Illusion Sound & Lighting grew from DJs to full service audio production—in Amish country.
There’s about a 50-50 chance that when a truck pulls out of the Illusion Sound & Lighting driveway it will find itself behind a buggy. That will happen when a company is headquartered in Ephrata, Pa.’s Amish country
“Yeah, sometimes we’ll end up going three miles an hour following a buggy,” admits Brian Gilpin, Illusion Sound & Lighting president. “Being out here is kind of a cool thing, but manufacturers and bands come out and say, ‘Dude, I didn’t even think you guys had electric here because you’re in the middle of farm land.’”
Gilpin has been working in the sound business since 1981 when he started gigging as a mobile DJ. After 15 years of spinning discs, Gilpin moved into installations and sound reinforcement for live entertainment. In 2000, the company added lights and two years later staging and roof systems. “I made the mobile DJ thing go away because, to me, it was fairly boring,” Gilpin admits. “It got to the point where I was DJing through a concert rig and people were asking why their house system didn’t sound as good. That lead to the install work and then I just kept adding gear.”
The move into lighting and staging came, Gilpin reports, when he was looking for ways to simplify the job for clients. “It seemed to me a perfect marriage, because when you’re doing a show the lighting guy is often in a sound guy’s way and the sound guy is often in the lighting guy’s way,” he reports. “The roofing and staging happened because we were looking for a way to make ourselves unique. We weren’t thinking we were going to be the biggest sound, lighting or staging company. We just wanted to be able to answer the phone and say, ‘You bring a band and an audience. We’ll take care of the rest.’”
Going One-Stop
Turns out that the local marketplace was not quite ready for that approach. “We got a lot of people saying, ‘Why aren’t other people doing that?’ Or they would ask us, ‘Well, what do I have to do?’ It took awhile for them to understand that all they had to do was show up and tell us where the right front edge of the stage should be,” Gilpin says. “One of the things about doing it as a turnkey package is that we’re not waiting for anybody else and we can do it much faster.”
At the same time, Gilpin made sure that none of the company’s gear or trucks is marked with a logo. “We have a lot of companies that will sub us,” he explains. “So, we show up and fly the PA or whatever we’re doing and provide great customer service. We found that it’s better to not compete against everyone else in the world, but to be support for them along with what we do.”
Considering CLAIR, Atomic Design and Mountain Productions are all in the immediate area, Gilpin’s invisibility policy is a smart one. At the same time, he says, “I have a good relationship with all of those companies.”
While the company has been concentrating on servicing the local festival and fair market, Gilpin says that they are looking at getting into touring in 2009. “We’ve been offered legs of tours before, but we’ve turned them down only because we’ve been busy with multiple-day events,” he says. “But we’ve recently talked to three acts and it looks like we’re going to get those tours. It’s the first time we’ve taken the calls and had the meetings.”
The Right Gear for the Gig
To help service the additional work, Gilpin is in the process of buying two additional speaker systems and consoles for Illusion. “We’re building two more complete systems. Some of it will be used for the tours, since two of them overlap by two weeks, but it’s mostly to support our growth,” he says. “We can do four shows at one time. We have four roof systems, four stages, four lighting rigs, four audio rigs and then enough to be dangerous on a fifth show. We don’t have a complete fly rig and 120K of lighting and a bunch of moving stuff, but these other two systems will turn it into six full-blown systems and then enough gear that there is plenty of back-up stuff.”
The company, he says, takes meticulous care of its gear and then turns it over every three years. The driving factor for gear purchases are the riders that he sees. “If I see something that’s out of the norm, I’ll call that engineer and say, ‘I notice you have a X-Y-Z on here. That’s the first time I’ve seen that on a rider. Why did you pick it?’ That sparks enough interest that I’ll grab FOH to see who else is talking about it. That typically starts a snowball effect and I’ll hear a lot about it and we’ll determine if it’s something that we’re going to add into inventory.”
As for 2009, Gilpin is seeing a change in how promoters and producers are approaching the fairs and festivals in the region. Rather than bringing in a major act for $100,000 or so for one show on Tuesday night, the plans are for doing six shows in a row with smaller acts. “They say they’re going to spend a little more money to have $35,000 acts six times during the week, but they’re going to fill all those days versus just one,” he says. “That’s how it seems to be working, and at this point, we’ve got about 20 percent more work on the calendar for 2009 than we did for 2008.”
Illusion’s combination of gear and work ethic has kept them busy. “We’ve been lucky that we own the right gear, we’ve got the right employees, the right attitude, that we’ve been lucky that we can talk the talk and walk the walk.”
