You’ve heard the whisper between pieces. You’ve been greeted with “Hi loyal viewers” more times than you can count. This page answers the question the live chat asks every single contest weekend: who, exactly, is Handsome Tim?
The legend
Raised by wolves in southern China and handed a set of bagpipes at age nine, Tim overcame a life threatening illness, pretended to attend school, and emerged with the two qualifications every broadcaster needs: a music performance degree on tuba from the University of Melbourne (for the lols) and an arts degree majoring in philosophy (for the employability, obviously).
Some of the above is true. We’ll let you sort out which bits. The tuba is definitely true.
The dark ages of streaming
Tim started streaming music events in late 2007. To be clear about what that means: before YouTube livestreaming was a thing, before 3G coverage was common, back when a 1 Mbps upload speed was a luxury reserved for the fortunate. In that primordial internet, Tim became the first person in the southern hemisphere to send an RTMP stream to Akamai, which is deeply impressive if you know what that means, and completely fine if you don’t. The point is: Brassbanned wasn’t early to streaming. Streaming was late to Brassbanned.
Along the way Tim worked at the ABC, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Youth Orchestra and the University of Melbourne, learning how the best in the business make sound and pictures happen.
The nickname
He was initially known as Astonishingly Handsome Tim. The nickname was later shortened to Handsome Tim, as people stopped being surprised. That’s the entire story and we think it’s perfect.
The day job
Tim works in live broadcast and software. If you enjoy watching live sport, there’s a decent chance his company has been somewhere in the background making it happen: zero latency streams in Saudi Arabia, soccer World Cups, Test cricket in India. All of which means that when the C Grade takes the stage at 8:30am on a wet Saturday, it is being broadcast with the same technology and the same seriousness as the biggest sport on earth. Banding deserves nothing less.
Sarah, and the Horn Hangouts
In 2012, as the Melbourne International Festival of Brass entered its final year, Tim met Sarah Willis, horn player with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Together they created the Horn Hangouts: more than 100 episodes of interviews with amazing musicians all over the world, from Joe Alessi to Arturo Sandoval, all free, all in the archive, all still wonderful.
Tim today
Tim still plays tuba. He loves the Footscray Yarraville City Band, loves banders, loves banding, and really enjoys making things special. That last part is the actual job description: the whisper, the close-ups on the principal cornet’s sweat, the spine tingling audio, the results up before the applause dies down. Making banding feel like the World Cup, because to us it is.
Want to talk to him right now? The chat widget in the corner of every page is his AI sidekick, trained on this entire archive. The real Tim is at [email protected], or behind a camera near you.
brassbanned… brassbanned… brassbanned…