Make Music Day 2020: West Street Digital Spotlight and Lineup

Conniption Fits at Higher Ground. Photo by Bain Testa.

Andre Maquera is the former guitarist-vocalist for the hair-metal band 8084, now head of West Street Digital studio in St Albans, VT. He’s lived the life of a traveling musician for twenty years, and as just a musician for over forty. Searching for 8084 nowadays will turn up pictures of group lineups demonstrating the quintessential meaning of the term hair-metal. While many people change with time and profession, it’s clear that Andre is still very much the same guitar player at heart as he was decades ago, just now with a studio to call his own.

I’ve already spoken with Andre about Big Heavy World’s Make Music Day live-stream, and so upon approaching him again I knew generally about his career and love of music. But now I got the opportunity to find out where that love originated and blossomed. Andre talked to me about his original life goal as a surgeon, about how he was a pre-med major planning to go into the same field as his father and mother. On the topic, he said: “My dad was a surgeon, my mom was an RN, I was gonna be a doctor. It’s what I planned on doing, my entire life growing up that’s what I did. I watched all the medical specials, I read medical texts.”

“When I was in sixth grade I really wanted to play the guitar,” Andre said in regards to the origin of his love of music. He says that: “I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan like everybody. And that wasn’t the turning point for me, but it was something about the guitar. It just attracted me. I took guitar lessons for about a year, then my teacher moved me up to the teacher that was, like, the teacher that everybody wanted to work with. And after three lessons the guy looked at me and goes: ‘Naw, don’t waste your time. You have no aptitude for this instrument. Don't waste your time, don’t waste mine.’”

The story may have ended there, and the world may have never heard the tunes of 8084 or seen the luxury of West Street Digital. But luckily enough, it didn’t.

“So from sixth grade all the way to high school, I didn’t play guitar. But all my friends played instruments. And so my best friend Ernie, who I always hung out with, peer pressure forced me back into playing music. Not usual. Some people fall into robbing stores, stealing stuff, smoking cigarettes. Me? I fell back into music.”

The control room at West Street Digital. Photo by Andre Maquera.

West Street Digital studio itself, as Andre puts it, “evolved” from the band he played with. They had worked in studios extensively for their own projects, in a time where studios were notoriously expensive. “You could spend thousands of dollars in the day in a studio,” Andre said. “And we started to think, you know, maybe we should put together our own place.” And thus, West Street Digital was born. Or at least the idea of it was. Its first facility, like all great businesses, began in the garage of Andre’s old house. It was originally just a “playground” for 8084, but as the studio evolved: “we realized that if we made it available to other artists then we could get better gear and grow the business. It was never planned to create a studio that was a commercial facility. It grew into that.”

Andre’s job, in his own words, is to “give you what you’re looking for so you can realize what you want.” The process of which involves a good amount of trying new things out and mutual respect between producer and artist. Andre says that as the producer “you are the vibe-master of the room,” and that “it (the studio space) can be anything you want it to be.” It’s difficult to try and describe, but the best way to do it would be by the concept of pace. Everyone has their own pace at which they work at, and Andre likes to find that pace. Not to control it, but rather to understand and harness it.

“The first thing I do with any artist is I sit down with them and have a conversation about “What are your goals? What do you wanna do? What’s your ultimate goal? Are you a singer songwriter? Are you trying to develop your songs? Capture your songs? Do you want to create an ensemble? So that I understand what you want from me. The first thing I’d do is try to understand what you’re trying to achieve, and then I would present options for how to go forward.”

The tracking room at West Street Digital. Photo by Andre Maquera.

Of course, we can’t go without mentioning Make Music Day and the contribution to it made by West Street Digital. For the unaware, Make Music Day is an international holiday celebrated by over a hundred countries worldwide, and for this year’s event West Street Digital will be one of several studios allowing artists to perform live within their space (under the right precautions.) There’s a separate post on that if you’re interested. But the key takeaway from this element is how Andre is continuing to use his studio to the benefit of the music community even nowadays. I remember him saying to me that: “for me, Make Music Day is everyday,” which is the quintessential phrase to sum up Andre as a person. If there wasn’t a Make Music Day already, he would probably be the one to found it. He put it simply but effectively, when he said to me: “I think, again, in these troubled times it’s just a win win for everyone. It’s a win for the artists, it’s a win for just music as an art-form, it’s a win for the public that gets to share in all this stuff.”

In addition to allowing other artists to perform in his studio for the stream, Andre has worked tirelessly behind the scenes on the technical side. It was his idea to involve a “multi-camera setup,” allowing for the artists to all perform in the same space at a safe distance from each other while also keeping them all in view of a camera. Because being a producer also involves being familiar with the technology required. If the Make Music Day stream has proven anything ( before it’s even happened) it’s that Andre is the perfect man for the job, with enough musical passion and desire to form the ball itself and enough technical knowledge and skill to get that ball rolling.

For Andre, music is always more than just a studio. It’s both a passion and an opportunity to help others along a path he’s already ridden. According to him: “as a player, the conduit that music creates between you and the people around you is intense. When you’ve got like, five people in a room there and you’ve got this musical conduit, there’s this constant conversation going on on multiple levels with different people and all at the same time. And being able to stay in that pocket and create something beautiful, that’s kind of the highest elevation of the art-form.”

West Street Digital studio is currently in its twenty sixth year of operation. If it keeps up as it has for all these years, it’s a safe bet that there’s another twenty six years or so ahead of it still. But what cements the studio as effective and viable is, as it often is, the attitude and presentation by the ones running it. Andre is a fellow musician to those who come to him, not just a producer in the game to exploit talent, and there’s twenty six years of satisfied artists to testify to it. I’d like to leave this off with the same sentiment that Andre hopes artists walk away from his studio feeling, namely: “I want them to leave imaging the possibilities. I want them to be forward thinking. I want to be able to plant a seed in them that’ll grow, get them thinking about “what’s next?” I want them to think “That was fun. Let’s do it again. What do we wanna do? How can we make it even better?” I want to inspire that sort of dedication to the art, that thirst for more. In a perfect world, I’d inspire people to want to go out there and just pursue it with all their heart and soul.”

The lineup for West Street Digital's Make Music Day live-stream includes:

Ben Patton from 3:30 to 4:00pm

Troy Millette Band from 4:30 to 5pm

Conniption Fits from 5:30 to 6pm

Text by Thomas Shimmield.

Thumbnail photo of Conniption Fits by Bain Testa.

Photos courtesy of Andre Maquera.