Richard Upchurch (’96)

On a family vacation, Richard Upchurch (’96) watched his nieces and nephews play. Their toys made noises, but it was at the mindless click of a button, with the same result every time. He thought, “What if I made something that you were the input and you were the output?”

Upchurch, a studio art major at Wake Forest, woodworked a prototype toy for his nephew on the rooftop of his New York apartment building, and soon enough, his nephew’s teachers were asking for more. He started an Etsy shop, and eventually, he had a big break: He began selling the products in the MoMA Design store.

Most of the instruments are low fidelity, or lo-fi, recorders that feature pitch control and repeater switches to manipulate the sound the user records. He demonstrates one of his toys in a video on his website. Holding up a wooden box, painted hot pink with black dots, he clicks a button. He exclaims, “Let your voice be heard!” The sound bite he has recorded begins looping, and then he twists a dial: first the sound goes higher in pitch, then faster in speed, then lower in pitch. The layers of sound have morphed his original track into something completely new.

The “Reverse The Curse” recording device, which has pitch control, delay effects, reverse audio switch, a continuous loop switch and a “scratching” feature – like an old turntable.

Upchurch learned to scale the business in real-time and on a “steep learning curve,” putting his Wake Forest economics and statistics classes to work. The business moved from Brooklyn’s eclectic Red Hook neighborhood to Texas when he married his wife, a Dallas pianist and music teacher. Upchurch and a small team still make the products by hand in their workshop.

His customers? Four-year-olds, rock stars and everyone in between. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and bands Slipknot and Death Cab for Cutie are among the professional artists who have used BrandNewNoise instruments in their records. He’s also collaborated with artists such as Brad Paisley and Patrick Carney of the Black Keys to create hand-signed limited editions.

He sees his colorful instrument creations as more than just a product. Each one is a small sculpture. “It leaves my hands, and it comes to you, and you have a piece of my art,” he says of his process at his company, BrandNewNoise.

His goal is to “spark creativity, curiosity and cheer” in the user, whether it is a child playing with the gadget or a professional musician looking to add a unique layer of noise to a song.

“You can do anything with an iPhone,” Upchurch says, “but, a lot of times, these ‘collectors of sound,’ they want it to be authentic and wonky and something that is just captured in that very moment.”

Outside the box

Upchurch credits his undergraduate experience as an arts student at Wake Forest for building the foundation of his career, which has included stints as a touring guitarist, film score writer and recording technician.

He describes a vibrant experience as a studio art major in the mid-’90s. His professors “were really pushing the boundaries for a small school and a small program,” Upchurch says. His classes — from sculpture to painting and photography — all got him outside the box, like when his classical guitar course with instructor Patricia Dixon opened him to a world of new types of music.

He found lasting lessons in other campus activities. He still carries memories from Secrest Artist Series events. Upchurch performed by himself for the first time in front of a packed crowd as a musical guest at the Lilting Banshees’ “In Search of a Corner” show — a pivotal experience for his future career as a musician. He even worked as a security guard at Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

In painting classes, Professor Page Laughlin encouraged students to critique one another’s work, Upchurch recalls. “This was not a tear-down session. It was not a session where we were all like, ‘Oh, I love your work!’ It was a real critique,” Upchurch says. “And I think in that was a real bonding and building moment for understanding how we all make each other better.”

His friends were creative types who spent most of their time in Scales Fine Arts Center together working on projects. “In a way (we) had our own little club, our fraternity,” Upchurch says. “It was really a beautiful time.” Many of those friends went on to successful careers in the arts.

“There was a group of friends and fellow students, and they all seemed to really embrace liberal arts education in the most pure way,” says Laughlin, who retired in 2021. “Studio art is a little bit riskier thing to engage in. It doesn’t lead directly to a ‘career path.’” But she says the discipline often “hones their capacity to problem solve in more creative ways.”

Hitting the road

Upchurch started playing rhythm guitar in the then up-and-coming Emma Gibbs Band as a junior, and he ended up touring with the band after graduation. On New Year’s Eve in 1999, the band opened for James Taylor in Raleigh. Wake Forest students regularly came out to support them at Ziggy’s and other Winston-Salem venues. Upchurch even recalls looking out into the crowd and spotting — easily — Tim Duncan (’97).

Kevin Palme (’98) and Upchurch met freshman year and began spending time together in the Scales sculpture studio working on projects. Palme, now a professional painter, lived with Upchurch for a summer, so he often got a front row seat to living room band practices.

Palme says Upchurch’s invention of the BrandNewNoise products makes sense. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that he found a way to fuse the love of creativity and music and bring it to so many people and bring so much joy to people. People love these things. We’ve got one at home,” he says. “It’s got a mustache. It sits on a mantel over a fireplace in our house.”

After Upchurch came off the road with Emma Gibbs, he recorded and wrote music for film scores, piquing his interest in audio equipment: “My Wake education led me to be curious and to educate myself.” That curiosity led to a master’s degree in audio technology at New York University. That’s when Upchurch realized that he had a yen to build something tactile, as he had done in sculpture classes at Wake Forest.

Inspiration for BrandNewNoise products came from recording studios. “There are all these knobs and buttons, and they’re knobs from the fifties, and there’s just all this cool vintage stuff. I love the design of that, and I still find that super inspiring,” he says.

Creative, interesting and joyful

Over the past 15 years of building the business, he’s worked hard to make space for creativity — both for himself, as the products’ maker, and also for the products’ users.

“I think that I love surrounding myself with possibility.” Upchurch says. “I walk into a music studio; I see the potential. All this gear is going to add up to something, right? … Once you add the human connection and the human creativity, it becomes something so powerful and so interesting and joyful.”

In Brooklyn, youth interns from various nonprofit and after-school programs joined him to build BrandNewNoise products. Upchurch was fascinated by their reaction to building something with their hands, often for the first time. “These kids would be like, ‘I built that.’ I’m like, ‘You did build that. You did that! You started something, and you finished it, and you now can see that you completed something that is going to go into the world.’… That is such a satisfying, rewarding feeling,” he says.

He hopes the products’ end users have an equally satisfying experience. He wants the instruments “to be a part of your daily lives. So even when you look at it, you think, ‘Oh, it’s waiting for me to do something.’ Either be silly or be creative or whatever. It’s waiting for you to interact.”

He’ll hear about how his toys can be found in major recording studios. And, just like when it’s used by a child, the product is there for pure play to open a moment of creativity. “A lot of times,” he says, “that moment of being silly and not thinking about your end product, you find something interesting in that weird little box.”

Just as Upchurch imagined all those years ago, the creatives become the input and the output for fun.

Texas Monthly featured Upchurch this year and praised him as “a professional tinkerer” and “the Geppetto” behind BrandNewNoise.