For Chip Self, while you don’t need to sweat the small stuff, you should take the details very, very seriously if you want to be successful in pro audio. The case can be made that by acting on the “small things” other companies shrug off, his St. Louis-based Logic Systems Sound & Lighting has grown every year for 29 years straight.
He’s meticulous, for example, on how he prices everything, from the gear he buys to the gigs he bids on. He noticed that ill-fitting cases took more time to load out, and bought a case company so he could create cases that loaded faster. The barcode system in his warehouse is designed so that if two guys are gathering gear for two separate gigs, the “beep” heard from the barcode gun is different from zone to zone to minimize any chance for confusion.
This adherence to the “small details” allows him to take on those big festivals.
“That’s our niche,” Chip Self says smiling, leaning back in his chair one March day. “Crazy loud bands playing big festivals.”
Logic’s nimbleness allows him to take on any project. One of his proudest achievements was putting together enough audio gear for 100,000 people to hear presidential candidate Barack Obama rally a crowd in 2008 — and he did it with 48 hours notice and handily met their demand that the speakers be heard but not seen (he had them up on cranes behind the legs of the Arch).
Inventory for the Gigs You Want
Self was working audio in bars before he could legally buy a drink at said establishments. He would build gear he couldn’t afford, and otherwise always put his money back into his business. He grew through five warehouses and recently expanded in his current digs, a 63,000-square-foot warehouse he’s owned since 2007 (he rents some of the space including to a company that rents backline, a nice fit). Today, he has 30 full-time employees, not counting the eight to ten dogs running around on any given day (every day is “bring your dog to work day” at Logic).
On the facility site, there’s an electronic repair shop that takes care of local musician’s amps as well as Logic Systems’ own gear. Whereas they merely “dabbled” in video before, the company has made a major investment and now has 126 Absen A7 waterproof outdoor LED wall panels with two controllers adding to their ability to provide the visual for their clients.
Considering Self’s mantra is “you buy gear for the gigs you want, not the gigs you have,” the big news is that last year Logic joined the L-Acoustics family. NEXO has served them well, and they still use that gear, but it was time for something new. Self laughs about how the L-Acoustics sales people were “very patient — kind of just standing off to the side for about 10 years waving their hand at me every once in a while reminding me that they were there.”
The L-Acoustics K2 was a contender for several reasons. “A company our size can’t afford to have everything in inventory that a client will need, so we have to rely on being able to rent more of what we do have,” Self says. “And as more K2s are accepted into the market, cross rentals are easier.” Also, they are getting increasingly rider-friendly. Then of course, there is the listening experience, which was the reason Self got into this business to begin with.
Shelf says another benefit is that L-Acoustics is particular to whom they partner with, and before they deliver any part of the system, they come in and train the crew on it. “They have high standards and want to be confident that whatever crew is working with their system, it’s going to sound good.”
“Much to my chagrin,” he adds, the consoles in the shop are overwhelmingly digital. “We tend to change consoles out a lot more frequently.” Currently, he has Avid Venue Profiles in heavy rotation, second to the “workhorse” Yamaha 5D’s. But of late, they are increasingly leaning on DiGiCo boards, as they are showing up more on riders.
For the smaller corporate gigs, he is bullish on the Avid S3L. “They are fantastic,” he says. “We also have the SC48s and Profiles, but we like the S3L for smaller shows and corporate work. It gives us many of the features of the larger desks, has great sound quality, and takes up a small footprint.”
Microphones don’t change much in his shop, and for his festivals, nobody wants to mess around: They want Shure 57s and 58s. “For the shows we do, people tend to not want the esoteric stuff. They want to know it’ll work even if it gets wet.” And this no-brainer approach is even more important considering a lot of these bands don’t even do sound checks. “Even if some other mic makes them sound a little bit better, they aren’t interested in it — they want absolute predictability.”
Festivals and the SPL Issue
Festival season keeps them busy. Early in the spring, there is April’s Welcome to Rockville in Jacksonville, FL; followed by Carolina Rebellion (Charlotte, NC), Rock on the Range (Columbus, OH) and Kansas City Rockfest (Kansas City, MO), all in May. The latter three have turned to Logic since pretty much their first show.
The Jacksonville gig is the most recent big festival to cartwheel onto his plate, and it came to him slightly impaired. “They got in a lot of trouble over the noise levels, almost to the point where the community was not going to let the festival happen again,” Self explains. A combination of doing a weak job modeling the arrays plus letting some subwoofers stray out of hand led the local city alderman to start writing his own noise ordinance. “I don’t know what they Googled, but it was being based on an OSHA standard for manufacturing, and would have meant essentially no concert of any kind could ever be held.”
Self introduced them to SG Audio’s 10EaZy, which isn’t as common in the States as it is in Europe (it’s distributed by Rational Acoustics here). This system strictly monitors all audio data in real time. Logic bought a handful of systems (“they aren’t cheap”), and they run them all day during a festival. It has a traffic light warning system of lights (green/yellow/red) to keep the volume in the pre-determined limits, but also creates a log. “So when someone comes and says it got too loud at 1:30, instead of becoming a he said/she said situation, you just look at the report.” That the unit can never be “recalibrated” in the field makes the data derived from it empirically indisputable.
Self just ran across a segment on CNN warning parents that their kids’ hearing might be getting damaged at these festivals, which he saw and felt was getting too close to “class action” possibilities. “My advice to all my clients is to use this [tool] and self-police themselves.”
Business Acumen in The Biz
St. Louis is a big live music town with a love of festivals of its own, including the Fourth of July event under the Arch, one of the biggest in the nation. Logic Systems has also been getting calls from the city’s Fox Theater, the 4,500-capacity venue that opened in 1929 and renovated in 1982. It’s home to many traveling Broadway shows and mid-sized concerts. This has been a pleasant surprise for Self, as touring shows typically carry their own production, but he got the call to do Million Dollar Quartet. “Hopefully, it’s a sign of things to come, because it’s got to be expensive to drag all that sound gear from venue to venue,” he says.
Logic Systems also does a fair amount of work out at the shed (previously Verizon, currently the Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre).
Being successful means making the hard decisions. After years servicing the July 4th Fair St. Louis, which includes plenty of bands over several days, the inevitable happened. The client informed him there was another, lower offer. Could he match it? “It was a strategic business decision to turn it down and hope we would get the business later at our price, because once you drop your price, you can’t get it back.” In this case, the client did happily return to Logic, but “it doesn’t always happen that way.”
The Case for Cases
Being successful also means rethinking things that everybody else is taking for granted, even something as basic as a case.
Standing in the warehouse where cases are being built, Self explains: “Traditional case makers think about cases from the inside out. They start with the interior dimensions and whatever size the total case turns out to be, that’s what it ends up being.” But he is concerned about the outer size of the cases he uses, and how they fit into a truck. Logic now makes and sells trunk sizes that allow for flawless truck packing. “How fast and easily a truck can be packed/unpacked is important to us, because even if it saves just five minutes, if you have 30 union guys on overtime standing around for that five minutes, that adds up.”
He admits that many others might not even think about such things and be content with doing things as they’ve done it for 10 years. Yet, while rethinking how a truck is packed isn’t particularly “sexy,” it’s just one example how Self thinks about the “little stuff.” Which, for Logic Systems, continues to add up to a pretty big success story.
For more information about Logic Systems Sound & Lighting, visit www.logicsound.com.
