Don't look for a website for Relles Sound. Owner George Relles of the Eugene, OR-based company hasn't bothered with one, as he's "not in a position to grow my business." But it's an enviable position to be in, because he's "basically been servicing the clients I've had for 20, 30 years."
And what a list of clients it is. Since 1980 he's been handling the Peter Britt Music Festival. "It is a beautiful outdoor 2,200 seat amphitheater with a permanent stage complex located in the hills just west of Medford, OR," he says. Right after that there's the Classical Festival which runs for three weeks in the same pristine spot, so he keeps an entire system, which includes a Meyer Sound MICA/700-HP main system with UPA-1P, CQ-2 fills, a Soundcraft Vi6 FOH console and a Yamaha PM5D-RH monitor console, up there for the summer.
Another longtime client is the Oregon Bach Festival at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, OR. "This year the first performance was Osvaldo Golijov's Azul featuring Yo-Yo Ma to a sold-out 2,500 seat audience." There are two Summer Parks series that he's done for 20 years, and the River Rhythms Festival that he's done for nearly 30.
Also on his plate this summer are concerts by Alison Kraus, Cirque de la Symphonie, Bobby McFerrin and the Yellowjackets, The Avett Brothers, The Decemberists, Sara Bareilles, k.d. lang, Willie Nelson, Chris Isaak, Aimee Mann, Cheap Trick, Chris Botti, The B-52s, Michael McDonald and Boz Scaggs.
He has been called on to work outside the Northwest region too: Lincoln Center (New York), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts (Miami), to name a few. Beyond the U.S., he's been behind the board at Barbican Centre (London), Royal Theatre Carré (Amsterdam), Casa da Música (Porto, Portugal), Santa Cecilia Hall (Rome), and even in the Canary Islands.
It's been a slow and steady climb. "For the first 10 years, I wasn't sure I was really in the sound business," Relles says. "It still felt more of hobby as I was still teaching banjo to up to 95 students." But his dedication to the pursuit of quality live sound and his instinct to constantly reinvest in his gear made it so.
From On Stage to FOH
Relles was born and raised in Sacramento, CA, where an interest in music blossomed early. At the age of 10, he picked up the banjo and taught himself to play. This was at the height of the folk music craze, though his inspiration soon switched from Kingston Trio fare to the genius of Earl Scruggs. Those who admire Relles will be shocked to know how close the pro audio industry came to never have him as a member of the tribe: In 1968, a few years after high school, he was working towards becoming a dentist.
Luckily, a lifetime of saying "open wide" was averted when two-time Grammy award winner Mason Williams hired him for his bluegrass symphony.
"I had always been an audiophile ever since I was young," Relles recalls. "I was that kid always listening to records, classical and folk music more than anything else – I really had a penchant for acoustic music." His passion could not mask the ugly reality that "pro" audio at the time was terrible. Even when on stage with Williams the quality or lack thereof was disturbing to him. "I was just so upset and distraught over the state of sound," he says.
This led to a journey from the stage to behind the console as he started to figure out solutions. For a Bluegrass festival he ran, he put together a system that included Klipsch La Scala speakers, assorted AKG C 451 and C 414 mics and a "cool little Allen & Heath Quasi 10-channel mixer. It was very compact, only an inch thick, and, for its time, pretty high quality." It was a system that put him far ahead of the local competition for jazz and folk concerts, and with it he started a relationship with the Spokane Symphony in 1977 that continues to today.
His reputation built quickly, and the University of Oregon started calling on him to handle their jazz and folk shows. "We did everyone from Ornette Coleman to Lou Rawls. I got to do sound for Sonny Rollins, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck and Bill Monroe." Relles Sound grew slowly. "And I mean slowly!" he adds, with a laugh.
Getting Those Meyer Speakers
Another long relationship began around this time when Relles was introduced to the work of John Meyer. Relles says he became an instant fan when he mixed a concert with Williams and the Sacramento Symphony at the Rancho Murieta Country Club in the late 1970s. "Yule ‘Thorny' Thorton was the system tech for McCune Sound, and he introduced me to the JM3 speakers John was designing exclusively for McCune at the time," he says. "I kept in contact with Thorny and remember going down to the factory in Berkeley when John first started Meyer Sound to audition the UPA-1A."
Despite being impressed with those Meyer speakers, they were "way out of my price range at the time – it wasn't until 1986 when I was able to get [a Meyer system]!"
How he even got that system is quite a tale. In the early 1980s, Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh established a community in central Oregon from where he preached against socialism, institutionalized religion, and for more sex. His spiritual quest was not immune to the finer things in life, including a collection of 30 Rolls-Royces. He also had an appreciation for quality sound, which included a new Meyer speaker system. "He had six MSL3s and two UPAs, and the system could only to be used for the voice of guru. But two weeks after he got it, he took a two year vow of silence!" Shortly after that, his community imploded, Rajneesh went to jail, and everything went up on the auction block. Happily, the Meyer gear went into Relles' inventory.
"I think it was about 1982 when I realized that if I wanted to change what I was doing from a hobby to a business, I needed to do pop and rock ‘n' roll," he says. In 1983, he took out a bank loan to acquire a Lexicon 200 digital reverb unit – the only loan he would take out in his long career. "If I wanted to separate my company from the local pack, I needed not only better skills, but the best equipment I could afford."
By 1990, he says he further expanded his offerings when he was able to buy his first Meyer system new and a Gamble HC-40. "During that time, I really upgraded my equipment, and by 1995, I became a Meyers' dealer for the Northwest territory." He adds that in addition to their equipment, he really admires the company's education center.
"George is resolute in his pursuit of precise measurement and accuracy in order to obtain the best audio system performance for his clients," says John Meyer. "He was an early proponent of the Meyer Sound SIM audio analyzer and one of our first users of MAPP Online acoustical prediction software."
"Relles is the best from Seattle to San Francisco, bar none," says local sound engineer and producer Ben Glausi, who sometimes works for Relles. "He embraced digital technology early on, and I personally have seen him control a [Yamaha] PM5D through a touch screen laptop in the audience over five years ago, long before that type of technology was commonly used." He adds that he was also on the cutting edge of SIM and time alignment and cardioid subwoofer enclosures.
Today, when Relles reflects back on it all, he says, "For me, it was all about keeping the company strong and not growing too fast. I'm the ultimate owner/operator. I don't have [permanent] employees. I don't do installs. I don't do any of that because I don't want to be an office manager and have to deal with things like payroll. So the company is quite small – but I've been successful in keeping the quality of work I do really high."
Relles has spent a career adapting to new technology, and always striving for better ways to achieve acoustic music reinforcement. "My goal has always been to create an environment where the audience is unaware of the sound system enabling them to focus on the performance. The best flattery for me is that I am not noticed! A sound system need not get in the way of a performance, but enhance it."
