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For 25 year, Tim Brady has been carving a niche for the electric guitar within classical music. Playing Guitar Symphony #1 (Ambiances Magnetiques, 2004) is Brady’s tenth album. Composed largely on electric guitar, it presents his contemporary classical score in five movements for a 15-piece acoustic chamber orchestra.
Brady and coproducer Morris Apelbaum sought to combine the guitar and orchestra with Brady’s guitar samples and textures. “My music is somewhat unusual in its combinstion of acoustic and clectmnic sound sources,” he says. “I compose on the guitar, on the piano, by singing, writing directly onto score paper, or using a sequencer or multitrack recorder. The choice of composing medium depends on what I’m trying to get at.”
Apelbaum and four assistant engineers recorded the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt, in Oscar Peterson Concert Hall at Concordia University in Montréal. “We didn’t have to fix the room sound”, Brady says. “The hall is used frequently for recording in Montréal”. Apelbaum recorded the orchestra onto 24 tracks through a number of mic preamps and Apogee AD-16 converters into an Alesis HD24 hard-disk recorder.
The engineers miked each musician individually. “That allowed me to create the final balance in the studio, rather than rely on the conductor’s balance”, Brady says. “Balancing the tone of the electric guitar and sampler with the orchestra was a question of subtle timbral decisions. Even in a live space with no isolation, [multiple mics] give one a lot more control than a stereo pair”. ln addition, the engineers placed each mic 18 to 24 inches from an instrument’s sound source.
Brady brought the orchestra tracks into his personal studio, which indudes a dual-processor Mac G4 running MOTUDigital Performer 3.1 and MOTU2408 audio interface. “I played untreated guitar lines live with the orchestra, and then added the processed stuff later,” he says. “l replaced a few parts with overdubs. Sometimes I didn’t like the mix of the original guitar tone with the ensemble. EQ can do only so much sometimes you have to change pick-ups or even guitars to get the sound that you want.
“All the guitar parts were edited and then reamped in my studio using the speaker simulator on my Koch Twintone tube amp.” Brady says “That added warmth, depth, and subtle tube compression. Tubes offer acoustic attack and decay characteristics, so they blend better with classical instruments.”
Brady recorded and processed guitar samples in his Yamaha A4000 sampler, which he later added to the existing tracks. His TC Electronic Fireworx effects processor also played a key role. “I used just two bands of EQ to bring out the chatacter of an instrument in the mix, Brady says. “With good mics, good preamps, a good room, and great players, you don’t need tons of EQ. I added some reverb and I used DP’s volume curves for subtle volume changes”.
The album concludes with Frame 1—Resonance, Brady’s piece for electric guitar and acoustic piano. “[It features] quite a bit of digital processing, using primarily an old Boss SE-70 effects processor,” Brady says. “The SE-70 has a crude 16-bit sound, but it has some amazing algorithms. The piano plays a dreamlike fantasia part, and the guitar acts like an electroacoustic sustain pedal, taking ideas from the piano and transforming them into an ongoing musical dialogue. I plan on composing more works that I explore the electric guitar in a small, intimate chamber-music context—if all goes according to plan.”
blogue@press-2841
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Tim Brady has been following his own path of frenetic post-Frippertronic technique of rapid fire guitar complemented by electronic processing for decades. This is his first symphony, realised by an ensemble of 15 members — and it’s great fun. There are a number of different ways to analyse this disc: judging it on its compositional merit as a symphony, or deconstructing the relentless shifts in tempo and instrumentation. Instead, let’s dumb it down a lot and call it music for a 21st Century car chase. Digital delays augment hocketing instruments produce 16th notes galore that race across the stereo field. This is an expertly realised recording— Steve Reich could only dream of these kinds of possibilities for mixing engineers when he first recorded his intricate percussion pieces. Movements One and Four are the most Shaft-like pieces, albeit with funk replaced by non-stop tension — Brady’s not exactly a swinging player or composer, which is part of his charm. These are wisely balanced by sparer passages as in movement Two , which features some beautifully slow melodic developments. The action is never too far behind, as the sampler solo in movement Three produces a brutish blizzard of guitar snapshots all up and down the keyboard. The whole adventure seems short, even at 46 minutes. Unfortunately, the CD is appended by a more intimate composition for guitar and piano called Frame 1 - Resonance that is a too-minimal, too-long coda in relation to what came before.
blogue@press-2789
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Avec Playing Guitar: Symphony # I le compositeur/guitariste canadien signe son 3’enregistrement pour Amblances Magnétiques. La pièce principale, commanditée par le Nouvel Ensemble Modern en 1997, fut présenté au public de Montréal en 2002 et plus récemment à Beauvais et à Marseille (2004). Le présent enregistrement est complété par Frame I-resonance pièce pour guitare, traitements électroniques et piano.
"Je ne l’ai pas fait consciemment, mais cette œuvre-là résume magnifiquement tout mon vocabulaire, aussi bien en tant que guitariste qu’en tant que compositeur" déclarait Tim Brady lors d’un entretien. Playing Guitar: symphony #1, à travers ces cinq mouvements, aborde en effet plusieurs aspects de ses précédents travaux: un intérêt pour l’écriture minimale, sa propension au travail d’expérimentation sonore de la guitare, son goût pour des compositions ambitieuses, ses affinités avec le rock progressif. Le mariage entre les différents univers (le NEM était souvent qualifié comme un ensemble plutôt intégriste dans le domaine des musiques contemporaines) est parfois réussi, en particulier dans le second et le quatrième mouvements. Parfois l’osmose entre les deux sources sonores (l’ensemble et la guitare) se fait grâce aux traitements sonores appliqués à certains instruments et réalisés en studio aprés l’enregistrement en concert. D’autres moments, il y a davantage de juxtapositions, voire de soliloques qui apparaissent plus conventionnels à l’auditeur et alourdissent un projet dense et inspiré.
Frame I-resonance tranche avec la pièce principale. Moins dynamique, elle propose une confrontation quelque peu paresseuse entre un piano qui égrène nonchalamment ses notes dans un environnement de traitements sonores.
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Montréal’s Tim Brady is a true mad scientist of guitar sound, placed here on Earth, it seems, to smash the barriers between high and low culture. His wild guitar sounds are daggers in the heart of classical music pretense, and God love him for it. The title of Brady’s latest tells much of the story, as it’s certainly the guitar playing that deserves top billing. Here, the music has a relentless drive to it and, to be honest, it is a bit wearying at times, but at the same time, one has to admire the way that Brady works with Lorraine Vaillancourt’s NEM to bring out their playful side.
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