London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Monthly Archives: June 2020

Can I fix it? Yes, I can …

… if it’s a musician you’re after, anyway, almost certainly.

Part of my ‘offer’ applying for freelance work almost as long as I’ve been working in music has been, when the ad makes it seem relevant, ‘and I should be able to get you some others if you still need more people’. More recently, this has enabled me to pull together groups where I’ve been hired as a musical director, or string sections if I’m writing string parts for overdubbing, and so on.

The logical next step, now running rather nicely with some ongoing clients, is to take a finder’s fee for connecting organisers with musicians I know will be suitable for projects I’m not involved with at all. So it seemed the right time to open this up as a service offered for hire by adding it to my website.

Now you (and your creative friends / contacts) don’t need a contact list as extensive as mine – you can commission me to do it instead!

Return of the Streamer

There was a pause in streaming activity for a while. Partly caused by ill health (it turned out to be shingles, with the worst of it on the left side of my neck; not ideal for holding a violin, viola or even a mandolin on a neckstrap!); partly by needing to think again about marketing and come up with an ongoing plan for making livestreams pay adequately to the amount of work involved. If you wonder how much that is, imagine being the sole performer, the venue and the promoter for a one-hour gig every week, with an audience who would be likely to reasonably complain if there was more than slow and occasional repetition of repertoire …

However, I’m very pleased to say that I’m restarting regular streams from this coming week. If you enjoy my music-making, please get Thursdays, 8-9pm (UK time) into your diaries, and take your pick of these locations:

(Or you could try all three on successive weeks and see which you find most congenial!) And ready your (presumably virtual) wallets to show your appreciation for the entertainment – I’ll be plugging paypal.me/martinashmusic but any method of transferring currency to me that you have will be very welcome.

If you have requests, now or at any time in future, please do send them in in advance or comment on a stream (for the following week – I’m afraid I’m unlikely to do real-time requests, sorry!).

Barring requests over the next few days, the bill of fare for this Thursday (2 July) will include some Telemann and Hoffmeister (solo viola music from opposite ends of the 18th century), traditional songs and dance tunes with mandolin, and of course foot-tapping British fiddle tunes similar to, but not including, these:

The Irish traditional jigs ‘Roaring Jelly’ (!) and ‘Morrison’s Jig’, from my third livestream.

See you there, or at least you’ll see me and I’ll see your comments!

For Folk’s Sake, Try Happy

Back in mid-February, when this seemed a perfectly normal thing to do and we didn’t know the world as we knew it was ending in weeks, I got up rather punctually in relation to when I’d got to bed after the previous night’s wedding gig and headed to a warehouse conversion near Stratford.

There to moonlight with Fraser Parry’s alt-indie-folk pocket orchestra Try Happy – Fraser being a pianist-singer-songwriter in this context, but also the cellist in the string section recording I had done for The Amazing Devil 6 months earlier. (The third member of that section, double bassist Jack Judd, both had recommended me for that session and is a Try Happy regular. Musical networking works sometimes.)

I don’t think I was actually asleep when this was taken, but I hadn’t got much sleep …

I was going to write an allusive, partly slightly ironic, purple paragraph seeking to capture Try Happy’s sound. But I don’t know why I’d bother, as the purpose of this day’s session was to record and film three live lounge-style tracks for the extensive video series produced and curated by the For Folk’s Sake brand. So you can listen, and indeed watch, for yourselves:

I believe the other two tracks will be posted in fullness of time, so do keep checking the For Folk’s Sake and Try Happy web presences for more material!

In the meantime, here’s to it being safe (and legal, but safe might well take longer) to get together in the same room and do things like this again soon – ideally even with a live audience …

Twists in the road

I was musically and audiovisually rather pleased with my third livestream, which went out on Tuesday but is still available to catch up:

The main change technically was a new, external camera (thanks again Dad!) which seems to deliver better resolution / picture quality and better automatic exposure control (meaning lighting is less of a worry) than using the one built into my laptop – and also meant I could have the computer screen where I could actually read, and so respond to, people’s comments during the gig!

Performance-wise, I think I had just got better into a groove of streamed performances and overcome some of the initial nerves. As well as doing a certain amount of honing the ordering of music over successive gigs (including believing in myself that I could swap straight from violin to viola and play in tune!).

All of this has been borne out by positive comments from the audience faithful who watched live and tipped. Unfortunately, they were few in number … rather fewer than they had been for the second stream a fortnight earlier … which was a lot fewer than the numbers for the first one a week before that.

This would put my livestreaming activity at a crossroads anyway. As it is, it’s on an enforced pause for entirely different reasons. What I mention in the broadcast as having just enough symptoms of covid-19 to take precautions, but more likely being an allergic reaction and a pulled muscle, hasn’t turned out to be any of those things. (Well, it’s still possible I strained a muscle in my neck 10 days ago.) The coronavirus test came back negative, and it was viral not an allergy; I actually have shingles. Which, at time of writing, is chiefly sufficiently painful and itchy, especially on the left side of my neck, for me not to contemplate another solo show and the practice necessary for one for a little while.

I’m not being entirely musically idle even in rest and recovery (if you include promotional work as musical), and I do intend to try streaming again when I can hold my instruments comfortably. But given the effort and stress involved (and I live in a houseshare remember, it does take a certain amount of negotiation and suppressed guilt to make noise and monopolise the internet upload bandwidth for purely self-imposed ‘work’), live streaming will definitely be ‘on notice’ to produce worthwhile income when I resume. So encourage your contacts to keep an eye on this blog and on my Facebook page, and when I resume broadcasting, to vote with their (e)wallets!

Rescheduling

Following the example set by the Musicians’ Union, I will be participating in #TheShowMustBePaused tomorrow (2 June); please see https://musiciansunion.info/2QJ-6W74P-IW0D6K-42QF29-1/c.aspx. Therefore tomorrow’s livestream is postponed to a week tomorrow, and so on cascading backwards. Immediate dates for your diaries:
9 June: YouTube
16 June: The Hat Art Open TV