Live Events and Touring Editing and Proofreading Services

The truck arrives at seven in the morning and the venue has a two-metre doorway, a house desk from 2004, no dimmers on the upstage bar, and one member of local crew who was told the show was acoustic. Everything about the next fourteen hours was decided three weeks earlier, when somebody sent a rider that listed the band's preferred beers and did not mention the power requirement.

We edit what touring productions, promoters and production companies produce — technical riders and specifications, advance documents and venue questionnaires, hospitality and contract riders, get-in and running schedules, crew and supplier briefings, health and safety documentation for touring shows, settlement and deal memo documentation, and the correspondence between production and venue. Our editors work on documents that have to survive being read by a stranger at 7am.

The technical rider and its advance is where a tour day is won or lost, and its failure is a document that describes what the show would like rather than what it requires. A venue reading a rider is deciding what to hire, who to call and what to warn about. We work through these so requirements are separated into what the show cannot happen without, what can be substituted with notice, and what is preference, since a rider where the power supply and the towel colour carry the same weight is a rider that gets skimmed; so power is specified as phases, amperage and distance from the stage, because this is the single item that cancels shows and the one most often described as "adequate power"; so access is stated as measured dimensions — the smallest doorway, the get-in route, the lift dimensions, the distance from the truck to the stage — given that a venue reading this can measure and answer, and a venue asked whether access is "good" will say yes; so the crew call is given as a number of people, with their skills, at a stated time, and what they will be doing; so equipment is specified with acceptable alternatives named, as a rider that lists one console model without alternatives gets answered with a telephone call at midnight; so timings run from the get-in to the load-out with the immovable points marked; so the contacts are two names with mobile numbers, one on each side; and so the advance asks the venue questions rather than only telling them things. Riders written this way produce a show that starts on time.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including riders, deal memos, schedules and venue correspondence. We are editors rather than production managers, engineers or safety practitioners, and we offer no view on technical requirements, safety or contracts. What we can do is make the rider readable by the person who has to deliver it.