Okay, here's my advice.
- As for railpasses, they can be damn expensive, so make sure to really research it and figure out your options. For example in Germany taking busses between major cities can be super cheap (down to something like €10 to some places), so it might be worth it to try and check all options. Also booking ahead is usually a good idea for any kind of transportation, the faster you act the cheaper it usually is. If you have a railpass it takes the edge off everything though, which can be a good stress relief - then it's just hop-on-hop-off - which can be pretty good, when you have enough other chaos to deal with on a daily basis.
- Turnouts are random as hell. It depends on the day, the weather, other acts, your friends, their friends, the amount of other activity (shows etc) at the time and so on and so forth. As said earlier you can expect from 2 to 100+, depending on your luck and often how many friends the local acts have.
- Getting paid much isn't too easy. It seems like most people I know in Europe are having problems raising funds for gigs at the moment, so guarantees are really hard to come by. Don't expect anything on that front and
be stoked if you get paid €100+.
Also as Mikko said, don't expect merch to sell like drugs in a crackhouse ... sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't, but don't expect to base your daily needs on merch sales.
- Bring as compact a set-up as possible. Carrying around a massive pile of gear is a huge pain in the ass, especially when you have to run for a train. So make it as light and easy to carry around as you can. This should almost be obvious, but just how annoying it is might not be as obvious right away. Even though I basically only had one case of gear with me on my last tour, it still weighed around 13kg (30lbs) and when walking around for a while that ended up feeling a lot heavier than first expected.
- This is probably another one of the obvious ones, but as a longtime promoter it's something that still amazes me that people don't think about: Bring a sleeping bag and a towel, when you're several people touring together. Don't expect the promoter to having blankets and towels enough for all of you. Also you'll be happy you brought your own, when you're staying in some crusty-looking place.
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Be a friend. Seriously I think this is just plain and simply the most important advice. You get extremely far in Europe just by being friendly - most promoters and artists will go far out of their way to help you out, if you're a genuinely good guy. Be a douche or too full of yourself and you'll quickly find a lot of doors closing very fast. Again one of the obvious, but apparently not obvious-enough things.
Quote from: tisbor on October 13, 2011, 12:07:10 PM
Language barrier here is quite strong: almost nobody speaks english.
I'm quite sure you'd always at least get free food and places to sleep all over Italy. Don't expect much money but you never know..
Also, personal advice for visiting Italy: don't be a vegetarian - you'd miss a good 70% of the fun..
Just came back from Italy, and I don't totally agree with this. While there sure is a language barrier, then just make sure to do your homework beforehand, learn how to say "where", "how", "thank you" - combine them with a bunch of place names, foods, people etc and you can do pretty well. To my experience most people into noise and subcultures in Italy know pretty good english and are insanely friendly, so you can quite possibly get help from them with a lot of stuff.
Also Italy is like vegetarian heaven, in my opinion. There's so many different fantastic vegetarian dishes there, so getting great food is hardly a problem at all - and it's not like a lot of places in Germany where the vegetarian/vegan options are all junk/fast food (which gets tiresome extremely fast). And it's not like some places in the Baltics where you can't get by anything except a pile of lettuce and perhaps some stewed veggies.
