Here’s an interview with Butch Gilmore, another Sales Consultant with All Pro Sound’s Packaged Systems Division:
How long have you been working at All Pro Sound? I've been working for All Pro Sound going on 20 years now and loving every minute of it.
When did you first start working with sound equipment? I started working with sound & recording equipment when I learned how to play guitar. Some of my friends and I started a band and played on Friday & Saturday nights at a local community center that had dances for teenagers every weekend. I was always looking for ways to get a better sound out of the equipment we had. I'll never forget one time I got an idea to use a 4 track reel to reel recorder that I had for a stereo delay for 2 guitar amps that I had on each side of the stage. You heard a note out of 1 amp & then a split second later you’d hear the same sound out of the amp on the other side of the stage. This used the sound on sound feature on the 4 track recorder. It really sounded good back in the days when the only pedals out there were for distortion, and there weren't many of them, either.
How long have you been playing guitar, bass and keyboards? I started playing around with the guitar back in 1956 learning everything I could from a few friends that had been playing for a while. I would sit around the house just picking around on my first guitar that I bought myself from Sears & Roebuck for less than 100 dollars. It was cheap even back then, but it did the job. I started playing the bass while I was in the Army in 1962 when I needed to earn extra money. While I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, I used to go out on weekends to a club called Ces' Bon and listen to the band that played nightly. I got to know the band pretty well. One night, their bass player didn't show up and they asked me to sit in. Previously I had only played around on bass but had never played one in a band. That made me a little cautious at first, but it went well enough that night that they asked me if I would be interested in playing with them full time. I gave them an immediate yes answer, not fully realizing just how hard it would be to do that while being in the Army. But somehow I was able to work it out so I could play for them 6 nights a week without being thrown in the brig. I enjoyed playing the bass so much I kept playing at that same club until I got out of the Army & then some. I started playing keyboards just out of curiosity. When keyboards first became popular, I was intrigued with the thought of all the sounds that you could get out of them. As technology progressed and companies started producing keyboards that not only sounded great, but could record with multiple voices, multi-track style, I was completely hooked. I'm not what you would consider a real keyboard player. I just play enough to be able to sequence some pretty decent music using the keyboard’s midi sequencer. I'm really into midi. That’s where the real fun is, especially when you're using a good computer to control it.
You play bass and also work with post-production multitrack audio mixdown in your church. How does this help you assist All Pro Sound customers? As far as the recording end of it goes, that's the real love of my life. A long time ago when I was still a kid growing up, my parents gave me a portable tape recorder that I just fell in love with on the first day. My first real recorder was a Roberts 2-track reel to reel recorder with sound on sound. I saw it on a shelf in a pawn shop and I knew at once that I had to have it. It quickly spread from there to everything that recorded. I put together a small recording studio that includes an Allen & Heath 32 channel mixing console coupled with an Alesis 24 track digital recorder that has the ability to dump all 24 tracks via firewire into a computer so that I can use software to edit the tracks. Then I master them down to 2 tracks and burn a professional CD. We put that in an EZdupe high speed CD duplicator to produce as many CD's as we need. The software we use is Adobe Audition. It is very easy to use and is also very powerful digital multi-track recording software. I find that doing the things that I do helps me relate all of my experiences to the many customers I deal with every day. All of us here at All Pro love what we do. When you are selling to the public, it helps to have a working knowledge of what you are selling. This makes it easier to understand customers’ needs better and also helps you avoid selling them something they don't need. The saves them time and money. Customers with equipment problems appreciate it when you are able to walk them through their problems and help them fix what’s wrong. That’s what this business is all about -- helping our customers get the equipment they need and making sure they know how to operate it correctly. We are able to do just that simply because we live what we do.
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