Middle Tennessee Is Where the Trucks Leave From

Last week two touring companies bought 68 acres of Wilson County, and the guy who signed it called Middle Tennessee "a true center of gravity for the touring industry." I've lived that line for years without having a name for it. Truck Packer gets built about 25 minutes from that field, and this post is about why that isn't an accident.

What just happened in Mt. Juliet

Concert Stuff Group and Major Tom Touring / Colonel Tom Touring closed on roughly 68 acres at 946 Sullivan Bend Road in Mt. Juliet on September 17. It's the third Tennessee project Colliers has closed for Concert Stuff Group, so this is a pattern, not a one-off. Lars Brogaard, who runs Major Tom, said it gives them "the foundation to build the next chapter," and Jim Brammer at Concert Stuff Group called it "exactly the kind of long-term position we've been targeting in Middle Tennessee." Nobody buys 68 acres to store a few consoles. That's shop, rehearsal and yard space for a lot of trucks.

It lands eight months after the other big one. Rock Nashville opened on January 20: 610,000 square feet on 55 acres off Whites Creek Pike, two arena-sized rehearsal rooms, 13 studios, Soundcheck as the anchor and Clair Global, Gallagher and The Rock-It Company as partners, with room for 30-plus vendors in audio, lighting, transport and crew support. By late summer it had hosted more than 400 rehearsals, and the tenant list reads like a truck pack: TAIT, Tyler Truss, 4Wall, DiGiCo, Shure, Sennheiser, Pyrotecnico, Alcorn Custom Case, and three trucking and freight outfits on the same campus.

Then on October 30 the AES Show sets up at Gaylord Opryland for three days. The pro audio convention moving to Nashville is a small thing on its own, but it's the same signal. The people who make the gear are coming to where the gear leaves from.

Why the trucks leave from here

The touring side of this town isn't new, it just used to be quieter than the songwriting side. The Nashville Chamber puts music industry activity here at as much as 30 times the national rate, with more than 190 studios and over 3,000 working musicians, the highest concentration in the country. Every one of those artists who tours needs a rehearsal room, a lighting vendor, a backline shop and a truck. So the vendors came. Stage Call has been running tour trucking out of Nashville for a long time, and outfits like Tour Entertainment Transportation in Gallatin do trucking, storage and staging from the same yard.

Geography does the rest. I-40, I-65 and I-24 cross here, so a truck rolling out of a Nashville shop on a Sunday night can make a Monday load-in in a good bit of the country. If you route tours for a living you already know the shape of that. If you don't, it explains why so many production offices have a Tennessee address and a bus lot behind them.

What that has to do with Truck Packer

I'm a front of house engineer. I built Truck Packer because I was chalking truck packs on load-in doors and rebuilding them in my head at 2am when a case got added. The people I built it with, tested it with and argued about it with are mostly within an hour of here: production managers, drivers, backline techs, the shop guys who have to make it fit on Friday. We wrote up how that started in Meet the Founders, and none of it happens somewhere without a load dock nearby.

That proximity shows up in the product in ways that aren't obvious from the outside. The container library carries the real interior dimensions of the trailers these companies actually run, not the brochure numbers, because a user caught a brochure number that was wrong and we went back and checked all 83 of them. Crew view exists because a stage manager wanted a printed pack order on the dock, not a 3D model on a laptop. When a shop in Mt. Juliet or Whites Creek asks for a feature, we can drive over and watch the load-out that made them ask. That's a hard thing to do from anywhere else.

The practical bit

If you're one of the companies building here, or touring out of here, the pack is the part of the move that still lives on a whiteboard at a lot of shops. Rehearsal at Rock Nashville ends, the trucks back in, and someone with a marker figures out what goes where. That's the exact moment Truck Packer is for: build the pack during rehearsals, print the load order, hand it to the driver and the local crew, and change it in five minutes when production adds a case on day three.

Middle Tennessee is where the trucks leave from. We just think they should leave with a plan.

Touring out of Tennessee this fall? Log in to Truck Packer and build the pack before the trucks back in.