Supreme quality and contemporary design with a multitude of features for the modern touring musician.
Many of today’s drummers are not only required to bring acoustic drums, cymbals, hardware, and sticks to the gig, but they also have to cart around assorted electronics, such as multipads, in-ears, tablets, laptops, triggers, cables, chargers, microphones, and so on. To help us keep all of these additional items more organized, Gruv Gear has created a trio of multipurpose gig bags that allow you to carry everything you need in a tight, portable package.
The Gruv Gear gig bags include the super compact QUIVR ($59.99), which is ideal for quick hits requiring just a handful of drumsticks and a few small accessories. The QUIVR Tour ($99.99) is a streamlined backpack that can house seven pairs of drumsticks, several pairs of mallets or rods, a laptop, and other essential items. The Stadium bag ($199.99) is a rugged, voluminous backpack engineered with various compartments for portable electronics, sticks, accessories, cables, and personal items. You could even throw in a few days’ worth of clothing for short road trips.
QUIVR
The compact QUIVR bag is designed to work in conjunction with the larger QUIVR Club, Tour, and Stadium bags to keep your sticks organized when traveling and to create a slick free-standing flip-out holster that provides quick access to six pairs of drumsticks on the gig. The QUIVR also functions as a stand-alone item that that zips up into a super portable 17″x4.5″x1.5″ shoulder sling. It comes with a pair of tethers for hanging the bag from floor tom lugs, and the right-side panel features a small meshed pocket for holding in-ears or other small items and a quick-release drum key holder. The most innovative feature of the QUIVR is the quick-draw pocket that allows you to prop up one, two, or three pairs of drumsticks so that they stick out of the top of the bag by a couple inches for easier access during quick stick changes. Little features like this go a long way to facilitating the best performances possible.
QUIVR Tour
The QUIVR Tour is a perfect solution for situations where you need to bring more than just sticks. Its compact, flip-out design houses seven pairs of sticks on one side and up to eight brushes or mallets on the other. It also has three zip-up pockets to store small tools, in-ears, cables, etc. The bag comes with thick, comfortable shoulder straps, as well as a zip-up compartment for stashing your laptop, tablet, or notebooks. There’s a small fold-out exterior pocket as well that contains elastic tethers for securing a smartphone, wireless charger, USB cables, or other items you might need to access quickly. Gruv Gear outfits this bag with a global recovery tag that makes it easy for airport personnel to return the bag to you if it’s ever lost in transit.
If you need more pairs of sticks than the QUIVR Tour provides, then you can expand its capacity by tethering the QUIVR to an interior hook. You can also flip the tethered QUIVR to the outside of the Tour bag to give you access to the sticks during the gig. Again, simple features like that let you know that the folks at Gruv Gear are looking for ways to make your job a little bit easier.
Stadium Bag
Okay, now we’ve come to the grandmaster of gig bags. The Stadium bag is designed to provide maximum versatility and storage capacity in a surprisingly slim profile. The bag is 13.5″ wide, 6″ deep, and 19″ tall and features hideaway shoulder straps and a snapping waistband. This fully padded bag stands upright on its own, making it ideal for stage use, especially when tethering the QUIVR to the outside to access spare drumsticks.
The upper 6″ compartment of the Stadium bag features a fold-out, zippered top for quick access to whatever items are placed within it. The lower two 6.5″ compartments are separated by removable soft shelves and have side-access doors so you can get to the contents easily without having to remove everything stored above them. If you remove the shelves, you can use the Stadium bag to carry full-size rack gear, such as an audio interface or trigger-to-MIDI module. Gruv Gear also offers padded vertical dividers to protect your rack gear.
The dual-layered side pockets are ideal for storing adapters, cables, tools, and other small accessories and personal items. The front zippered pocket is sized for most laptops, and Gruv Gear offers a tethered laptop sleeve called ScanFly that allows you to hang your computer onto the outside of the Stadium bag to expedite airport security checkpoints. Gruv Gear also offers a range of Bento bags (sold separately), which are small, stackable cases designed to fit perfectly within the compartments of the Stadium bag to help keep cords, adapters, batteries, toiletries, and other small items organized and separated.
If your setup requires a mix of trigger pads, electronics, and/or small percussion instruments, the Stadium bag is the perfect solution for containing everything organized and in one place. This is going to be my primary travel bag, for work or leisure, for many years to come.
Michael Dawson
