Festival Season coming to a close - Blog 8 - Posted on 2014-08-13 by Travis Wentzell

Well, what a lot of gear. This past month I packed, unpacked, repacked, reunpacked, counted and checked over about 80% of the instruments used for Osheaga and Heavy Montreal. For the most part everything was unscathed, but we had some casualties in a DW 9000 cymbal stand, a badge fell off a DW floor tom, couple broken high-hat stands, and some really beaten up amps. Most notably an Orange cab (my baby) with some cuts in the casing. I would really like to be behind the scenes at the next festival just to try and see ways to prevent these things from happening. Whether it's people not knowing how to handle gear properly or maybe it's poor locations of storage, there is too much money involved to have this stuff come back in such poor condition compared to when it was sent out. And since this is apparently has turned into a little bit of rant, we had a 14" snare, 13" and 16" tom come back with the batter heads CUT OUT of the shells. I opened the cases and was just speechless. I myself am an artist and a drummer and I can't understand someone's thought process to do something like that. It is a rental kit, not your own drums, not your heads, not your hardware. You just can't do that. Anyway, on a lighter note, a possible club move is happening this month, so I get to assist in redesigning and moving a club to a bigger location. Man I am excited, because if I can see how this is done I can do this for my own venue in the future. It should be fun. Thanks for reading, pce