Failed Experiments Leads To Success

The topic on my mind lately: reinvestment, taking chances, and the simple fact that not every chance pans out. Over the past three or four weeks I’ve been making changes to my booth and my transport setup, and what I’ve learned over the years held true again. Sometimes you make a good call, sometimes you make a bad one. The trick is being willing to make the call at all.

So let’s talk about a couple of experiments I ran recently. One of them I’m keeping. One of them I tore right back out. Both were worth doing.

The Great Cart Saga

Moving gear is half the job, and I went down a real rabbit hole trying to get my cart situation right.

First I tried a set of furniture dollies. The wheels were just way too small, so that one was dead on arrival. Then I tried another set of furniture dollies, and that round I didn’t like how top-heavy everything rode. Strike two. From there I upgraded to a Krane AMG 750 cart, which is a genuinely capable piece of equipment, and before I knew it I was stacking close to 400 pounds onto it.

Here’s the thing. The Krane can absolutely handle that kind of weight. The problem is me handling it. Trying to push 400 pounds up a hill or up my ramp turns into a real workout, and when my daughter came to help me at my last wedding, she was straining just to get it moving. A cart that only one strong person on the team can push isn’t actually solving the problem.

So I landed somewhere different than where I started. I’m going with one of the stubbier Uline carts for my speakers, and then one of those folding beach-buggy wagons, the kind built to roll over sand and dirt, for my lights and speakers. The bonus is that the wagon doubles up for ceremony work. If I need to haul speakers, poles, and whatnot out to a ceremony site, I can throw it all in the bag and not think twice about the terrain. Longtime readers know I already went deep on this exact problem when I built my DIY “Big Wheel” 8020 ceremony cart, so getting in and out of bad ground is something of an obsession of mine.

It took numerous iterations and, yeah, some money. That Krane cart isn’t cheap. But I think I’ve finally found the setup I’ll run for the season, and I only got there by striking out a few times first.

Raising The Booth, And Lowering It Right Back

The other project went the opposite direction, and that’s the one I want to be honest about.

I’d wanted to raise up my Toadmatic basically since the day I got it. The whole idea traces back to the DIY modular booth I built a few years back, where I first chased that clean, elevated surface so everyone could see all the gear laid out on top. That vision really locked in for me at Harvest of Sound 2023, when I set the booth up for Skratch Bastid to perform on. He wanted everything on that top layer so the crowd could see exactly what he was doing, basically running it like a standard table with the whole show up top. Ever since, getting my own booth to sit like that has been a mission of mine.

I’d even bought the wheels for it the year before, back in December of 2023. Never got to it last season, so this season I finally dug in. I swapped down from a big 8-inch wheel to a 6-inch wheel, thinner but the fattest one I could find in that size, and started building out the raised surface.

Then reality struck. The initial test run across the grass in my yard was decent. But the moment I started loading real weight on and made a few passes over the lawn, it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. The narrower wheels just sank and dragged. I work plenty of venues, including one coming up in a couple of weeks, where I flat out need those fat tires under me.

On top of that, the new top surface I’d made kept getting dinged up. Granted, I used a softer wood up top, so some of that’s on me, but after only a week or so of handling it I could see exactly where this was going. The idea of every scuff showing on the thing I work over all night long, well before midseason, started to really bug me. Could I replace the top every year? Sure. Every few weeks? Not unless I had a CNC machine in the garage churning them out.

So I reverted the wheels back to where they were. I did build a semi-new surface for the inside, but it sits sunken back down rather than raised up the way I’d pictured it. The vision I’d carried for over a year turned into “yeah, on second thought, no.” And that’s okay.

It’s Okay To Strike Out

Here’s why I’m telling you about the one that failed and not just the one that worked.

It’s okay to make those mistakes. It’s okay to experiment. Because if you don’t, you genuinely never know what might come out of it. You can carry an idea in your head for a year, build it, and find out in a week that it doesn’t survive contact with a real load on real grass. That’s not wasted time. That’s an answer you didn’t have before.

I’ve gone through so many different setups over the years, and in the end they’ve all worked toward something. Even the ones that failed for me pointed me at something better. The furniture dollies pointed me to the Krane. The Krane pointed me to the wagon. The raised booth that didn’t work told me exactly what my booth actually needs to be. If you’ve ever wrestled with whether to chase the next upgrade, I get into that headspace more in Outgrowing Your DJ Equipment.

Keep Experimenting. Period.

You basically never know what’s going to happen until you try it. So keep experimenting, keep making mistakes, and learn from them. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll land on the thing that works perfectly for you. And even when you don’t, you’ll walk away wiser than when you started.

That’s my thought. Take care, everybody.