weeks of the last tour, I lost my keyboard stand and we had quite a few acoustic shows that we had to play for radio stations. So for each radio station we're having to call ahead of time to see if they can source us a keyboard stand to use for that. And other times like we were thousands of dollars over the weight which is what the airline quoted us. So it was and this was like the day the morning of flying. So we had to improvise leave half of our gear in the U. K. Rent things from Australia. It was it was absolutely crazy. Um But all of that wouldn't be possible without our Guitar Tech mitch. You know he puts all of the work in ahead of time and then helps us solve the problems when they arise. And yeah and then a few things we have things in multiple continents like my keyboard, I have one keyboard in the U. K. And the other to bring around with me because sometimes when you're the airport it's cheaper to actually buy stuff in the country you're going than to have it as excess baggage. So yeah thanks. I hope that answers your question