If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to be in a band, on the road, often in a van with the other band members and all your gear, it is frankly not that glamorous. But making music is a calling and performing live is amazingly fun if not always financially rewarding. Touring bands have to deal with booking gigs, figuring out how to get places, where to eat, get gas, and where to stay. Imagine taking your vacation plans and multiplying them by a factor of 20. Touring can become a daunting task.

Now a West Seattle businessman has developed a solution that’s not only comprehensive, it’s free.

David Wall has created the GoodRoadNetwork.com (GRN) which helps touring musicians take full control, with relative ease, of everything they must deal with to make a tour work.

Wall, whose diverse background includes stints as a professional BMX Freestyler, a touring musician and UX architect for various tech companies, has been working with a team of developers for close to two years to build a tool for musicians that really provides them with a complete toolkit to maximize their shot at success.

Features of GoodRoadNetwork include:

• Creating custom electronic press kits
• Tour planning including the route, and where to stay
• Scheduling of tour dates (and everyone gets updates)
• The bands music streamed online
• The full discography of the band
• Photo galleries for any purpose the band chooses
• Automatic synchronization with social media. They post once and it goes everywhere
• Financial tracking including income and expenses to keep a band afloat on the road
• Opportunities for adding gigs on the road

“I’ve been on the road and it always bothered me that there wasn’t a better way to not only help the band do better planning but make the band more successful, so I built GoodRoadNetwork as a tool by a musician for musicians.”

The beta testers of the product have been enthusiastic. “I love it,” said touring blues singer/guitariist Polly Keary, “It makes the work of figuring out a tour really easy.”

”For all of my musician friends, sign up to this amazing site and plan your entire tour all in one place," said Mikayla King a V2D Records recording artist and radio and TV personality.

“This would have cut out about two years of trial and error playing on the road," remarked Ben Early of local band the Hollowpoints "Doing all this legwork is a pain, I just want to get there and play.”

"When I put my first tour together," said Wall of his own experience, "Booking the first show wasn’t as difficult as filling in the gaps between point A and B. I didn’t want to drive for 16 hours to get to a show if we could put something in between. Once we had the shows booked, we had to guess at what it would cost us to go out on the road. GoodRoadNetwork was able to help me forecast cost and easily reach venues between major cities to help us “connect the dots” and make the tour coverage more efficient.

Wall joked, "One time we were touring with a circus and one of the llamas took a romantic interest in me.. If i could have found a room that was pet friendly you might see me with an Alpaca sweater today."

Wall continued, " but seriously we were in Seattle and booked a show in Ventura and we didn't want to drive 1500 miles to play a single show. I had to measure out from Seattle and approximate an 8-hour drive to find the next nearest city and try and change them together with gigs. I had no idea which venues were between me and the venue that we booked in Ventura. What's more is I had no idea once we found the venue's what kind of venues they were other than they featured live music. Was it a country bar? Was it a coffee shop? No idea. The last thing we wanted to do is show up with five guys and a heavy rock band to a fine dining establishment that was expecting a jazz quartet. So today with GRN we would be able to research the venues and find ones that would fill in the gap. We would also be able to project how much money we needed so we wouldn't need to survive off the dollar menu for the last 3 days."

The site was purposely built to work anywhere a musician might choose from the desktop to a smartphone. Wall has cleverly designed the site to make it a platform for all kinds of social interaction with bands and serve as tool for a variety of ways to reach out to and provide services for musicians.

The site will make money through strategic partnerships and through advertising.

The company is holding their official launch party Saturday, featuring three bands SISTERS http://www.sisterstheband.com/ A FAME RIOT: https://youtu.be/ThT-VB41eNA and BOD https://bodcamp.bandcamp.com/ at 9pm at Slims Last Chance in Georgetown.

Beyond being a tool for musicians, venues too can benefit by seeking and finding specific kinds of bands or music to entertain their customers.

You can follow GRN on Facebook here.