BURLINGTON, Ont. – Burlington Teen Tour Band alumni Andrew McClure became a one-man band when he released a YouTube video of himself playing many of the parts of Prince of Thieves, one of the bands most popular songs, on his own.
“I was in the music program at M.M. Robinson, and our teacher told us about a trip she took overseas to see a foreign music program,” McClure said. “It was a group of young students sitting in a circle, all with different instruments, and they played a whole piece from memory.
"When they were done, they passed their instrument to their neighbour and played it again, a different instrument for every student. I remember thinking how impressive that was, and I wanted to know if I could do it as well.”
McClure, who has been playing tenor sax for 15 years, had to learn seven new instruments to play each part of the song, renting the first instrument on Nov. 15, 2021.
McClure learned the flute, alto sax, tuba, baritone, trombone, trumpet and clarinet to play the wind section of the song by himself. Every instrument was self-taught aside from the trumpet.
“It was fascinating,” McClure said. “I highly recommend learning to play multiple instruments. When you learn to play an instrument, you end up being able to play that instrument. When you learn multiple, you learn how to learn and it changes your whole experience.”
It took 835 days to learn every instrument and record each part of the song before compiling them all together.
McClure found that one of Prince of Thieves’ most prominent instruments, the trumpet, was the most difficult one for him to pick up and play.
“The trumpet has a lot of demand on it, especially during the first trumpet part,” McClure said. “You’re the star of the show at that point, out of all the other instruments. You have complicated solo parts and all the high notes, and high notes are hard to play on everything. While all the other instruments took two or three months to learn, the trumpet took me 11 and I had to take formal lessons for it.”
In the video, the musician thanks his friend Dylan Wright, also a Burlington Teen Tour Band alumnus, for his help in teaching McClure the trumpet.
McClure enjoyed the challenge of the project but found it much harder than he had been expecting at the start.
“It’s definitely doable,” McClure said. “It was a personal challenge for me to see if it was something that I was capable of doing. I found out that yes, I was capable and it was possible, but boy it was not easy.”
McClure plans to learn the French horn in the future, the only instrument he omitted from his video, and has considered doing similar, smaller-scale projects like his Prince of Thieves video in the future.