Goldfish – TOUR TIPS

This new set of Tour Tips was written by electronic duo, Goldfish. You can check out their tips for being on the road, after the break.

There are a bunch of handy tips out there and we could go on for ages, but here are 5 of our top tips for the traveling Electronic Musician.

1) Definitely the most important one: Back up your Data! Back it up, like right NOW! Can’t stress this one enough – we are all in supreme denial about our laptops and iDevices having this magical invincible cloak around them…and nothing will ever happen to them. Shit can and at some point probably will, happen. Everyone has heard the horror stories of Skrillex losing an entire album or numerous DJ’s memory sticks not working on stage..Have your stuff backed up before you go on tour, and back up your important files to dropbox/the cloud too so you can access them should your laptop meltdown or be relieved from your possession. That way you are covered in two separate places.

2) Double or even triple wake up alarms. Lets face it: you’re traveling, you aren’t getting much sleep and you have an early morning redeye flight. Maybe you’re hungover to add that awesome combo. “I’ll just have a quick two hour sleep before I have to get up again to catch the flight…..bzzzt.” We did that in Dubai once and slept through the alarm…expensive mistake. Set multiple alarms and if you are a heavy sleeper, get a wakeup call from reception. And when you get out of bed, idiot check the room. Have you got your Macbook charger? Is that your favourite leather jacket on the back of the chair? Been there done that…

3) Audio Books. These things are our saviour on long trips. Sometimes you just don’t want to listen to music or work on a track while you are traveling and there is nothing better than having someone read a great book to you. Some great ones we love are Keith Richards’ audiobook ‘Life’ narrated by Johnny Depp or Anthony Bourdains’ ‘Medium Raw.’

4) Duplicate Toiletries: When you travel a lot it is a great plan to have double of everything you use at home in a toiletry bag that never leaves your travel bag. Your favourite vitamins, shampoo, etc etc doubled up means one less thing to pack when you leave home. It’s all there ready and waiting for you in your travel bag and the continuity also helps when everything is so crazy on tour. Life is too short to have to repack this stuff every time.

5) If you are musicians like us, having big-ass flight cases is just asking for trouble. When you fly commercial, especially in the US, you don’t want to have weird, heavy, bulky flight cases. The TSA is all over that like white on rice, nevermind the excess baggage charges. Make it look normal if you can.

Buy samsonite/other good quality cases, have a foam company custom route out a block of foam to the shape of your equipment so it is protected and your stuff starts magically arriving with a much higher success rate. Also when it comes to conventional flight cases, there is nothing more irritating than paying the exorbitant excess baggage charges for your gear in London, only to have your equipment not arrive in Ibiza and you are in the Czech Republic tomorrow. And then Munich the following day. Your gear invariably plays a fun game of hopscotch following you around your tour stops, only one day behind. So make your gear easy to tour, it will make your life so much simpler…or alternatively just DJ on memory sticks:)

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