Getting any of the Affordable Sound & Light team on the phone from now until October might be a bit tough, considering the five-strong crew will be running from music festival to music festival across Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida setting up lights and P.A.s for dozens of acts that span a world of musical genres.
It kicks off in May with the Crawfish Boil in Birmingham and the Jubilee CityFest in Montgomery, goes into June with City Stages in Birmingham, through the summer and then spins down with the Big Spring Jam in Huntsville and BayFest in Mobile, Ala. "It keeps us busy," says ASL vice president Billy Klein. "Most medium-sized towns around here have a two- to three-day street festival with anywhere from two to four stages." For the most part, Klein explains, ASL will cover the two big stages at these festivals. "We also do a month-long outdoor series with the local symphony that starts at the end of May and goes through June. It's more of a pops-type show, and we've had everyone from James Taylor to The Temptations backed by the symphony." The biggest difference between the festivals and the pops show? "You go from a wall of P.A. to a very distributed system through a park and musicians playing $100,000 violins who don't want you to put contact microphones on them," he answers with a laugh. "It's all about a whole bunch of area mics."
In the midst of the festival frenzy, ASL also supplied services to the Pantene Total You Tour, which ran from March to May in such towns as Chicago, Dallas, New York and Atlanta. The company has worked with an impressive list of acts, such as James Brown, Matchbox Twenty, Phil Collins, Deftones, Patti Griffin, Train and Alison Krauss. "When you do three-day festivals with about 30 bands in a weekend, you get to work with a lot of great acts," Klein states.
Things have changed quite a bit for the Birmingham, Ala.-based company since 1989, when the doors were opened as a backline rental company. Eventually the company's founder, John Robinson, brought in a small P.A. system, and then the company expanded in 1997 to include larger festival-type rigs and lighting. "We had a big growth in outdoor street festivals here in the Southeast about that time," Klein recalls. "That's where we really started growing."
Early on, the company opted to stay regional rather than moving into the touring market. "It's hard to break into Nashville," Klein reports. "It's a tight little town over there and we're out of the loop. We do mostly one-offs and corporate tours."
ASL stays busy, he says, by being a one-stop shop with sound, lights and video. "I think the combination of all that helps us get a lot of work that we normally wouldn't," Klein says. "The backline seems to pull it all together, because we'll get a call from a promoter that they need backline and we'll ask 'em what they are doing for sound and lights. One of them will complement the other pretty well.
"We do pick up the occasional show at the amphitheater or the civic center here if somebody is not carrying production," he continues. "We'll typically handle that. We've done several shows for the Beach Boys, who don't carry production, but most everyone carries these days. There used to be more that didn't. We also do a lot of the radio station festivals out at the amphitheater."
ASL has two rigs that clients can choose from–the Apogee rig and the Turbo rig. According to Klein, most of the music festivals are serviced with 24 Apogee 3×3 speaker cabinets and 12 AE-15 subwoofers, powered by Crest amplifiers. The FOH console is a Yamaha PM4000 and the monitor position gets a Yamaha PM3500 desk. Monitor wedges are Apogee AE-8s. The Apogee Rig also features a rack of gear that includes the standard pieces like a Yamaha SPX 990, TC Electronic 2290, Eventide H3000 as well as Drawmer gates and compressors.
The Turbo Rig includes Turbosound TFL-760H Floodlight cabinets, TSW-721 subwoofers and QSC Powerlight amplifiers. The desk and processing rack remain the same, but the monitor wedges are switched out to include Turbosound's TFM-330s.
Lighting equipment includes 96 channels of Colortran 2.4K digital dimming, a 72-channel LP 2000 controller with Q Plus and a pair of Thomas 8-lite Molefay.
The company still maintains an impressive list of backline gear with dozens of keyboards (Hammond B-3 Organ with Leslie 122 or 147 cabinets, Fender Rhodes piano, a series of Korgs, Rolands and Yamahas), guitar and bass amplification (Marshall, Fender, Mesa Boogie, Gallien/Krueger, SWR and Ampeg), drum kits from Yamaha, Pearl and Ludwig and various pieces of percussion from LP.
More often than not, the bands playing at these festivals will supply FOH mixers, but ASL will handle the responsibilities for the regional acts who play earlier in the day. The company will also handle all of the production design for these festivals, including lighting and staging set-ups.
According to Klein, competition in the Birmingham market boils down to a pair of mid-sized companies like ASL and a couple of smaller companies that concentrate on the Christian market. "We do rock, country and big corporate shows," he explains. "We'll do some Christian, but it's got to be fairly good-sized. We've got some real large churches around here, like 10,000-member churches that will have six services on Sunday, but sometimes they will want to get all their members together and they'll rent the civic center or the amphitheater and have everybody in at one time, and we'll do that."
The key for ASL, no matter the venue or the gig, is personal service. "Anybody can buy gear; it's the people that make the difference," Klein says. "We've always felt that. We've just been fortunate that we've had some really good people who have gotten us where we are; it's certainly not our state-of-the-art gear."
