It’s unusual to find an artist and instrumentalist equally talented at playing as they are on the production side of music—recording, mixing, and mastering. Add an extensive body of microtonal work spanning over 6 albums, and you get—Brendan Byrnes, one of the most prolific microtonal guitarists on the scene. His latest release, Astral Bloom, is a lovely exploration of microtonal textures, ambient backdrops, and tasteful guitar leads.
In 2021, I interviewed Brendan for an article on microtonality for those who want to dig deeper into the subject. I caught up with him recently to talk about his latest album.
PHILIP MANTIONE: Great album, man! Can you talk a bit about what inspired the title of the album and some of the tracks?
BRENDAN BYRNES: Thank you so much! I’ve wanted to do an album like this for a long time. While there are a few structured songs, most of the music was composed and recorded very quickly and instinctively, and I worked this way to capture the feeling of spontaneity and have a loose, unpredictable vibe. A lot of it is through-composed, as if it were the soundtrack to a dream. The title Astral Bloom is meant to evoke the dream world, and I’m referencing the phenomenon known as astral projection, which is kind of a half-dreaming, half-awake state of consciousness. I’ve done it a few times, and this music feels tied to those experiences as well as some other recurring dreams I’ve had. The song titles come from these experiences too—I don’t expect the listener to really know what they mean, but hopefully it evokes some feeling or imagery that suits the music.
PM: Your use of field recordings, particularly ocean and nature sounds, adds a laid-back vibe to the work. Can you describe the source(s) for this material and how they were recorded? Or are they existing samples? And why use field recordings?
BB: This dream world that I’m referencing and wanted to evoke takes place outdoors, in very lush environments and near the ocean, so a lot of those instances are multiple field recordings from different environments layered on top of each other. I would say the field recordings are about half of my own that I recorded and half that were pre-existing. In my day job, sound designing podcasts, I use Soundly for sourcing background ambience, so I used that here and there, but I’ve also recorded a lot of my own field recordings with a pair of Sennheiser Ambeo earbuds that function as a binaural microphone. They’re perfect for grabbing quick field recordings, and actually sound quite good!
PM: I hear a lot of intervallic lines in your soloing and melodic writing. I hear a little John Scofield, Pat Metheny, and a touch of Scott Henderson in your work. What guitarists have been major influences on you?
BB: Yes, you’re right, I do tend to think intervallically more than thinking about scales. And I’m glad you can hear Pat Metheny in there; he is a huge influence. Jimi Hendrix is another major influence, although I don’t think anyone would hear it in my lead playing. His musical imagination is just as much of an influence on me as his actual playing. I have too many guitar heroes to list them all, but Andy Summers, Jeff Beck, and Lee Ranaldo/Thurston Moore/Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth are up there for me.
PM: Is it a challenge using distortion on microtonal lines? It seems “harmonic” distortion generated by saturating the signal would conflict since the fundamental frequencies that are not aligned with the harmonic series.
BB: It can be a challenge using distortion with microtonal guitars, but not as much as you might expect. On my Freenote 12 Tone JI Plus guitar, complex microtonal chords can sound great because you can play notes that are perfectly in tune with the harmonic series of the fundamental you’re playing over. These just intonation chords can sound very solid and smooth, just like a power chord, even though there are some crazy microtones in there. A good example of this is on the track, Constellational Tectonics, towards the end. I’m playing big microtonal chords with a lot of distortion, but you don’t really hear any of the muddiness that you might expect. On the microtonal equal temperament guitars that I use, it sounds about the same as regular 12 EDO (equal divisions of the octave) in terms of muddiness. Even a simple major chord on a 12 EDO guitar can sound bad because the 3rds are so sharp, so with the other microtonal temperaments, you’re dealing with about the same amount of roughness. With lead lines, distortion sounds just as good as it does on a 12 EDO guitar, I’d say.
Freenote 12 Tone JI Plus
PM: The guitar sounds throughout the album are color-rich and lush, but you were able to get a nice bite when needed. I liked the contrasting sounds you achieved even within a single track. What are some of the effects chains or pedals used on the guitar?
BB: I wanted to avoid dialing in guitar sounds during the mix stage with plugins, so I tried to capture the final sounds during recording. I’d say 75% of the guitars weren’t touched during the mix aside from volume adjustments. My typical chain was a Beyerdynamic M160 mic on a Fuchs Blackjack 20 amp, and an Austrian Audio OC 818 in omni to capture the guitar and amp in the room, as well as the resonance of the guitar. I ran the M160 through a Pultec EQP-500x and an Overstayer SVC compressor, which has a wonderful saturation that you can crank up if needed, but it would usually be gently saturating and compressing the signal in parallel. I usually ran the OC 818 through a Buzz Audio SOC 20 compressor. For pedals, I regularly used an Earthquaker Time Shadows II, a TC Electronics Flashback Delay, a Boss Space Echo pedal, an MXR Phaser, Jekyll and Hyde Distortion, Big Muff, and a few other miscellaneous pedals. In the box, I would sometimes use a Sound Toys Echo Boy, Crystallizer, or a Devil Loc Deluxe if I needed more. And occasionally some reverb – I used the Audio Thing Moon Echo in a few spots. I tried not to EQ the guitars with digital parametric EQs if I could help it. Those usually do something to the guitar sound that I don’t like, and you seem to start losing a sense of realism if you rely on digital EQ too much. Getting a realistic sound was very important to me, so I would move the mics and adjust settings on the amp and pedals to get the sound I wanted, and that was usually enough.
PM: Can you talk about how the horns were tuned to fit the microtonal context? What was that process like?
BB: Getting the players to retune their horns and adjust their playing was fairly time-consuming, even though the lines were fairly simple. I wrote the parts with a MIDI virtual instrument. I use Native Instruments Kontakt because, buried in their Script Editor, you can easily change the divisions of the octave to whatever you want. We used these MIDI parts as a guide for intonating each note, and walked through each phrase slowly, allowing the players time to work out how to play each note before recording it. They would sometimes be able to figure out a complete phrase, but often it was one or two notes at a time. I don’t know how to play trumpet, clarinet, or sax, so I can’t speak authoritatively on what it took to play these intonations. From what I understand, some notes were very easy to lip up or down, but others were more difficult, and they had to experiment with different fingerings and sometimes they even had to make physical adjustments to the instrument. Some notes and passages were very tricky, especially if it was more than 30-50 cents away from 12-tone equal temperament. Both players were pretty tired after the sessions!
PM: The other three players on the album Louis Lopez (trumpet), Michael Mull (bass clarinet and alto sax), and James Waterman (percussion) provide stunning performances. Have you worked with these guys in the past?
BB: I agree, their performances really took this album to the next level! The horns are crucial to this album and really help define it. Louis Lopez has played microtonal trumpet on a few tracks on my other albums, and not coincidentally, those tracks are amongst my favorites. I hope to collaborate with him even more on my next album. Michael Mull is an incredible musician too — I was lucky enough to record and mix an album by his band Wax People, which is how we met, and I always had hoped to collaborate with him on some microtonal stuff. James Waterman is a ridiculously talented musician and composer, and I’ve collaborated with him on numerous projects and played in a few bands with him. This is the first time he’s collaborated on one of my albums. Again, I hope we can do more on the next one.
PM: I appreciate the dynamic range in the album—something lacking in so much stuff you hear. I understand you mastered it yourself? Can you describe your approach to mastering this album and, in general? Did you have a target LUFS in mind?
BB: Yes, I mastered this album as well as mixed it, and for the most part, these 2 processes were combined. I have a good monitoring setup and have done some mastering work here, so I felt confident in forgoing the 2nd opinion that a dedicated mastering engineer provides. The only thing I did in mastering was fine-tune attack and release settings on the final limiter, and adjust the overall loudness on tracks relative to the others while I was sequencing the album. Whenever I can, I use my hybrid mix setup, which I’ve been building and tweaking for the last 10 years. I consider it an instrument in a way, like a nice console, and finding the sweet spots on analog gear is just so satisfying and gets me a sound that I don’t know how to achieve ITB. I prefer doing a somewhat top-down approach. This means I mix into my stereo bus and a limiter, but I also mix into 4 stereo Busses with an 8-channel analog summing mixer, and each bus has its own analog processing. For example, all the percussion would go into an API 2500, then into an Elysia EQ before being summed into the stereo bus. My stereo bus on this album was all the same: Clariphonic M/S EQ, into a Dangerous Bax EQ, into an Alan Smart C1 compressor. Now that I mention all of that gear, I’m starting to worry that the album should have actually sounded better! But seriously, I’m very happy with how everything sounds. I didn’t aim for a particular LUFS level, I just wanted it to sound good. The louder moments average around -7 or -8 LUFS, and the quieter sections are around the -13 to -11 range, so they average out to around -10 LUFS overall. It’s pretty dynamic, and the final limiters were never doing much.
PM: I see you’re playing microtonal bass as well as guitar on the album. Can you describe the instruments you used on the album?
22 EDO Bass
22 EDO Danelectro Guitar
BB: Yes, microtonal bass and a handful of microtonal guitars! I used 3 types of microtonal guitars: a Danelectro refretted to 22 equal divisions of the octave (22 EDO), an Ibanez hollowbody refretted to 27 EDO, and a Freenote JI Plus Stratocaster that has the pitches from the harmonic series that I mentioned earlier. The bass is 22 EDO, and for the 27 EDO tracks, I used the guitar but pitched it down an octave. I created all of the percussion performances with a high hat, ride cymbal, and a bunch of different hand percussion instruments. I used Native Instruments VSTs of a Wurlitzer and a Steelpan too. I wanted to keep the instrumentation consistent across all tracks, so it all sounded like the same band.
Ibanez 27 EDO Guitar
PM: What synths did you use—hardware, software? How did you approach tuning these instruments?
BB: I didn’t use any synths on this record, just the VSTs I mentioned above. I used the Script Editor in Native Instruments to retune to whatever EDO the track was in. Not all VSTs in Native Instruments can do this, but most of the basic factory library instruments can. The tricky thing with this method is that the octave gets spread over your MIDI controller, which is designed to have 12 notes per octave. This means none of the chord or melodic shapes will be the same if you try to play them in a different octave. I actually sort of enjoy the confusion this can create, because it forces me to really use my ears. I’m not a great keyboard player, and I didn’t use a click track for any of these tracks, so I just had to take my time getting a good performance that locked in with everything.
PM: The work has a fairly wide stereo field and also a nice feeling of front-to-back depth. Is that something you strive for in the mixing process? Any thoughts on releasing an ATMOS mix?
BB: Yes, the front-to-back stereo thing is important to me. A lot of the depth was achieved by using different delays and reverbs in combination with very dry elements. I was careful in deciding how everything was panned, and there’s a fair amount of volume automation which helps push things forward and back. The more dynamic mixing and mastering approach allows you to create a more vivid sound stage, so that’s a big part of it too. It would be fun to do an ATMOS mix for this, I think this album is a good candidate for that kind of spatial treatment, but most people don’t have a way to listen on a good ATMOS setup, so it doesn’t feel urgent. The ATMOS mixes I’ve heard on headphones haven’t inspired me to mix music in this format, though I’ve done ATMOS mixes on a few of the podcasts I’ve sound designed. I’ve read about Brian Lucy’s 4 Points Quad Technique for music, which I’d like to try out, so maybe it’s worth a shot with this record at some point.
PM: Anything new in the works?
BB: I have a few new tracks and a concept for the next album, but I’m also working on some songs for my band, Ilevens with my friend Mike Horick, who plays drums and helps with arrangements and production. We haven’t released anything in 10 years, but we plan on releasing a few tracks by the end of the year if we can. I’ve also been doing some mixing — a couple of film scores, but also wrapping up an album by the aforementioned James Waterman that I’m really excited about.
PM: Where can our readers find your music?
BB: The best place to support is on Bandcamp if you want to hi-rez audio, vinyl records, or other physical media. I’m on all the streaming services as well. I’m also regularly posting microtonal guitar videos on Youtube and Tiktok these days. It’s all under “Brendan Byrnes”. My website is brendanbyrnes.com. Thank you, Phil!
