South Carolina reaches a strong point in the niche music industry> GSA Business

Tom O’Hanlan, BookerLAB, Liberty

Featured by Pink Floyd to the Beatles and Eric Clapton, some might call speaker Leslie the backbone of classic rock and roll.

Tom Booker O’Hanlan called the rotary speaker a hobby – until the CEO of Sealevel Systems became one of the few people in the world to reform vintage speakers commercially for his Liberty-based BookerLAB.

“It’s a fun sport, if you want to,” said O’Hanlan of collecting the now 13 Leslie speakers that started work at BookerLAB in 2018. “And I don’t even play the keyboard. I am simply in love with technology. “

In the late 1930s, Don Leslie invented the main speaker, a cabinet with an amplifier similar to a rotating horn, to match the doppler effect with the Hammond organ. Over the decades, musicians like John Lennon have experimented with the speaker to twist their voice – as in the Beatles’ supernatural version “Tomorrow Never Knows” – as well as electric guitars and other instruments.

Today, old bands, churches that favor a traditional gospel vibrato and college-age musicians looking for a vibe that is both old and new are the market for Leslie speakers, he said.

The speakers are still being made from organs just off the production line, but insiders say the new boys on the block don’t sound exactly like their predecessors. The price doesn’t match either.

“A church could buy a new Hammond organ and one or two new Leslie speakers for $ 25,000 to $ 30,000 or they could buy a used Hammond B-3, which is the classic – like a Ford Mustang – and one or two Leslies vintage for $ 8,000 to $ 9,000 and in 10 years there will probably be no one to meet the new, ”he said.

After O’Hanlan learned to refurbish the speakers he collected, he built his experience with Sealevel circuit boards to launch a line of motor controllers, Revolution: The Advanced Motor Controller, now with other components for sale.

“We recognize that it is not a large market that we are serving, but just as Sealevel started making small plug-in cards and now we are making computers for the military, I see this as an early music business, and our focus and niche is in the Hammond and Leslie market now, ”said O’Hanlan.

Previous customers include Peter Keys, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s contemporary keyboardist; a keyboardist who toured with Who; The Revivalists and Van Morrison’s contemporary Joey DeFrancesco, who does various tasks to the trumpet and the Hammond organ.

COVID-19 precautions have stopped the regular shopping “pulse” for upcoming 2020 tours – as pieces for the organist with Grammy-winning Lauren Daigle – but O’Hanlan and James McCarter, the company’s new business development representative , are busy with at least 50 purchases from the beginning of 2020 to the end of June.

And if anything, O’Hanlan is willing to wait for things to end. He has done this before.

“It all starts in my head and stays there for a long time. Yes, it is something I have wanted to do for a long time, ”he said.

John “Chuck” Herin, Pegheds, Winnsboro

Chuck Herin cannot remember a time when music was not part of his life.

The cellist became one of the youngest members of the SC Philharmonic Orchestra when he was 14 in 1971. As soon as he sat down in the cello section, the neighboring ladies crowded around the boy with requests to tune the wooden pegs frequently. their tense cellos swelled.

“By the time the rehearsal started, I had sore hands from tuning about eight or nine other cellos,” said Herin. “Looking over my shoulder, because I was in the bottom row of the cello section – to my right was the string bottom section and the bottom section had meshed pins (tuning) since the early 1800s – and I was thinking, I wonder why cellos don’t have gears? “

In college, Herin started fiddling with prototypes of tuning pins that housed gears instead of a solid wooden shaft. It wasn’t until his sister challenged him to stop talking about the idea and actually do something about it in front of Herin’s future wife decades later, however, that Herin brought his plans to light.

A week later, he visited Columbia patent attorney Mike Mann with the idea and convinced Mauldin’s Centerline Technologies to make a plastic mold for the cello pin.

Thirty lines of instrument pins later, Herin bought a 23,000 square foot historic school and 14 lathes to start manufacturing and distributing aluminum pins to musicians from the Czech Republic to California full-time.

At the same time, he sold up to 90,000 pins a year. The cello, violin and ukulele pegs are now sold by a handful of other companies, but Herin says Pegheds is the only one on the market for about 27 of the 30 instruments, from lutes to zippers.

Herin created 30 pins for a “single” French lute with synthetic-based strings, on request. Grammy-winning cellist Lynn Herrell also used Herin’s pins to tune her Montagnana, an Italian cello that Herin says rivals a Stradivarius violin in price and rarity.

Still, the cellist is ready to retire and sell his company after all these years, but once you become a unique accessory in the field of replacement pins, it can be difficult to find a replacement for you.

“I am the only person in the United States,” said Herin. “There is a company in Taiwan that manufactures the product under my license, and there is a company in Germany called Witter that is like comparing apples to oranges, because the Witter pins are aimed at the bottom segment and are made of plastic.” he said.

Tom Strange, Square Piano Tech and Sigal Music Museum, Greenville

Tom Strange had a crazy idea in college.

Passionate about the sound of a soft-toned clavichord built by his professor at the University of South Carolina, he decided to build one himself. After graduating, he turned around a carnation and bought a Zuckermann kit.

“When they call it a kit, it’s not like IKEA, where you can assemble it in a few days and that’s it. In this case, the kit is more similar to what the great builders of antiquity would have done ”, he said.

For 20 years, Strange focused on his physics career as Abbott’s director of research and development and put his devotion to keyboards in the background. The internet was the icebreaker, however.

“The next thing you knew, you could talk to people all over the world about things like the first pianos and blackheads,” he said. “The market suddenly exploded.”

When he started collecting the first pianos, carnations and clavicords, restoration work came with the territory.

“You will not find parts that are already ready, you have to do it,” he said.

Strange launched the first piano hub squarepianotech.com, and fans and musicians began to contact him to buy pieces and diversion advice.

Like slicing bread, Strange said it is easier to model a set of pieces, such as hammer hammers, of which he makes hundreds a year, with a wooden block instead of just a replacement.

Now that the physicist has retired from Abbotts, Strange is turning his attention to the Sigal Music Museum (formerly the South Carolina Music Museum), from which he served as a curator since its opening in 2018. Last year, the Greenville museum inherited hundreds of collector Marlowe Sigal’s first keyboards and wind instruments, an exhibition scheduled to open this month.

“I have years and years of restoration work already planned,” he said.

This story originally appeared in the August 10, 2020 print edition of the GSA Business Report.