On a truck, and the truck is the part of the session that gets planned last and fails first. The working answer in Los Angeles is rented backline plus cartage, and most of that inventory lives in one-story warehouses across the San Fernando Valley, with Van Nuys holding a dense share of it. I produce and mix out of my room in Burbank, credits from Stefania onward, and when a song needs a real kit or a specific amp, the first question I settle is which door the gear comes through, at what hour, and who carries it.
What do backline and cartage actually mean?
Backline originally meant the wall of amplifiers behind a band on stage, and in American usage it widened into the whole rented instrument package: drums, amps, keyboards, percussion, the physical things a session or a show needs that are not microphones. Cartage is the older, narrower trade: moving a musician's own equipment to the date and setting it up, so a first-call drummer walks in holding sticks while their kit, tuned and mapped, waits in the tracking room. The distinction matters when you book, because a backline house quotes you a package from its own stock, while a cartage company quotes you a truck, two handlers and a schedule, and a full session day in this city often needs both quotes.
Why does so much of the gear live in Van Nuys?
Because gear needs cheap square footage, a roll-up door and a forgiving curb, and the central Valley has all three. Van Nuys is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles, laid out flat across the middle of the Valley, and its industrial blocks are exactly the single-story concrete stock that storage, repair and rental businesses want: drive-in access, no neighbors complaining about a 10 pm return, room for a truck to turn. The area has held serious music infrastructure for half a century; Sound City Studios ran on Cabrito Road from 1969 and recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana inside what is visibly a converted industrial unit, and I wrote about what that kind of room still offers in the Van Nuys console room piece. There is also an airport in the middle of it: Van Nuys Airport, opened in 1928 and now covering 730 acres, serves general aviation including touring traffic, which keeps rehearsal, storage and backline operations clustered within a few minutes of the runways. The same geography that makes the area loud under the flight path, which I covered in recording near Van Nuys Airport, makes it efficient for anything that moves by truck.
For orientation from my side of the Valley: Burbank is its own city, east of Van Nuys, and the drive between them runs about 8 miles along Victory Boulevard through North Hollywood, which, like Van Nuys, is a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Off-peak that is 20 to 25 minutes; at 5 pm it is double, and the return window has to respect that.
What does the rental spec need to say?
Exact models, acceptable substitutes, and counts, written down before anyone calls. A spec that says drum kit gets you whatever is clean and in stock. The spec I send says: 22-inch kick, 13 and 16 toms, two snares, one wood one metal, new coated heads on everything, five cymbal stands, hi-hat clutch spare, kick pedal plus backup, rug. For amps: the model, the speaker configuration, and a named second choice, because the one you want is sometimes out with a tour. For keyboards: the exact instrument and whether the sustain pedal, the stand and the bench are included, which they are not always. Then three logistics lines that save the day more often than the gear lines: delivery or will-call, the return deadline and the after-hours option, and who supplies cables, fuses and a spare speaker cable. The hour spent writing this is the cheapest hour of the session, the same logic as preparing the session before the band arrives.
How does the load-in get planned?
Backwards from the downbeat. If the band plays at 1 pm, the gear is in the room at 10 am, because the first three hours of a tracking day go to assembly, tuning and microphones, a split I walked through in the drum day piece. The plan itself is a path, measured in doors: truck to curb or dock, curb to room, every elevator, ramp and stair counted. Valley industrial units are the easy case, since the truck backs up to a roll-up and the kit rolls in on one dolly in ten minutes. A second-floor room in a residential building is the hard case: the same kit is forty minutes and two people each way, and a rented organ or a real piano simply does not go, which decides the booking before any acoustic argument does. Parking is part of the path. On a Van Nuys industrial block the truck sits at the door all day; in Hollywood the meter, the loading zone and the parking enforcement schedule are line items in the plan.
How do I run a rental day from my Burbank room?
Will-call, early, in my own car when the package fits in one trip. Morning pickup in Van Nuys against an off-peak Victory Boulevard drive puts amps in my room before 10 am, and the session runs with the return deadline written on the whiteboard, because a 6 pm will-call return against rush hour is the most commonly missed appointment in the Valley. Anything that needs a truck, a full kit, a B3, gets delivery, and I schedule the delivery window a full hour before I need the gear, then use the hour for placement and microphones. What stays in Burbank is everything that records after the loud day: overdubs, vocals, editing and the mix happen back in my room, the pattern from recording live drums near a Burbank home studio, so the rental covers one day, never a week.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between backline and cartage? Backline is the rented instrument package itself: drums, amps, keyboards. Cartage is the service of moving and setting up gear, classically a session player's own rig, so the player arrives with a gig bag while their equipment is already in the room.
Do backline rental companies deliver to home studios? Most will deliver anywhere there is access, but delivery, stairs and after-hours returns are line items. For a one-day session near the Valley, will-call pickup in your own vehicle is often half the logistics cost of the day.
How early should backline be booked for a session? A standard kit or amp package usually holds with a few days of notice. Specific vintage pieces, a particular console-era keyboard or a matched pair of amps can take two weeks, and award-season months tighten everything.
If your session needs gear that is not in the room
Send me the song and the instrument list you are imagining. I will send back a spec sheet for the rental, a load-in schedule built backwards from the downbeat, and an honest note on which parts should be tracked in a bigger room versus produced in mine. Credits are at /credits, background at /about.