Worked example

Tech rider template: a worked example, not a blank page

Most “tech rider template” results hand you an empty table and a folder of stage icons. That is only useful if you already know what belongs in the table. If you are the one in the band who ended up doing the admin — usually the bassist, usually at 1am, usually because a booker asked for the rider by Friday — the hard part was never the drawing. It is knowing that the numbers on the plot have to match the numbers on the input list, that bass goes DI before anyone reaches for a mic, and that a small club desk will not give you eight monitor mixes no matter how nicely you ask.

So instead of a blank template, here is one finished rider, in full. It was produced by this site’s own engine from a single paragraph, and it is the same document a real act gets. Below it, every section is explained: what it is for, and what the engineer reading it at load-in is actually checking.

The paragraph that produced it

This was the entire input. No form, no icon library, no channel count:

Four-piece indie band from Berlin. Drums, bass on DI, two guitars through their own amps (one Fender combo, one Orange half-stack), the singer plays the second guitar. We bring our own snare and both amps. The singer needs her own monitor mix. We usually load in two hours before doors.

Three things in the finished document below were not in that paragraph and cannot be inferred: the act’s own name, the arrival clock time, and a day-of-show phone number. Those are the only three questions worth asking an act, and they are the only three we ask.

The stage plot

A top-down view of the stage as the audience sees it, with every position labelled. It is not art. Its one job is to let the engineer match a name on the stage to a number on the desk, so the labels here are the same strings that appear in the input list — not “Gtr 1” on the plot and “Guitar SR” in the list. A label on a plot that the engineer cannot find in the input list is the single most common failure in real riders, and it is the thing that costs you soundcheck time.

Note that the drums sit upstage centre and the two guitars are pushed out to either side. That is an assumption, and it is marked as one. A real four-piece corrects it in about five seconds by dragging a box, which is a very different job from drawing four boxes from nothing.

The input list, and why the order matters

Channels run contiguously from 1, with no gaps, in the order a desk is patched in practice: drums first, then percussion, then bass, then guitars stage-right to stage-left, then keys, then any playback, then vocals with the lead vocal last in the vocal block. An engineer who has patched a hundred bands reads a list in that order without thinking. A list in a different order — vocals at the top, or channel 7 missing because the band deleted a row — has to be read carefully, and being read carefully is not what you want for your paperwork at 5pm on a Friday.

Two conventions show up in the eleven channels above that acts almost always get wrong. First, DI before mic: the bass is a DI box, because that is how a bass is taken unless the band specifically says they mic the cab. The guitars are the opposite — an amp on stage gets a mic on the cab (an e906 or an SM57), not a DI. Second, 48V phantom power only where it belongs: true for the condensers on hi-hat and overheads, false for every dynamic mic and for a passive DI. Sending phantom into the wrong thing is at best pointless and at worst expensive, so the column is explicit rather than left blank.

Band brings vs house provides

This is the section that stops the argument at load-in, and the one most templates leave out entirely. Every single line of the input list says who supplies it. The paragraph above said the band brings its own snare and both amps, so those three lines say Band and everything else says House — including, explicitly, “full drum kit minus snare”, because “we bring our snare” and “we bring a kit” are very different sentences and the venue needs to know which one you meant.

Monitor mixes: four, not eight

Monitor mixes are numbered per position. The singer asked for her own mix, so she is mix 1 — the convention is that the person who asked gets the first send, regardless of where they stand. The other three positions take mixes 2, 3 and 4.

That is the ceiling, and it is deliberate. A 100–400 cap club desk gives you four sends in the ordinary case. A rider that requests six individual mixes is not an ambitious rider, it is a rider that will be renegotiated in person while you should be sound-checking. If an act genuinely needs more positions than the desk has sends, the correct document shares mixes between adjacent positions and says so in the notes — which is exactly what the notes above do.

The word “assumed”

Several lines above carry a small “assumed” marker. Those are the fields nobody told us: the specific kick mic, the tom choices, the plot positions, the vocal mic. We mark them instead of hiding them, because a rider that quietly invents a detail is worse than one that flags it. An act glances down the assumed lines, corrects the two that are wrong, and the document is true. That is the whole editing model — you are correcting a nearly-right page, not building one.

Why both languages, side by side

If you play German-speaking Europe, half the engineers reading your rider work in German and half the paperwork you receive is in English. Two separate files go stale at different rates, so this is one page with both: Kanalliste beside input list, Monitorwege beside monitor mixes, Abnahme for how a source is taken, Kleinmembran and Grossmembran for the condensers, Stromverteilung for the power line. That is the vocabulary a German FOH engineer actually says, which is not the same thing as a translation of the English.

The short version, as a checklist

If you are writing a rider by hand in a word processor tonight, this is the minimum it must contain to be worth sending:

• —A stage plot whose labels match the input list exactly, word for word.
• —Channels numbered contiguously from 1, in desk order, lead vocal last.
• —DI or mic stated per source — DI for bass and pickups, mic on amps.
• —48V marked true only for condensers and active DI boxes.
• —Who supplies every line: the band, or the house. No blanks.
• —Monitor mixes numbered per position, and no more of them than the desk has sends.
• —Arrival time and a day-of-show phone number. A rider without these is worth less.
• —One page. An engineer will read one page and skim three.

Coiled Clamp is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is also why the example above is a real engine output rather than something a copywriter typed — we regenerate it when the conventions change.

Describe your act instead

One paragraph, the way you would say it out loud. You get the whole document on screen, watermarked, free — the plot, the numbered channels, both languages. €19 once unlocks that act forever, with unlimited updates and a new show version for every booking. There is nothing to draw.

More: what Coiled Clamp does and what it costs.