Lantzville fiddler Quin Etheridge-Pedden has been nominated for a Western Canadian Music Award.
Last week nominees were announced for this year’s WCMAs, and Etheridge-Pedden, who goes by Quin With One N, is among five artists from B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan up for Instrumental Artist of the Year.
“I was shocked. Definitely something I wasn’t expecting,” Etheridge-Pedden said. “It was also partly because I didn’t realize they were announcing the awards the day that I received the e-mail, so it was actually a nice surprise in my inbox as well.”
Etheridge-Pedden is up against a diverse group of nominees including electronic musician Factor Eight, sitar player Mohamed Assani, Latin-jazz bassist Rubim de Toledo and the Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra.
“I always have a listen to the people I’m with and it’s some pretty cool stuff,” Etheridge-Pedden said of the company he’s in. “Definitely going to be tough [to] judge.”
Etheridge-Pedden is no stranger to award attention, as both of his albums earned him nominations for Canadian Folk Music Awards for Young Performer of the Year. He said being up against adults for the first time is “intimidating but in an exciting way.”
“I feel like it’s a next step,” he said. “And I just had my 19th birthday so it feels like I’m not just a kid anymore. I’m in the real world.”
Now that Etheridge-Pedden is on summer break after his first year of jazz studies at VIU, he said he has a lot of time to work on his next release. He’s also becoming a bit of a one-man band.
“It’s been a joke lately that I’m kind of addicted to buying new instruments,” he said. “Basically since I’ve started playing violin I wanted to play other instruments as well and started collecting things like guitars and most recently basses and I just bought a cello.”
Etheridge-Pedden said playing all those instruments is “quite the task” but it allows him to create a lot of arrangements on his own without having to hire other players. With so many instruments at his disposal, Etheridge-Pedden said his sound and style is varying from tune to tune.
“There’s some more traditional fiddle-sounding tunes but then it quickly goes into more world music-inspired with different Latin rhythms and grooves, but also the melody takes the role of traditional fiddle again, so like a cross-breed between the two … and I’m getting a little bit of an influence from the jazz world, too, having studied that a bit,” he said. “So it sounds a bit all over the place, but it’s coming together and forming its own beast.”
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