Load-In

Getting a Touring System into the Venue

Many of the concerns involved in getting equipment in and out of a venue are to do with manual handling: when packed for transportation, a touring PA or lighting system generally consists of a lot of large heavy boxes.

If you have hired or are working with a professional touring system, most of the boxes will be on 100mm castors (if you are building your own PA system for touring this should be part of your design), and many modern venues have a parking area for loading vehicles, and ramps and/or lifts, so that any equipment can be wheeled from van to stage.

While having loading bays and ramps (and everything flightcased and on wheels) generally makes matters fairly straightforward, there are a few other things you may need to think about:

  1. Look at the load-in route before you move anything. Know about any obstacles or difficult corners before you are rolling a heavy flightcase down a ramp towards them.
  2. Work carefully. Don't take lumps out of walls and door-frames, even if you can see that everyone who has ever been there before you did it. You are liable for any damage you cause.
  3. Wear Gloves, even if you have never crushed your fingers between a cable-trunk and a door-frame before.

Where parking and/or wheeled access are not available there will be additional concerns, and one of the best ways to approach these is to carry out a Risk Assessment, combined, where appropriate, with a Method Statement (you can find more detail about these on our Safety page). Just taking a few minutes to think through the operation can bring to light concerns that might otherwise be overlooked.

If you are hiring a system from us and wheeled access isn't possible we need to know about it before we arrive.

Even with additional crew, load-in will take longer if equipment has to travel further, or be carried rather than wheeled, and you need to allow for this when arranging times for access, set-up, sound-check and performance.

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