Tim Dutton Releases “Nolens Volens” and “Schrödinger’s Chicken”

Some people are annoyingly good at guitar, and Tim Dutton is one of them.

When he sent me Nolens Volens and Schrödinger’s Chicken for mastering, I had one of those slightly demoralising moments where you look at your own guitar and feel like you've been letting it down.

Tim is a former session guitarist who has spent more than a decade making music for television. These two instrumentals originally began as demos for a project that didn’t pan out, so he tidied them up, mixed them himself and decided to release them under his own name instead. This is excellent news for the rest of us, although perhaps less so for any guitarists hoping to retain a healthy level of self-esteem.

Nolens Volens sits firmly in the 1980s guitar-virtuoso mould of Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. The playing is sensational, the tones are enormous and there are enough fretboard fireworks to keep even the most dedicated guitar nerd occupied for weeks. Thankfully, though, this isn’t just a technical exercise or an excuse to pin the listener against the wall with scales for several minutes. Like Satriani and Vai at their best, Dutton never loses sight of the fact that there still needs to be an actual song underneath all that ability.

There are wonderful melodies running throughout the track, but the real highlight for me is the beautiful, tender breakdown section. It winds its way through a superb chord progression, giving everything room to breathe before gradually pulling us towards the climax. By the time the final solo arrives, it feels completely earned, and the playing is absolutely outrageous.

At this point, you might think you’ve got Tim neatly filed away as an 80s-inspired shred guitarist. Then Schrödinger’s Chicken turns up wearing cowboy boots and ruins the entire filing system.

The wonderfully ridiculous title belongs to a track that is a masterclass in country guitar chicken pickin’, with the kind of speed, precision and snap that immediately brings Brent Mason to mind. In fact, having already mistaken Tim for Satriani or Vai during the first track, I’m now forced to consider the possibility that he might also be Brent Mason in disguise.

Once again, though, the playing never takes over at the expense of the music. There are plenty of contrasting sections, twists and sudden gear changes, but it all holds together because the songwriting remains front and centre. The result is a whirlwind tour through country guitar at its best, played at a frankly unreasonable level.

I had the pleasure of mastering both songs. The mixes arrived with loads of energy, character and detail already in place, so the job was to give them the final weight, definition and polish they needed for release while keeping all that speed, articulation and personality intact. The difficult part was resisting the temptation to stop working and just sit there listening to the guitar playing.

Technical ability at this level is rare enough, but rarer still is the ability to use it without turning every song into a glorified demonstration reel. That’s what makes these two tracks so special. The playing is virtuosic, but the music always comes first.

Nolens Volens and Schrödinger’s Chicken are both out now. Go and give them a listen on Spotify, and if you play guitar yourself, try not to take it personally.