Interview With Paul Besch of QCA (Quiet Country Audio)

Around the Buffalo area, there are a multitude of professional and prolific recording studios. We are blessed to live in a city and greater area with so much talent, and Paul Besch is a big player in this pool of engineers, producers, studio owners, and creative collaborators. I had a friendly chat with him to get the inside scoop about his recording studio, Quiet Country Audio (QCA), and to learn more about him and his process.

Max: I keep hearing terrible things about the industry right now.

Paul: My absolute best friend moved to Nashville about five years ago, and our other friend works for a company… so, like, if you’re Taking Back Sunday, you pay a company like he works for to design your lights and what microphones you use live, the whole thing. So he would design it and then build it. Then Taking Back Sunday, Alabama Shakes, Rob Zombie, Paramore, Korn, they have like nine of [these companies] strategically placed throughout the country: three on each coast and three down the middle, so as you’re touring you can be like, “Hey, this monitor doesn’t work and these mics don’t work, and we need new cables for A and B.” They resupply it. He works for them and trains their techs.

For a week straight, they do training on their setup. Set it all up, run the set, tear it all down, load it into the trailer. Take it out of the truck, set it back up, tear it all down. They make you practice that every day for like a week so that when you go out on the road… 

Anyways, he worked his way up to corporate. In January, he just got a promotion, a six-figure promotion, and he got two paychecks out of it before the entire… Dude, it’s gone. Not just his company but the whole industry. Some of the shit that he tells me about his high-level boardroom meetings… They’re all just like, “Yeah, that’s over with. No more live shows. It will never go back to the way it was.” They’re all just terrified, and hopefully they’re wrong. He just got furloughed this week, and before he went on furlough, they said, “We’re just gonna pay you out for all your time off that you had because we don’t know if we’ll have the money when you come back. We don’t know what’s gonna happen.” That whole industry is dark as fuck right now. 

I just really hope that things pull through. I know it’s going to be years before things are close to normal again.

Yeah, I mean it’s not forever. Billy Joel is still gonna play shows and there are still people that need to set that up. It’s not going to end, but it took a major fucking blow.

What kind of music are you listening to right now?

I’m all over the place. It’s Arkells, Finch, there’s this band The Hire from 2005 that came out with this album, and I was driving around the other day, I completely forgot it existed, and it is, like, perfect all the way through and I can’t stop listening to it. It’s called “Histrionics.” Jimmy Eat World, Steel Train, Super American, The Best of Drive-Thru Records, just all over the place. But it’s sunny, so I’m listening to happy shit, I’m listening to pop-punk.

I totally feel that. I’ve heard some people say that it’s Bon Iver through the whole winter, and then as soon as everything gets nice out, it all changes.

That’s how I defrost, man. I defrost with Drive-Thru Records!

What is your background in music and the production side of things? How does this all play into your backstory?

As short of a long story as I can make it, I started playing music when I was 11, first full-length record was out when I was 12. I was in that band until I was 18, the same four members from the town I grew up in. That was pop-punk, Drive-Thru, that whole thing. Then I got really into Radiohead like people who are 19 do, and I started playing guitar in this touring band. I toured for about two years and then the singer of that band was like, “Yo, I went to recording school; we should record ourselves!” So we bought a little interface at the time and some speakers, then he left the band and it was over, but I had really gotten into recording. 

I just didn’t feel comfortable… I know how hard it is for bands to come up with cash, and I didn’t feel like I had earned the money from the people who would be paying me without doing something education-wise first. But with a brand-new kid and a full-time job, I went to Berklee College of Music online, and got a Masters in Audio Production and Engineering. Once I completed that is when I opened the studio and thought, “OK, now I am confident enough to be deserving of all the people’s music and money that they’ve invested into their stuff, and I feel comfortable now that I can help people fulfill their vision.” From there, I grew it out of my Mom’s garage until it moved over to the new space that I just opened.

That’s awesome. And this space is pretty new, right? I’ve seen construction photos on your Instagram. How recently was it put together?

So, we bought the building in 2013. I share the space with my brother who does graphic design for a living, and he works with people like Santa Cruz Skateboards, Dogfish Head, so it’s like skateboarding, snowboarding, beer, graphic design for tons and tons of bands and artists. When we bought the building, the idea was to combine our businesses so that within one house, you could come make the record with me, he’ll handle the artwork, I work with Brett Ballachino in the studio…

I mean, being in bands since I was 11, I know what you have to do when you make a record. I know all the steps involved. You always have to find friends who have friends, or know people who know people, to get your website, your merch made, your layout done, book the studio time, you gotta get your guitar set up, and all that stuff I wanted to combine into a one-stop-place, so if you wanted it, we could handle it from front to back. 

I love the idea of that. You know the phrase “It takes a village”? It’s like you guys are building the village here.

That’s what I’m trying to do, man; I’m trying to grow the community. There’s tons of studios run by wonderful engineers all over Buffalo, actually, and I was just really thinking of coming up with something different that nobody else was doing.

And also, you know, a lot of brothers end up in bands, and it’s funny because me and my brother do not share musical taste EVER. Once every six years, we like the same record. We’ve never been in a band together, we’ve never really played together, but he’s got so much talent, and I’m trying to do my thing, and they just are a perfect pair, so why not join them up?

But yeah, we bought the building in 2013, and he moved his studio in 2015, and I have spent the past five years building my side that I just opened in March.

So he had been using the space since before QCA was there?

Yeah. So he’s got screen-printing, he’s got this whole drafting area because he… the cool thing about what he does is that it’s all illustration. So how a lot of things now are digital, when he grew up and went to school for art, there wasn’t really… like, computers were coming up, but if you were gonna design something, you still were using scissors and tape and glue and paper, and you draw it all out. He still works that way, and I think that really sets him apart.

A lot of the stuff he does is really hard to do in a digital way. It’s like an Amp Modeler versus a real amp. A lot of people use the modelers, but he still uses amps. He’s awesome.

I wanna talk a little bit about these sessions you’ve been doing, these Audiotree-esque sessions. I’ve seen you guys do sessions with The Eaves and Super American. What is the process like for that? What is it like working with these guys? What kind of work goes into an audio/video presentation like that?

It’s completely different from multitracking a record. I ran that out of the old studio kind of as a business card almost. I started it with Andy DeLuca a while ago, and grew that kind of as a, like, “Hey, check out my studio.” Because, again, full-time job, I had one kid at the time, now I have two. I can’t really go out and party at every show with all these bands and make all these friends. What I can do is record you live and make a video and make a vlog series out of it.

But then I really grew to love it. It’s a completely different love than making records. It’s a live show, so it’s more “seat of your pants.” Things go wrong all the time, and people are making mistakes, but we just keep rolling with it whether it’s the band or us. It’s a really good way to exercise the muscle of the process so that when I do go to make a record… I can take a lot of chances in the live sessions that kind of mold the approaches that I take when I make a record.

It’s less stress in one way because it’s just fun. There’s not a lot of pressure in the live sessions. All the bands I’m doing it with, I’m friends with and we all go way back, so we hang out, drink some beers, play some songs, and set up some cameras and mics. That’s where I really get to experiment: “What if I try this mic on this amp, or this position on this drum?” or whatever. That then gives me the toolset so that when I go to make a record, I go, “Oh, I used it on this and it sounded really good. Let’s try it now.”

They’re fun, man; they’re just a blast. At one point, Andy DeLuca took off and blew up, which is great, and the studio took off, and I never really clicked with anybody… because it’s still a lot of work. It’s fun, but it’s a lot of work. I was just waiting for the right person. And when I met Brett, we had a meeting one night at the studio, I showed him everything, and we didn’t know each other at all but just totally clicked. Every idea that I had, he was totally on board with and finishing each other’s sentences and all that shit. It just worked out really well and he’s awesome. Things are going really good.

That’s great, man. It’s so rare to find people that you work with well, that it’s effortless to bounce ideas off of.

Not that it hurt, but when DeLuca left, I was so stoked for him because he got the gig with 5 Seconds of Summer, and just all this huge shit… It took us a year to get to the point where we could read each other’s minds when we were doing it, and it was fast, and it came out great every time. It’s a team. You gotta figure each other out and figure out how each other works. At that time when he took off, it was like, “That was a lot of fun. I’m sad it’s over, but it was what it was, like a moment in time.” Then I had this new place, and it was like, “Well, I got more room now.” 

Everybody always hits me up saying, “I love them. When are you going to do more?” Like I said, when I just so happened to meet Brett, it was like, “Yo, you’re down, this would be super fun.” He’s awesome. He brings a whole new life into it.

Unfortunately, we had like 10 booked and we only got through three before coronavirus hit. We are going to keep doing them, but it’s just gonna be a little bit before we can fire it back up to full speed again.

Who inspires you as a producer or engineer?

I didn’t really care about this stuff until my early 20’s, and then I started to go back. It didn’t matter to me who made the record when I was younger, but then going back, I started to ask myself, “Yo, why does this sound so good?”

There’s two people that stick out from the past and two today. Definitely Jerry Finn, the guy behind all the Blink records and Jimmy Eat World. He was just the god of the 2000’s rock/alt/emo sound. There are some other dudes like Brian McTernan, who is awesome… There’s the big guys with anything you know, if you’re in a band you’ll go, “Oh I love the Beatles” because, well who doesn’t? There are engineers like that where it’s like, “You’re just huge and everything you do sounds huge and awesome.”

As far as an inspiration, I go more to peers, man. Jay Zubricky at GCR who is an awesome dude and one of my oldest friends. I’m always listening to his stuff and just seeing how he’s working on things. Sam Pura is a really good friend of mine, he runs Panda Studios in California. His attention to detail is second to none, and he has been just a wonderful friend to me and taught me a lot in a very short amount of time. Will Yip in Philadelphia is awesome too. He works out of Studio 4 and has worked with so many bands like Balance and Composure and Circa Survive.

I’ll hear records, and they sound good, but most of all, I am inspired by the people that I know in the area. Just like bands when they play live shows with each other, how they feed off each other. The biggest inspirations come from people I know.

That’s wholesome as fuck, man. 

*Laughs* Well, because the other dudes are almost untouchable, you know? Maybe untouchable is the wrong word, but they’re out there doing their thing, and they sit on a higher plane where it’s like, “I don’t know you at all, but everything you do sounds great.” But when you can get it down to a granular level and actually develop friendships with people that do what you do, that’s more inspirational to me.

I get what you’re saying. When you’re friends with someone, it’s easier to recognize what great work they’re doing, and obviously Rick Rubin isn’t going to talk to any of us.

It’s so far out of reach that… like I said, when you are in a local band playing with other local bands, you can push each other. You watch your friends tear it up right before you go on, and you’re like, “OK man, awesome!” and it fires you up.

It kind of plays back into what I’m trying to do, like you said, building a village. I want to grow that community bigger. That’s what inspires me to grow. In Buffalo, there are so many producers, studios, and engineers with so many different genres of music with so many amazing musicians. The potential is just limitless here. It’s awesome.

Going back to Quiet Country’s construction, I know it has sort of a DIY construction, so who is responsible for the actual creation of the place?

So, there were a couple of phases. It was a huge learning experience for me. I got the building, and I had the dimensions and stuff, and when I went to find studio designers, basically I was getting laughed at. The first question was, “What’s your budget?” and if it was under $2 million, “Fuck off.” Really outrageous numbers that were like, “No, I don’t have half a million or a million.” So it was a little defeating because it’s like, “Are you telling me I can’t get this done in a quasi-DIY way where it’s still at a professional level but I can do it?”

And I forget what I posted, but I think it was on Gearslutz, and this guy John Brandt who was out of Nashville and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, he hit me up and said, “Hey man, I’ll work with any budget, any skill set, I’ll help you through it.” That blossomed into a really good friendship. He ended up going really deep though, ’cause the building was just a pole barn; it was empty. I mean it was literally just empty, the four walls on the outside of the building, and then the entire thing was hollow, and we built every single thing from the ground up. Bathroom, kitchen, my brother’s side, the shop, the studio, the live room — all of it. The whole building was hollow. So he designed from the exterior walls all the way in. All the framing, all the electrical, all the treatment — just every bit of the way, and he was so helpful.

I went through, like, five contractors throughout the process. Some of them were general construction, but it’s just so far outside of what a normal contractor does. They are used to remodeling bathrooms, or putting up a bedroom wall or taking down a wall, things that are routine for them, and to bring them into what I wanted to do… Normally, you’d frame a wall and put drywall on each side, but actually, I want to build two walls, and I want six layers of drywall, and I want a layer of plywood, and the studs can’t line up, all of this shit… So yeah, I think I went through five contractors before I finally found somebody that was willing to do what I wanted and work with me. 

That was the crazy thing! I got the blueprints from John. Architectural, ArchH D-size blueprints, 2 feet by 3 feet. I felt like I was in a Disney movie rolling out this giant blue tube of paper, but it’s like, “Dude, everything is laid out for you; I just need you to build the Lego set. You have the tools to cut the wood and the wood, here are the Lego directions; just follow them. You don’t have to think about this at all. Read the paper, do what it says, and be done.” And what I would run into is I would say that, I would leave, and then I’d come back at the end of the day, and they’d say “Oh, well you know you don’t really need to do…” and it’s like, “Stop right there. Yes, you do! Your brain, shut it off! I don’t need your input, I don’t need your opinion. I just need you to follow what’s on the sheet.”

So I hired a contractor to build the walls, put in the floor, do the electrical, everything but the treatment. When we got down to the treatment, that’s when me and my friend Mike spent a year — all of 2019 from January until December nonstop, all summer, all winter — building all the treatments on the walls and finishing everything up. My one friend, John Crook from Ugly Sun, built the doors for me, and then we installed the window, and then we installed the doors to the frames. Just 8,000 trips to Home Depot and memorizing YouTube video after YouTube video and buying tools I couldn’t even pronounce to do work that I had no business doing.

But I just really wanted to own it, man. I really wanted it so that when you walk in you can ask me anything. You wanna know how thick the walls are? How big the rooms are? I know where every screw is, you know? I remember doing it.

A lot of engineers just get called into the studio at random, but you know your space like your home. That’s really cool.

You know, I’m not a contractor, and I’m not Mr. Tool Guy, so it was a real… There were times where I was just… I mean I went two years without making a record, and there were tons of times building it where I was just forgetting, like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Nobody even remembers that I had a studio, nobody’s going to call me to make anything…” It gets really self-defeating sometimes, because it’s a lot of work. And it’s a lot of really detailed work, and it’s things I couldn’t afford mentally or financially to do wrong and have to do over.

I had to really slow down and take my time. It’s the opposite of making music, you know? It’s all I wanted to do, but to get there there was a year of hard work between me and that dream becoming a reality. I really had to earn it, man. Like I said, there was a lot of times where I really felt defeated, but the reception to it so far has been unreal and worth every minute of it. Sometimes, you just lose focus, and you gotta go home and regroup and try again the next day. 

It is an absolutely beautiful space. The work definitely paid off. 

Thanks, dude, I tried! *Laughs* I did my best, man, you know? That’s just it. There were some corners I had to cut, but I had to look in the mirror and realize what I was actually capable of and what was just beyond my skill set. I’m happy with it.

It’s done kind of in a modular way where if I want to upgrade in the future, I can upgrade the treatment even further. I kinda did a basic treatment of the rooms. The plans that I have from John Brandt are far more detailed but just kind of outside my skill set, so as the studio grows, I can always just redo it and continue to work on it, and that’s just what I’m doing now, so… Get it done, and then improve it as I go.

Well, once you have a working space, you can upgrade it from there.

That’s what I mean. That was the problem; it was just time and money and struggle. And six months into that, you’re like, “Why am I fucking… Who cares? Who even cares? Is this ever going to get done?” There’s no light at the end of the tunnel ever, and then as it drew closer, it was like, “Holy shit, this is really gonna happen!” and then I really pushed through at the end of last year to make sure it was exactly how I wanted. 

Speaking of the space you have, when I was in there, the pedals and the amount of gear was just astounding. The amount of choice that’s there is… Has this been a lifelong collection? What’s been some of your go-to favorite gear when you’re producing a record?

It’s hard to answer. I’m just a gear slut, man. Like, who am I talking to, a drummer? A guitarist? I’m a nerd, man, just a total dork with it. From the color of it to the shape of it to the voltage it runs at to what dials are in it — all of it. From studio gear to microphones… just everything.

I guess some of my favorite things that I have for my guitars, my favorite guitar that I have is a Fender Starcaster with Lawler Wide-Range humbuckers in it. The pickups cost more than the guitar did, but they sound like they did, and it’s awesome. A couple of amps I have that are really cool, I have a Bad Cat Hot Cat 30 that sounds really good, and I have a Supro 88TN from 1966, a 2×12 that has not been redone yet because the Supro brand got sold and remade by Pigtronix a couple of years ago. They started reissuing those amps, but the one I have is from back in the day and they haven’t remade it yet, so… It’s just got a really cool tube tremolo to it; it’s just really unique.

Studio-wise, gear-wise, my favorite thing is my Chandler 32-channel summing rig. I have two Chandler mini rack mixers. Chandler is the company that went to Abbey Road and was the only company ever allowed to go into Abbey Road and trace all their circuits in their gear and reproduce it and sell it. Essentially, it’s a 32-channel Abbey Road Console, in a way. That thing is really dope. It was specifically made for Depeche Mode in the UK and flown here, so that was rad. That thing rules.

Basses, I have a Ripper, an Epiphone Ripper, it’s really really cool. And microphones, man, my friend made a couple of Neumann u87s to ’60s specs with new-old stock parts and shit — they came out amazing. Also, there are some called Little Blondies, and they’re these little microphones the size of a shotgun shell, and they just sound really really cool. They’re really small, but you can hit them really hard and they’re just awesome. 

Even though I have a lot of gear, it all serves a very particular purpose. Like, I buy and sell a lot, but I don’t like doubles of anything. If anything is like, “Well, this pedal does what that pedal does” or “This amp does what that amp does,” then I pick one and the other one goes. There is a lot of shit, but it’s years of refining over and over and over again, of like, “I don’t need this anymore because a) I don’t need it, or b) I don’t use it because I bought something that does what it does better.”

I feel like I’m at a place now where I don’t really want much anymore. Everything that I want is like $10,000. Now it’s all the ridiculous shit I could never afford, but for the most part, I’m really comfortable with my addiction right now. *Laughs*

You’ve got a bit of a distillation process going; you’re, like, finding the fountain of youth. Every piece of gear gets more and more useful until you just could do anything.

Yeah. My tape echoes I would say are also really special to me, pretty much everything you could want. I have an echoplex, I have an EP-1 that’s tube, I have an EP-3 that’s solid-state — those are both from the ’60s — then I have a Space Echo from the ’70s… you name it, man. I have an Oil Can delay, I just bought a tube tape machine that just sounds unreal, a reel to reel. It’s just a thousand pounds, and it’s got these really rare tubes in it. I bought it because people apparently take the tube preamps that are in them out and rack them and use them to run mics through and make records, but this thing is just a work of art. I bought it thinking I was going to tear it apart and rehouse it and do all that, but it’s just too cool. And it works, so…

When you get old gear and it actually works and doesn’t have any problems, it’s such a unicorn. I’ve spent so many years learning how to fix all my own shit that’s been broken, so to actually buy something old and it works is like, “I gotta preserve it for now.” But the second that tape machine dies, I’m chopping that thing in half. 

Follow-up to this one: If you could have one piece of gear from all time for free, what would that be? 

A Mellotron. A ’60s Mellotron. An OG real-deal Mellotron. I touched one once when I was in New York a couple years ago. I was at this music store, and they had a sign that said “Do Not Touch” on it, and listen man, that moment doesn’t happen twice, so fuck your sign. 

*Laughs* Well, those are all my questions for today. Do you want to do a social media plug?

Absolutely, man! I mostly use Instagram. I’m still too old for Twitter, I don’t get it. Facebook is just a cesspool. I like Instagram because it’s pictures and I’m simple, and that’s where I post all my gear and all my shit that I do.

Paul Besch

Instagram: @qcaudio

Website: qcaudio.com

Ryan Besch (Paul’s brother)

Instagram: @yourcinema

Website: yourcinema.net