"Whatever Works" for Connor Hutcheon! 11/2/13

Image compliments of Paul Duffy of Atrium Images

Connor Hutcheon is planning a road to recording with a plan for two albums, one of which we can expect to see this year with a single in the summer. Connor has started making appearances in local venues in the last couple of years but has been involved in busking and music making for a lot longer.

“I started playing and started writing when I was about 11, what I was listening to had a lot to do with what I was doing at the time. At that stage it was Nirvana and the Ramones, punk, because it was easy and I only knew a couple of chords. As soon as I got the power chord I was able to learn Ramones stuff as well as Nirvana stuff and that carried on for a while. The more I learned about how to play electric guitar, I was able to get into different stuff and then I sort of got bored. I got into the Pixies and I realised the guitar solos were a bit silly and electric guitar was a bit silly. Then I heard Josh Ritter about six months later, I mean I liked The Frames and stuff before that but I’d never made music like that, I never thought I could make music like that."

"Josh Ritter seemed a wee bit more accessible because the guitar was easier. I was busking and I just knew G, C and D, so I started writing songs on acoustic guitar. That was when I was about 16 and I’ve just been doing that since and getting into different stuff. From 16 til about 19 or 20 I was just doing the busking thing, sounded like a busker, whenever I went on stage I sounded like a busker, shouting at everybody, thrashing the guitar. In the last maybe three years I just got quieter and quieter but I think the songs have gotten better, the playing and singing’s gotten better, well I hope.”

Connor describes that making the transition from busking to on stage entertaining had more challenges to behold than he first thought. “I had to learn how to sing with a microphone which I hadn’t done. I had to learn to stop shouting, had to learn that when you’ve got amplification and a microphone you don’t need to shout because people can hear you, where as if you’re busking you kind of need to throw your voice, project your voice to the other end of the street. When you’re giggin’ you don’t need to do that, I had to learn to be quiet and when you learn how to do that I think you get better at playing. You can’t really do intricate stuff when you’re thrashing, you just have to keep it simple or I did anyway. The quieter I got the more I got into finger picking and different styles of playing.”

Connor had seen himself in a position where he recognised that busking was putting a limit on what he could perform. “Hearing people like Nick Drake, you couldn’t busk that. It’s really really quiet but it was stuff I really liked and stuff I actually started to play. I like to play Nick Drake and “folky” stuff but you couldn’t busk it, busking for me, I don’t know maybe I wasn’t doing it right, it was always thrashing. Trying to project your voice and project the guitar to the other end of the street or whoever was there.”

The transition from street performing to stage also highlighted other challenges for Connor as he has faced challenges finding openings to play. “If you don’t have management or anything and it’s just you on your own you have to be very kind of, maybe pushy’s the wrong word but you have to be more able to promote yourself and I can’t do that. Like these days, I’ve been looking at trying to ask people to help me out with management and promotion and stuff and people will just want you to get to a certain point yourself and then they sort of take over. There’s not really much of a support structure these days, I don’t know if there was before but certainly I’ve noticed these days there’s not much of a support structure for actually helping you get a bit of confidence and helping you develop on your own and they could handle the getting gigs side of things, you have to do everything yourself. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m just lazy but it seems harder to actually get started because there isn’t any sort of development, there’s no concept artist development anymore, there’s no money in it. You can see that, see why they do that, it seems quite cut throat.”

As a way of pushing his music forward Connor decided to record demos of his music to try and build popularity before going for an album. He was on a budget but luckily found someone to help him record cheaply. “The Beechwood stuff (Beechwood Recordings) was one mic and it was just to get the stuff down. It was essentially a performance. In terms of performance I would probably put a bit more into it but it was the fact that I didn’t want it to distort. In terms of performance dynamics are the most important thing, if you’re recording with just the one mic you just don’t want to put in too many dynamics because it won’t be able to handle it, it’ll just kind of distort and so I wanted to just have it a fairly simple versions of the recordings. That way people had the songs and knew what the songs were. In that way if people were to ask, ‘Have you got anything new?’, I could say ‘Yeah’.”

Connor is hoping to appear at local music festivals in the city and also further afield and has already made his applications for these. The coming single in the Summer should prove to be a real treat and taster to the coming album. Details of coming events can be found on Facebook and already recorded demos can be found at https://soundcloud.com/connor-hutcheon. They are truly a treat to the ears of acoustic lovers. Mellow, melodic and soothing, the demos sound all the better for their bare presentation of guitar and voice. A personal favourite of mine; “Whatever Works”, is simple and beautiful.