Planning a DIY tour that doesn't fall apart

Routing

Book the anchor shows first: the two or three dates you are confident about, in cities where someone actually knows your band. Fill the gaps between them so no drive exceeds what your driver can safely do after a show. A tour that looks efficient on a map and requires a twelve-hour overnight drive is not efficient, it is dangerous.

Keep driving days under eleven hours as a hard rule, and plan an overnight stop the moment a leg threatens to cross it. Decide who drives each leg before the tour starts, not in the van at 2am.

Advancing

Two weeks out, confirm every show in writing: load-in time, soundcheck, set time, set length, backline, parking, payment terms, and the name and number of the person who will actually be in the building. The night falls apart when nobody knows who has the key or who holds the money.

Collect every contact in one place per stop: the venue, the promoter, the sound engineer, and the friend whose floor you are sleeping on. Print it or make it work offline; phone signal is not a given behind a venue's load-in door.

Money

Track three numbers per show: the fee, the expenses you attribute to that stop, and merch sales. Nightly, while it is fresh. Small tours rarely lose money in one catastrophe; they bleed it in unrecorded fuel stops and forgotten floats.

Merch is usually the difference between breaking even and going home hungry, so treat it seriously: know your stock before the tour, count it nightly, and restock the fast movers mid-run if you can.

Sheets

A day sheet per stop, one page: times, address, travel, who drives, contacts, money, and the setlist. Everyone in the van should be able to answer any question about today by looking at one piece of paper. If your tour lives in seventeen chat threads, the answer to every question is an argument.

GearHub's Band+ tools generate day sheets and a per-tour accounts summary as PDFs from the tour you plan in the app, and let you advertise support slots to local bands in each city. Built by people who have slept in the van.

Support

Local support acts sell your tickets. A hometown opener brings thirty people who would never have come for an out-of-town headliner, and those thirty people are your next tour's anchor city. Choose openers early, treat them well, pay them what was agreed, and say their name from the stage.