The Quarter Tones
Welcome to the Quarter Tones Page
From Left to Right - Rob Turner Chris Lydon, Chris Birch and myself (Matt Roberts)
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We’re a Midlands based Brass Quartet who grew up playing together in the youth groups young musicians play in as kids.
I am actually a late addition to the group as Chris, Rob and Birch had school connections which lead them to start the group and as I was on the other side of Derby it wasn’t until 2002 that I was first asked to fill their recently vacated trumpet chair.
I knew Birch as we’ve been best mates since we were in junior wind band together at the age of 8 but it was the first time I’d met Rob and Chris Lydon properly.
The first gig I played with them was my first time I’d ever gone busking… I wasn’t keen on the thought.
But then we ended up having such a laugh and even made enough money to fund our Christmas shopping, many cinema and all you can eat pizza trips.
If you have ever spent 6 hours a day standing in a freezing town centre, playing until your chops burn and THEN come out the other side laughing you know you’ve found some good mates!
Since then we’ve played a varied style of gigs including weddings and corporate events with material ranging from a mixture of original arrangements and compositions to a few standard bits of quartet repertoire. More recently we’ve played at the Adrian Boult Hall and recorded a CD of original arrangements.
We always have a laugh together and the audience always enjoy us.
However this year we finally undertook something which started off as a bit of a joke we would make standing in the freezing streets of town.
“This year Derby, Next year Europe and then The World” - Rob Turner, 2003
This lead to our greatest adventure yet… EUROBUSK
Let me first thank the photo of all four of the quarter tones in front of the Eiffel Tower - at the top of this page - taken by our favorite KOREAN photographer; Hunn.
What is Eurobusk?
Quite simply we hired a mobile home (aka The Flash) and toured Europe for a week where we went around the cities and played Christmas Tunes. The aim was to raise enough money to pay for fuel, tole roads and food as well as to have a good laugh doing it.
We drove from Derby to London (in order to pick up the mobile home) through to Dover where we got the ferry and then straight through to Cologne. From there we went to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London and then we ended by busking in Derby on Christmas Eve. Here’s another shot of us in Paris where we took most of our photos (mostly because we took so much video we forgot to snap many pictures).
Whilst all this went on we had 2 Video Camera’s running pretty much the whole time. Rob is currently editing the footage so that we can bring out a short series of what we got up to on our trip and the first place you will see it is right here at mattrobertsmusic.com .
Should you wish to Hire The Quarter Tones for your next event please email us at matt@mattrobertsmusic.com
Trailer 1
Trailer 2
