Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Posted by Kyle Bailey on Jul 08, 2016

Ahhh, there’s nothing quite like the sound of broken glass in the morning. As the driver began to unload our long-awaited, brand-new, custom display cases, there was no mistaking the tell-tale tinkling of shattered glass. Well, add it to The List.

After the sheer exhilaration of being in our new store started to wear off, we took stock of the situation and realized: We have a lot of work to do before we open! We’ve come a long way toward that goal, but a few setbacks have us thinking about opening the doors in early August rather than late July. For example, three out of the 20 cases that we ordered arrived with broken glass. The good news is that the rest of the case structures were not damaged, so it’s a simple matter of getting the broken panes replaced.

I am proud of our beautiful acoustic room, which I think of as the jewel of the store. It has a unique wood feature with reclaimed walnut planks placed in an angled pattern that starts on one end of the room, goes up the wall, continues across the ceiling, and down the other side. You really have to see it to fully appreciate it. And, until recently, you would have also needed flashlight! It seems our lighting supplier received a bad batch of LED drivers from China and we were among their unlucky clients that had them. At one point, half a dozen lights were turning on and off randomly while Kent was trying to arrange our Martins & Taylors & Taks (oh my) on the walls.

Replacement drivers fixed the lights, but we realized there was another issue with the acoustic room, acoustic room, acoustic room… Too much reverb. An acoustic room should be a little lively, but ours was a bit over the top. Kent demonstrated the problem by making this strange chirping noise and you could hear it ring for 10 seconds afterwards. Luckily, we had lots of sound-absorbing wall covering left over from the amp room, so we had some installed in the acoustic room to tame the echo a bit.

Speaking of the amp room, we had really cool amp risers built to look like road cases with black laminate surfaces and metal corners. They look great and work well for displaying the amps. However, we soon realized that, because they are hollow inside, they added a lot of bass resonance and made all the amps sound boomy --Not a good thing in the high-end amp room! We solved this one by cutting small access panels in the risers and filling them with Rockwool insulation. This worked perfectly and now the amps sound great! We had them fill beneath the stage area up front to ward off resonance there as well.

So, these are the types of little issues we have been wrestling with by the dozen over the last couple weeks. They are not difficult to fix, but they require contractors to work in the store. So, we have to clear our products out of the way instead of getting them setup and displayed perfectly. I feel like we took a step backward last week while these things were fixed, but I am not discouraged. I truly have the greatest staff an owner could ask for. When they see a problem, they don’t come to me and say, “This won’t work because….” Instead, they say “Here is a challenge and this is how we can overcome it.” When one of us is freaked out by working in a room full of psychedelic flashing lights, the others calm him down. And when I stand outside proudly, only to watch broken glass being unloaded from a truck, they rally behind me and pick my spirits back up. Despite a few challenges, things really are coming along nicely. This place is going to be awesome!