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Aleks Braylon Before The Show Begins
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Aleks Braylon
Before The Show Begins
About This Book
This book grew out of a simple professional habit: after every difficult show, I mentally go back to the beginning and ask myself where the outcome was really decided. Almost never is the answer found in the moment the audience saw. It is usually earlier - in an email someone read carefully or carelessly; in the decision not to save money on redundancy; in a conversation with the artist; in two extra hours of load-in; in the person who said no at exactly the right time.
I did not want to write a textbook on concert production. Textbooks age quickly: consoles change, protocols change, platforms change, ticketing models change, and even what we mean by an artist changes. I am more interested in the logic of the profession - why some teams move through problems almost invisibly while others turn a small issue into a crisis; why one calm person can sometimes be more useful than another truck of equipment; why production begins not with technology, but with responsibility.
There will be sound, lighting, video, touring, economics, streaming, and artificial intelligence in these pages. But they will appear where they appear in real work: inside people, decisions, mistakes, negotiations, and specific events. I separate documented stories from the global industry from composite scenes, and the sources are collected at the end of the book. When I say 'I have seen this,' I am not trying to claim someone else's story as my own. I mean the professional experience of this environment: situations that repeat themselves at venues again and again, changing names, cities, and budgets while barely changing their human mechanics.
• • •
PROLOGUE
A Few Seconds Before the Call: 'Go'
The room is already dark. Not completely - emergency and work lights leave the space half-awake - but the audience understands that something is about to happen. Conversation grows denser. Phone screens glow in the stands. Someone finishes a bottle of water, someone checks a camera, someone looks at the empty stage for the hundredth time, as if the artist might appear sooner simply because they are watching more carefully. Backstage, it feels entirely different. There is no waiting in the romantic sense. There is a countdown.
Five minutes to show is not five minutes. It is a short production cycle in which dozens of things have to be confirmed. Stage ready. Artist ready. Playback ready. RF stable. House lights standing by. Video parked on the first frame. Lighting console in its opening state. FOH has signal. Monitors have signal. Comms are working. Security knows the launch moment. Doors are already open and the audience is inside - from here on, the only clock that matters is show time. Nobody tells long stories over comms. The closer you get to the first cue, the shorter the language becomes.
'Stand by intro.'
'Standing by.'
Those two phrases can represent the work of hundreds of people, weeks of preparation, and a budget the average audience member will never see. Yet at launch, all of it compresses into one point.
'Go.'
The blackout triggers a scream before the first person even appears onstage. Sometimes the audience reacts not to the artist, but to the promise of the artist. That is part of the strange power of a live event: it begins in the mind before it begins physically.
That moment is usually treated as the start of the show. In reality, the show began much earlier. It began with an email sent months ago. With the agent's first call. With negotiations over a date. With a tentative venue hold. With a budget. With a decision about whether the project could be brought to this city at all. Then came the contract. Then the technical rider. Then hospitality. Then flights, freight, visas, insurance, local crew, hotel, ground transport, customs, rehearsals, content delivery, the stage plan, rigging plot, power plan, RF coordination, and the master schedule.
And sometimes it began even earlier - with a song one person wrote in a room without knowing that, years later, thousands of people would sing it together.
The audience sees the final two hours. The industry lives in everything that happened before them - and everything that happens after. In a few hours the stage will become a collection of components again. The LED wall will come apart into cabinets. Fixtures will go back into cases. Cables will be coiled. Stands folded. Backline loaded. The lights will go out on the tour bus. The venue will be left with tape marks and the debris of thousands of people. By morning, the room may be turning into a conference, a wedding, a sporting event, or the load-in for another concert. Concert production creates worlds that are designed from the beginning to disappear.
Perhaps that is why this work teaches you so well to distinguish what matters from what merely looks good. What looks good is what remains in the photograph. What matters is everything that made the photograph possible.
• • •
PART I. BEFORE THE DOORS OPEN
Chapter 1. The Venue and the Rider: Where an Idea First Meets Reality
The most useful thing an empty venue does is strip away our illusions. On a render, everything is usually beautiful: lines are clean, the screen hangs perfectly, fixtures point exactly where they should, and for some reason nobody is ever standing in an aisle. In real life, the first things you find are a door ten centimeters narrower than the case, a ceiling beam in precisely the wrong place, and a venue representative who calmly says, 'You can't rig from that.' That is where the real profession begins.
I stopped thinking of this as a fight against circumstances a long time ago. A venue does not owe our presentation anything. It existed before us and will exist after us. Our job is to finish the conversation between the idea and reality so that, by evening, nobody can see how many compromises were required in the morning. Sometimes it feels like architecture. Sometimes diplomacy. Sometimes a multimillion-dollar game of Tetris. An empty room is one of the most honest spaces in the entertainment business. There is no applause yet, no expectation, no status attached to the artist, no magic of light. None of the social energy that will later make an ordinary black riser feel like the center of the world. There are only architecture, physics, and constraints.
A first site walk very quickly becomes a conversation about specifics: ceiling height and point loads, power, evacuation routes, truck access, door widths, stage access, noise restrictions, and curfews. Then your eye moves to the FOH position, whether delay lines are possible, which seats may have to be killed, where the LED can go, and where the fire lanes run. And near the end, almost inevitably, you discover that the only suitable room for the technical racks is locked and the key belongs to someone nobody has seen all morning. This is where the presentation ends and production begins.
In a visualization, a stage can float in mid-air. In a real building, it has to be supported by something. In a promo film, a lighting fixture can be placed anywhere. At the venue, that exact point may contain a sprinkler, ductwork, a ladder, a VIP route, or a structure you are forbidden to rig from. Good production begins with respect for reality. That sounds obvious until you see how many projects are built in the opposite order: first someone invents the effect, then the team tries to negotiate with the laws of physics. Professional logic works the other way. It does not kill creativity; it gives creativity a form it can survive in. Almost anything can be done if you understand early enough what needs to be done, why it matters, and what it will cost.
A site visit is not a walk through the future venue. It is the moment when the idea first meets infrastructure. An experienced person reads a room differently from an audience member. The audience sees a stage. The engineer sees signal paths. The rigger sees load. The lighting designer sees angles. The video engineer sees sightlines and viewing distances. The production manager sees time. Security sees human flow. The promoter sees sellable seats. The venue manager sees what must not be damaged. And all of them are right at the same time. That is the first difficulty of concert production: there is no single reality. There are several systems laid on top of one another.
The creative system says, 'We need a bigger screen.' The building says the weight cannot be flown here. Finance reminds everyone that a ground-support structure is not in the budget. Operations needs load-in completed by four. Safety quietly closes an access route that somebody has already used in a beautiful render. The job of a strong production team is not to choose a winner. It is to build a solution in which every system remains functional. Professionalism rarely looks like heroism.
When I was starting out, I thought the strongest specialist was the one who could rescue a problem faster than anyone else once it had already happened. Over the years, my view has almost reversed. The most expensive professional luxury is arranging things so that nobody needs rescuing. Heroism looks excellent in a story and rather poor in a production schedule. Heroics begin where the plan has already failed. Real mastery often looks boring: arrive early, measure, ask, check the paperwork, get the load table, verify power, photograph access, open old drawings, call someone who has worked in the building before, and discover the problem three weeks before the event. None of that is spectacular. It is also exactly how shows are saved.
The Stage as a Temporary State
During a large event, a venue develops something close to its own form of government. There is territory. There are access zones. Department heads. Hierarchy. A language. Temporary rules for movement, safety, and decision-making. Some people can enter a certain door and others cannot. Some objects cannot be moved without permission. Hundreds of actions answer to one schedule. For one day, a temporary state appears and exists until the last case leaves the building. And the larger the event, the less important the equipment becomes compared with the structure of authority - who is allowed to make which decision. You can buy the best systems in the world and still lose because nobody knows who approves a change. You can have a merely adequate equipment package and deliver an extraordinarily difficult show if responsibility is clear.
An empty room makes this especially visible. Before anyone comes in, the truth is obvious: a show is not a collection of things. It is a set of relationships between people, space, time, and technology. At night, the audience sees the picture. In the morning, production sees the system.
A Rider Is Not a Shopping List
Technical riders are often read too literally. If the document names a console, find that console. If it specifies a microphone, order that microphone. If it asks for eight monitor mixes, provide eight. If it includes a stage plot, reproduce the plot. That approach works until the first situation that does not fit the template. A good rider is not an inventory list. It describes the conditions under which the artist's team believes the show can be reproduced predictably. The distinction matters.
I used to read riders almost like a procurement sheet: there is a line item, so that line item must be closed. Eventually I realized that the more important question is what problem that line is trying to prevent. Once you understand that, the negotiation stops being an argument over brands and becomes a conversation about outcome. Sometimes, admittedly, you learn this lesson standing next to an open road case and a very unhappy member of the touring crew - an excellent, if expensive, form of education. If you understand the purpose behind a requirement, you can discuss an equivalent professionally. If all you see is the model name, every deviation becomes an argument.
Suppose a touring engineer asks for a particular console family. The reason may have nothing to do with that model sounding objectively superior. They may have a show file, scenes, plug-ins, a familiar automation workflow, and a short soundcheck. Replacing it with a 'console of equivalent class' may look reasonable on paper while creating a production risk: the engineer now has to rebuild a workflow on show day. Or the artist may request a specific wireless system. That may be about the capsule, familiarity, coordination parameters, or compatibility with a touring rack. You cannot know until you ask the right question. A strong advance starts with a simple question: 'What is this requirement actually protecting?' Not because every line should become a negotiation. Because you need to understand the architecture of risk.
Hard Requirements and Preferences
Most riders contain requirements of very different kinds. Some are genuinely hard requirements: safety, input count, required power, physical stage dimensions, frequency compatibility, protocols, timecode, specific playback elements, or show-control components. Others are preferences. Some are historical residue: a document copied from tour to tour long after the show itself changed. Some are insurance. Some are simply a way of making sure the local provider does not arrive with an underpowered system. An experienced technical manager should be able to tell the difference - but not unilaterally. The key principle is approval.
If the exact requested item is not available, the question is not, 'Can we give you something similar?' It is: 'We propose this equivalent. Here are the specifications. Here is how it covers your requirement. Please confirm.' A large part of professional culture fits inside that short procedure. Bad production hides a substitution and hopes nobody notices. Average production asks permission without understanding what it is proposing. Good production proposes a solution and explains why it is equivalent in the context of that particular show.
The Rider as a Test of Understanding: The Brown M&M's Story
Some stories in the concert business are so good that the retelling gradually strips away their original meaning. Van Halen's brown M&M's are one of them. For decades, the clause was repeated as proof of rock-star excess: as if stages, amplifiers, and limousines were not enough, the band demanded that someone sort candy by hand.
The truth is more useful than the joke. David Lee Roth, and later Alex Van Halen, explained that the odd request served as a quick indicator of how carefully the promoter had read the rider. The document contained serious technical and safety requirements. If the promoter missed a bright, easy-to-check detail about candy, the touring team had reason to wonder whether the same person had skimmed the sections on power, staging, or load limits.90
The lesson, obviously, is not that every artist now needs a color-coded confectionery audit. I would almost argue the opposite: if you have to hide a trap in the rider to test a partner, trust is already imperfect. But I understand the logic. A document does not matter because it exists. What matters is whether the process can detect that the document was not understood.
I have heard the phrase 'We received the rider' more times than I can count, and it is usually true. The file did arrive by email. Sometimes somebody even downloaded it. But between received and understood, between understood and confirmed, between confirmed and delivered, there is an entire profession. It becomes especially funny when ten people at the venue confidently say, 'Yes, yes, that was in the rider,' and every one of them means a different file. Moments like that teach you that a PDF is not a management system. It is simply a very calm witness to the fact that, at some point, somebody wrote something down.
A rider is not an English-language exam and not a competition in page count. It is an agreement about the future reality of the show. If the artist's manager, the promoter, the venue, and the supplier can read the same line four different ways, the problem already exists. It simply has not been plugged into power yet.90
The Rider as a Negotiation of Trust
There is another function of the rider that is rarely stated directly. It tests how much the touring team can trust the local side. When a touring party sends a document, they do not know who will be standing in a venue in another country. The paperwork becomes a proxy for experience. The less trust there is, the more detailed the language tends to become. A good advance changes the relationship before the artist even arrives. Replies are fast. Deviations are declared honestly. Drawings make sense. The patch is confirmed. An RF plan exists. The contact sheet is current. If something is unavailable, everyone knows in advance. By the time the touring team arrives, they already know that the people on the other side of the email read more than equipment model numbers. In live events, trust is usually built before people meet in person. And it can be destroyed before then too.
One email saying 'everything will be fine' instead of answering a concrete question can tell you more about a production company than ten pages of corporate presentation.
Chapter 2. Advance: The Show That Is Built Long Before the Stage
In this profession, almost every next problem begins with a previous decision. The closer we get to doors, the less room there is for theory and the more clearly the quality of preparation becomes visible.
Advance: The Show Is Built in Emails and Spreadsheets
The audience carries a natural illusion: concerts are built at the venue. At the venue, they are assembled. They are built earlier. Advance is one of the most undervalued phases of concert production because there is nothing particularly photogenic about it for Instagram. It consists of emails, documents, calls, spreadsheets, file versions, clarifications, and questions that sometimes seem excessive. But every clarification made during advance potentially removes one problem from show day.
When I advance a show, I usually begin with questions that seem almost too mundane for 'big production': when trucks are allowed in, whether there is a loading dock for stage freight, who will open the right gate, where empty cases can be parked temporarily, and when the venue can actually receive the crew. These details rarely make it into a render, but they are remarkably good at consuming hours.
Then comes the technical layer: available power connections, FOH position, multicore run length, who is responsible for rigging, trim height, intercom, video-content format, RF restrictions, crew working hours, backline storage, and whether the PA can be run at working level. Alongside that are hotels, transport, catering, and crew pickup. In a good advance, none of these fights for the title of 'most important.' They simply have to converge on the same day. Not all of those questions are technical. That is one reason production management became a profession in its own right. Shows fail at the interfaces.
The sound system may be ready while the stage crew is late. Video may be ready while the content arrived in the wrong format. The artist may be ready while transport is stuck. The venue may be ready while access was never cleared by the promoter. Rigging may be complete while power distribution cannot be energized before inspection. Every team optimizes its own area. Somebody has to optimize the whole.
Every industry has jokes that resemble its paperwork a little too closely. In production, one of them is a file called final, sitting next to final_2, followed by final_really_final - and an hour later somebody appears with a USB stick and says, 'This one is definitely the final version.' It is funny right up until two departments load different show files. Ridiculous filenames are only the symptom. The real task is change control. Stage plans, input lists, crew rosters, playback, and video content inevitably change. Every change needs a visible trail: which version is current, who approved it, who was informed, and what else it affects.
If the artist adds a song, that is not only a musical decision. It may require another instrument, a lyric prompt, additional video, new lighting programming, a backline change, and a few more minutes in a schedule that was already full. A small creative decision can cast a very long operational shadow. Good production therefore does not answer the creative team with an automatic no. But an unconditional yes can be equally dangerous. The most professional answer is often: 'Yes. Here is what it will require, and here is what it will affect.'
There is a phrase that now switches on an internal calculator in my head: 'It's a small change.' It remains small only until you start naming the departments it touches.
U2 360°: When a Creative Idea Becomes a Transportation System
Large tours reach a point where the artistic idea stops being an image and becomes a physical problem. U2 360° is one of the clearest examples. Production director Jake Berry and his team were given a concept in which the stage itself was part of the idea: the audience would surround the performance, and the structure had to work as a repeatable system in stadiums across different countries.
Jake Berry Productions described the scale in unusually concrete terms: a steel structure about 164 feet high and roughly 120 trucks to move it. The number itself is not the point. The point is that after a certain scale, you can no longer think of a tour as 'a concert traveling from city to city.' It becomes a distributed logistics operation with a strict sequence, dependencies, time buffers, and a very high cost for every mistake.
A project like that changes the way you read an advance. A loading-dock dimension entered incorrectly is no longer a minor inconvenience. An unconfirmed allowable load can change the engineering scheme. A venue labor curfew can affect crew shifts or even routing. A border crossing stops being administrative background: if one critical component does not clear customs on time and there is no equivalent replacement, the entire show can stop.
Large tours often use leapfrog systems: multiple sets of selected elements move ahead of the route so that one stadium is still being struck while the next one has already begun to build. Even when a particular tour is organized differently, the principle applies at every scale: the speed of show day depends on how much work you successfully moved out of show day in advance. Berry's own career is just as instructive. He started as a drum tech and went on to lead production for some of the world's largest tours. That path breaks the popular illusion that a production manager is primarily a spreadsheet person. A good production director understands the spreadsheet precisely because he knows the physical cost of a road case, a cable, a riser, a truck load, and the sentence, 'It'll take ten minutes.'
Scale does not cancel the basics; it makes them merciless. The larger the show, the less room there is for verbal assumptions. Advance becomes the architecture of the future day, and the production director becomes the person who translates creative ambition into a sequence of operations that can actually be performed.1, 2
Chapter 3. Load-In Day: Weight, Time, and the Artist's Trust
Load-In and Build: Theory Turns into Weight
There is a moment when an idea becomes physical. The truck doors open. And everything that existed yesterday in Vectorworks, CAD, Excel, PDFs, and email begins to move on wheels. Load-in reveals the quality of preparation very quickly. If road cases arrive in the wrong order, the one you need is buried behind twenty others. If the stage has to be ready before the next rigging phase but its components are in the last truck, the entire schedule moves. If no forklift was booked, a heavy structure stops being a line in an equipment list and becomes a very real problem. Concert production has a deep affection for specifics. Weight is specific. Time is specific. Cable length is specific. Headcount is specific. However many creative words appear in the presentation, load-in day translates everything into physical quantities. The critical path.
