Mia x Ally photo by Colors by Harry
Mia x Ally Champion The Versatility of The Electric Violin and Bagpipes
Mia x Ally are a duo of instrumentalists who have generated a major reaction from audiences online and more recently have been able to get touring, first with a shorter run last spring, and now with a much broader series of shows that concluded in late November. Mia Asano plays electric violin and Ally the Piper plays the bagpipes, but what they do with those instruments challenges perceptions about instrumental music and even what’s possible for those instruments to convey. They take on many different genres of music, but notably Rock and Heavy Metal tracks, and create complex orchestration that highlights the versatility and wide-ranging possibilities that are often untapped in their instruments.
Add to that their high-energy style and panache when playing for videos or playing live, and it makes for a very engaging experience. Taking the lead from the various tracks that were most popular when they played them online, Mia and Ally worked on a quick turnaround for the October-released album, titled Mia x Ally: The Viral Hits. Though they didn’t depend on validation, they’ve received plenty of it from the musicians who composed many of the tracks they’ve covered, including Metallic championing Ally’s efforts, particularly. I spoke with Mia and Ally while they were out on tour about their goals, their approach to adapting music, and what it’s like bringing this music to fans live.
Americana Highways: I understand you’re on your first large tour. How are you choosing what you play?
Ally: We are curating our setlist mostly around the album, but we are incorporating some of our original music that we’ve written individually and supporting each other on it. We also play some of our covers that we’ve done before individually and are now supporting each other. There’s also some Celtic moments, some moments that are definitely more electronic, because the big takeaway from the show is highlighting our instruments in a way that otherwise they would not be highlighted. We’re showing their range and how broad they can be.
AH: That’s awesome that you’re also playing original music. I understand what you mean about your instruments, because in the broad scheme of things, they are in the minority as instruments. Do you think that with the internet raising awareness, there’s more potential for people to play these instruments these days?
Mia: Definitely. Both of us draw a lot of inspiration from our teachers and mentors who are playing a lot of instruments, but the really fortunate thing we have right now is the power of social media. Between the two of us, we’re reaching millions of people every week with our videos. We’re introducing people to our instruments in this unique setting. We’re not the first people to do what we’re doing, but we are among the first doing it on social media. We’ve seen a lot of people follow suit, and we’ve had young people bringing up their instruments after our shows to have us sign them. It’s been a really amazing experience to create a community who love what we love.
AH: I was hoping that hearing your music would encourage people to give electric violin or bagpipes a try, or return to them if they’d started and stopped, so I’m so glad to learn that. But it’s also the ideas that you’re coming up with that’s also helpful. It could give people ideas about the potential for original and cover music.
Ally: That’s something we’ve experienced a lot from each other and watching each other. Ultimately, that’s why we decided to join up. That’s a big thing even across instrument boundaries, taking inspiration from friends and collaborators.
Mia: I’ve become such a better performer working with Ally and the band. She taught me how to bend and do all these things. [Laughs] We’ve been able to cultivate such a great show together.
Ally: Feeding off of each other’s energy is a really big thing as well.
AH: Do the two of you have any differences in your musical interest or expertise that challenge you? Or are you very much of the same mind?
Mia: We had a lot of similarities, in general. Both of us were classically trained from a young age. We also were both metalheads at heart, but we both loved Celtic music. Since Ally is such an expert Celtic musician, and I’ve done Celtic music more as a hobby my whole life, this has given me the chance to take on some of the ornamentation that she’s doing. Especially when we were recording the album, with those songs in particular, made me grateful to have that experience, because I was able to hear what she was doing first, then learn what she was doing. That made me more able to be a better Celtic player.
Ally: There’s a song on the album that was written for bagpipes, and that’s the one Mia’s references. We have another song on the album that was written for electric violin and violin in general, and it’s in a key that’s not particularly bagpipe accessible, so I had to do a lot of work with my instrument to make it possible for me to play in these keys. Traditionally, when you play bagpipes, you can only play nine notes. It can be limited. Something that’s been a rewarding challenging for me has been playing with instruments that can play chromatically in any key at any point. I work really hard to stay in that, so I’ve invented some chanters, the part of the bagpipe where I put my fingers, or I’ve manipulated some chanters that I already had to create a broad show. That’s been one of my favorite aspects of what we’re doing, being able to jump into different areas.
AH: Needless to say, other bagpipes might take that as a research area by watching you, seeing what’s possible and what they can adapt. That’s what’s cool about trying to do things that seem impossible. You’re laying new ground.
Ally: I think what we’re doing is really special and working together and has helped us to grow so much. I don’t any of that would have happened if we didn’t start working together.
AH: There’s still a bit of duality out there where people are surprised if you like both roots music and metal music, so this is also a great representation of that possibility.
Mia: We definitely have something for everyone on this album. I have a background in bluegrass and roots music. It’s something I did as a kid a lot. I’ve put elements of that into this show. When we’re doing “The Devil Went Down To Georgia,” that’s my one opportunity to do some Americana-style fiddling, kind of in the style of Charlie Daniels. We literally have almost every genre represented in our show, even jazz. We have some bossa nova.
Ally: It’s very eclectic.
AH: Do you get the sense that some of the accessibility of your music online, and even globally, is because it’s mainly instrumental and doesn’t need translation?
Mia: Yes, and that our music has more meaning than just playing the vocal line of “Freebird” on the bagpipes. There’s a deeper meaning to what we’re doing and we’re glad that’s coming through.
Mia: We had a really special experience where one of our fans online told us that they were going through something really difficult and could only listen to instrumental music and our music was beneficial to them in that way. That was the moment that really solidified things for us…
Ally:…That this is the right thing.
Ally: It’s been a really fun experience because even though we are taking some of the vocal lines and guitar parts from songs and extracting them for our instruments, there’s a challenge because it has to feel like it was meant to be that way. It doesn’t feel like you’re playing a karaoke track. That’s something we thought about a lot during recording, that we have to embellish things, we have to add to them. It’s gotten to the point that a lot of these are songs that I’ve known and loved for a really long time, but to me they don’t feel like they are supposed to have vocals in them anymore.
Mia: We are adding layers and layers of violins, and Ally is adding layers and layers of bagpipes, and also whistles and flutes, so we are revamping these tracks in our own voice.
Ally: Which is instrumental.
AH: I can hear what you’re talking about on these tracks. There’s a lot of complex development and it’s full orchestration that you’re creating for each one. Does it take you a while, per song, to do this, and get to the point where you say, “This is what we were going for.”?
Ally: There’s a lot of back and forth for each song. The only track that we were able to record in person was “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” where we brought our band out and worked on it in-studio. The other seven songs were recorded remotely from wherever we were at the time. That posed its own challenges, but I think we communicate well whenever we are recording. One song might be a four-hour session for me, that I then pass to Mia, and she does a four-hour session, but of course I take what she gives me, and then I add and change things. The one that took the most time for me was “Through the Fire and Flames.” I kept going back and forth until it was perfect, so I had 16 hours of recording time for that track alone.
Mia: That’s why it’s important to have back and forth even if we are recording remotely. If you notice, on that particular track, in our solos, we’re playing off of each other’s solos. We parrot some lines, then come together and play a line together. It sounds like we came up with that in the same room, but all of that happened hundreds of miles apart. It turned out really cool. But also, I’ll note that we conceptualized and created this whole album is under six months. We started after our last tour, which was in April, and finished in October. We worked really hard, but we also worked really fast.
Ally: It’s been a big priority in our lives. We also filmed five music videos for this album as well and four of them were all filmed in four days! It was a lot.
AH: I’ve seen many of the videos, many of which are set outside. When it comes to the videos, and the TikTok reaction you’ve had, as well as the response to the live shows, I think there’s a component to this where people really want to see you do this in real-time. I’m not exactly sure why, except that’s it’s very impressive to see live, and maybe viewing you playing these very difficult parts is a thrill for them.
Ally: Yes, it’s a different energy. The music videos were so much fun because the music really comes alive doing it that way. It feels that way in our shows, too.
Mia: I think so too. The TikTok musician thing really reached its peak during the pandemic and there was no touring. That’s why it happened for a lot of us, when all of our gigs dried up. For a lot of us, that’s how we met each other. It was a little uncertain how things would go once we wanted to transition that to touring, but luckily for both us of, we were musicians long before we were on TikTok and had been doing gigs our whole lives.
So we were able to build on that experience. The other nice thing about it is that so many people accuse us of faking our instruments and faking our videos all the time, so there’s no way that anyone can accuse us of faking if they go to one of our shows.
Ally: It’s beautiful! [Laughs] It gets to the point where there’s no way it’s fake, like the little mistakes that we make. I love that because it shows how real it all is. We also have a moment in the show where we swap and play each other’s instruments. We’re actually getting really good at it! But it started out being pretty funny. We just do one song on each instrument and that shows the complexity and how difficult these instruments really are. I think people get a little bit of perspective in that moment. Then we switch back and we go full virtuoso.
AH: That contrast is awesome.
Ally: We love a bit of contrast.
Mia: It gives us perspective, too, because I knew bagpipes were hard, but I didn’t know it was this hard. Seeing Ally do that, and she’s back-bending, and she’s jumping around, and she looks really good and sounds really good, is insane.
Ally: Likewise, we try to mimic each other’s mannerisms when we’re doing these bits, and a couple of shows ago, I was just leaning back, and immediately not being able to look at my hands on the violin threw me off. I was thinking, “How does she do this??” The respect was there, but now it’s just ten-fold.
Mia: Now we know what each of us has to go through in order to pull this off. That’s nice. We’re both very connected in that way.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Mia x Ally! Find more detailed information about Mia x Ally on their website here: https://miaxally.com/
