London Viola Player, Violinist & Arranger For Hire

Martin Ash LTCL

Projecting

Posted on

The String Project were in the studio on Friday night, for the first time in a while (it must be at least two years I think), at least of doing full-blown recordings rather than filming and recording live-in-studio performances. We were doing full takes (likely to be spliced and edited) of an instrumental from the slightly more ‘art music’ Ben Mowat composition era, and laying down rhythm tracks for a more recent song to have string and voice overdubs added soon.

I’ve always hugely preferred performance to recording. Some musicians thrive on the perfection, the being able to correct mistakes individually (especially in the digital era), and the creation of a lasting artefact. However little this might be true of my life and my practised philosophy in general, as a musician I live in the moment and practically survive on interaction with fellow musicians and audience (possibly the main reason I hate playing auditions by myself to poker-faced examiners).

All of which said, I think Friday’s was a good session and maybe I’m getting over my distaste for the studio! It helps a lot to be familiar with the material (which I’ve been gigging with this band for a couple of years by now), and to be in a group largely similarly familiar – massive thanks though to my once and future freelance colleague Judith Malonda for stepping in to cover the viola part on a couple of days’ notice, and doing so extremely well! I’m certainly confident that a bit of editing (and of the old-fashioned cut-and-splice variety, I don’t think we’ll need much if any timing adjustment or autotune) will give us a good version of Maybe Epic Soon, and I hope to be able to overdub some violin onto The Unquiet Grave soon too. For recording mostly being done in a live room, with therefore spill from everything onto everything else, either everyone gets it right or everyone has to do it again, that’s very good going in an evening (perhaps especially a Friday evening given most of us have day jobs of one kind or another!).

The String Project record story is an ongoing one – we hope to finish some other part-recorded tracks and release something fairly representative of our current live performances with the next month or two, but there may well be a separate collection slanted towards crossover instrumentals by Ben in the pipeline for not long after that. Watch this space, it’s an exciting time!

F**k*n

Posted on

Last weekend was a busy one – it’s not just in terms of blog posts that I’m still catching up halfway through this week!

filth fox firkin

Saturday night (yes, just a few hours after my previous gig in a different city!) was the last Filthy Spectacula gig of the year, at the Fox and Firkin in Lewisham.

We had an unusually well-matched support act in the shape of Brighton’s Edwardian goth-punks The Iron Boot Scrapers. They have violin, cigar-box guitar and a sousaphone on the bass line; of course I loved them! We will be holding you to the Brighton end of this gig exchange though guys; we have to get in on that scene …

The Fox and its sister venue the Magic Garden in Battersea are unusual among pub-venues; not only for being very cool, having superbly crazy-stylish interior decor, putting live music on at weekends and paying their bands reasonably properly, but also for asking their headline acts for very long sets. As a result, the time we’ve headlined each venue has led to us playing everything we know and putting a bit of time into learning more songs!

This time, that meant a 17-song epic set spanning a good 90 minutes of high-octane rather drunken (chiefly the crowd!) debauched fun. You might even say it was Firkin awesome.

(and the following night I saw Tower of Power in Camden, who were any-adverb-you-like awesome, and they played about the same length set. So I reckon that means we’ve made it)

Album recordings coming up – but see you in February if not before for more Filthy live action …

Browser’s buskers

Posted on

No, not a new online music project; like almost every other non-acronym piece of digitalspeak, a browser did use to be something else and you can definitely still find them in bookshops, musingly considering the shelves with that tilt of the head from when you have to read a lot of text sideways.

Which (without the tilt of the head) was also where you could find myself and Wulf Forrester-Barker on Saturday afternoon. Blackwell’s, the Oxford original of what is now presumably the UK’s only academic bookshop chain, were reacting to Black Friday with ‘Civilised Saturday’ – less showroom floor brawls over cut-price TVs, instead poetry readings, free mince pies (they had to get more a few times, apparently 120 was nowhere near enough … ) and cultivated background music.

I had been hired for this at less than 48 hours’ notice after negotiations with a couple of string quartets fell through. I wasn’t quite able to pull together a classical chamber group at that notice, or not in Oxford for a maximum budget of £200 anyway.

What I was sure I could do was get someone to play guitar / very sophisticated bass / keys if needs be and jam jazz standards from lead sheets with me; I considered trying for a trio but had to bear in mind I would be travelling back from London for the gig and wasn’t going to pay the others less than I paid myself, which is an interesting set of mathematical constraints. Luckily the flukes of diaries were in my favour and I was able to get my first choice, Wulf and his protean six-string electric bass playing.

Which, spiced with a couple of light classical unaccompanied violin solos, seemed to go down very well. The second location (languages and literature, next to the coffee shop  after a while down in the cavern of all things academic), were a little disenchanted with Cry Me a River – so we upped the groove and got a very good response to Joe Zawinul’s Mercy Mercy Mercy, which I would barely have believed we could get away with in that instrumentation, and the classic Freddie Freeloader off Kind of Blue (double-stop sixths are an underused possibility in jazz violin).

Speaking of underused, off the beaten track specialisations for the unofficial full-length version of my CV:

  • bookshop music
  • next day delivery of live performance

Way out West

Posted on

Saturday saw me doing my most westerly gig for a while, getting the National Express out to Cardiff and then on a hire coach to Carmarthen. I was taking up a viola chair with the wonderful Welsh Musical Theatre Orchestra for the first (but certainly not the last) time.

And so a small orchestra with some of the characteristics of a pit band (piano, kit, saxes, multiple wind doubles, pairs of trumpets and trombones while the rest was chamber orchestra sized), plus a hand-picked squad of vocal soloists and conductor Andrew Hopkins, had a couple of hours of slightly camp fun in the Lyric Theatre with the sounds of the West End, Broadway and Disney. And that was just the rehearsal.

Joking apart, this was a fun gig, and it’s always nice to be asked to think about the visual and performative aspects of orchestral playing rather than only the purely musical ones. Having got a better grasp of Cardiff’s geography (for future transport interchanges) and more importantly the Shows and Soundtracks programme folder, I’m looking forward to repeating the experience – specifically in Port Talbot on the 16th of December. See you there if you’re currently of Cymraeg residence!

Blue pictures

Posted on

Mostly not literally, though as with most pub/band gigs the lighting makes for interesting colour tone … These are from depping on bass with 2Blue in Eastleigh a little while back, a gig I’m pleased to say I’ve been asked to repeat!

2Blue01

2Blue02

2Blue03

On the record

Posted on

The last two afternoons have seen me and some helpful and highly dedicated friends gathered in two different churches for a couple of hours each, doing a handful of things over and over again.

This is known as ‘recording’. Or in this instance, ‘filming’. Across a total of nearly four hours, we managed to record and shoot various takes, of which I think at least one each is good, of two solo pieces (one viola, one folk fiddle), one violin-piano duet and one jazz trio number. If that doesn’t sound a lot for the time, you obviously haven’t been at too many recording sessions. If you’ve done a fair bit of recording and it sounds a lot to get done in four hours, you’re right, but I had practised murderously beforehand and it was all being done classical recording style – live to a stereo pair of mikes, full-length takes, no overdubs, no splices. It speeds things up a bit. I was still very drained by the end of afternoon 2! Massive thanks to Ben Mowat and Justin Gibson for doing the recording and shooting, and to Stephen, Emyr and Wulf for accompanying various bits. I owe you all serious favours!

Very unusually in my musical life, this was actually my own project on my own initiative, not as a hired hand for someone else or even part of a collaborative group. It’s high time I had an up-to-date video showreel again, and so I’ve bitten the bullet and gone ahead with producing one (and trusting it will pay for itself!). If there are particularly good takes and sound quality in there I may well put up some complete audio tracks, as well as editing together a video highlights reel for Youtube. Of course, the next step is that I will have to go through the footage and audio (cringing horribly at myself doubtless, particularly the chatter at start and end of takes), pick out the best takes and work on selecting sections, ordering and editing together – all the backroom stuff that a freelancer is often spared. (I say spared because what musician wouldn’t rather just play the music and go home in all honesty? Well, actually quite a lot of people I guess, otherwise there would be no producers in the world … )

Anyway all this is still to come, but hopefully not too long before I can present some finished products and set about reeling in clients with renewed energy …

And all manner of thing shall be well

Posted on

Last night, the String Project headlined a showcase / launch night for our label, All Will Be Well.

(There are three altogether, split by geography and genre; the Reading one has already passed, but you can still catch the Oxford rawk night in early December.)

The risks of a ticketed event with six acts, each doing short sets, without a direct connection to each other, are evident (especially on a Friday night, when Oxford reliably has an oversupply of good entertainment options). But they are more or less the same as the potentials for something really interesting. And in the end it was the latter that paid off, almost exclusively.

The evening started with a rather select audience – but it filled up dramatically within the first half, to a pleasantly full-feeling room. The atmosphere was friendly, by and large attentive, and open-minded. I certainly heard some original (All is Worth), entertaining and durable (Ben Gosling, Louise Petit) and beautiful (Stu and Sarah) music by performers I would have been unlikely, realistically, to go and hear otherwise, and not all that likely to share a bill with either.

And I hope (and have good evidence from audience comments afterwards!) the same could be said of those who were new to the String Project’s music too. We had set ourselves a challenge for this gig: within a half-hour slot, fitting in one new vocalist (congratulations Countess! you rocked the place!) and one guest vocalist (Lauren Bradford, reprising previous guest appearances with and without the Eko Collective), some quite new and some revived material, and finishing the evening off with a bang. And I think we pulled it off; probably as tight and slick as we have ever been despite how tricky it is to set that band up and though even without a drumkit the Jericho Tavern‘s stage feels a little tight when there are 8 people on it (not for the whole set thankfully!).

All in all, a very good night and part of a general feel of building momentum and increasing expectancy about the label project. All power to your elbow, All Will Be Well!

Being a session musician

Posted on

Tai Azeez strings recording

To most people, my job title (outside my day job … ) is ‘session musician’. The term is often used even in the music community for freelance / jobbing players. Which is a bit misleading considering there is hardly any money (certainly hardly any profit) in recording for anyone now, and so there is much more likely to be budget for additional musicians at live events. Live is probably 19 out of 20 jobs for me.

However, yesterday I was actually recording as a professional job (see photo!). Electronic music producer / writer / impresario Tai Azeez has a real love of the sound of live string instruments, and so the four of us (me on viola) were gathered to lay down various sections, lines and loops – individually and as a string quartet – for use on four or five of his tracks.

A long recording session (5 hours this time) is always hard work, but we kept it amicable and friendly. The nature of this sort of music is you can’t really hear any rough mixes till Tai’s cut up the takes into the sections and reapplied / layered them onto his tracks, but he says they sound really good. I’m looking forward to hearing some results – and working again with these lovely people!

Going down low

Posted on

Last night, I travelled down to Eastleigh and played bass for blues-rock covers band 2Blue, allowing them to maintain a semi-residency gig with a local live music venue-cum-pub.

A quick look around this website will reveal that bass guitar isn’t one of my primary professional offers, and so I had put quite a bit of effort and perhaps an unnecessary amount of worry into preparing for this gig. The prep certainly paid off though, as the band were complementary about not just my playing but also my ensemble / variation work

Both the blessing and the curse of material of the nature of most blues songs is that there is no fixed arrangement or parts (ignoring real blues-rock standards and a handful of other songs where the riffs are expected to be reproduced note-for-note). This means even as a dep rhythm section player, having got beyond whether you keep up with the chord changes, you will stand or fall substantially on ability to produce / select riffs and figures, and to then produce variation in line with the rising and falling dynamics around you (which will almost certainly not correspond to those of whatever recording you learned the song off, since the placing of solos, verse repeats etc. won’t either). Equally though, while this might seem to make the musical, rather than technical, demands of playing any instrument rather similar, it doesn’t mean I can use the same bags of tricks as a bassist that I would as top-line melody instrument on violin (not on blues rock anyway; maybe on modern jazz). So I’m certainly going to be somewhat pleased with a regular band saying it’s enjoyable to play with a bassist who comes forward and drops back and varies the intensity of what I do.

This may be subject to the criticism of over-analysing. The short version goes: another evening that proved there is no oxymoron about the phrase ‘party blues’, and I think everyone had a good one.

Wedding bells

Posted on

Last night saw me renew my (intended to be now ongoing) relationship with Celtic-function outfit The Duffys.

A Thursday night wedding in the sticks in Essex required that band’s usual 2 x 45 minutes of mixed rock and cheese standards on the one hand and Irish drinking and dancing songs on the other – some new variations in the set included multi-instrumentalist frontman John Duffy swapping essentially Avicii’s version of ‘Wake me Up’ from acoustic guitar to accordion (plus fiddle, electric guitar, bass and drums) and a new cover of ‘All about that Bass’ (not seeming so remarkable till you remember this band only has male vocals. The crowd loved it).

The clients and indeed their guests were clearly really more interested in the Irish and country side of the band though – it is refreshing to get shouts for ‘More Irish music!’ when you’ve just done a handful of fairly guaranteed dance floor fillers of the sort that prop up any ordinary wedding band set – especially such a long geographical and cultural way from Ireland! Among the specific requests from the couple was The Devil went Down to Georgia after the manner of the Charlie Daniels Band. Suffice to say that one gave me some considerable hard work to do in the days leading up to the gig, but it went (down) (to Georgia? or Hell?) extremely well in the end.

Of course, I did need more coffee than usual to plough through my 4 hours of day job today. But you can’t expect to get paid without working! Here’s to the next wedding (a quote not to be taken out of context … ).