Music has always been in my life since very early childhood mainly through my father who enjoyed classical and easy listening music and played piano. He was self taught never having studied music but had a natural talent to play by ear and this is something I was able to do from a young age.
As it turned out, it was my younger sister who was sent to piano lessons whilst I was more into football and sports which to me at the time was a more favourable option. When my sister used to practice her piano pieces I would hear and
memorise every note and from this, I could sit down at the piano and play them back note perfect. Piano and practice were not really my sister's thing so she was always amused when I used to play her pieces and fool our parents into thinking it was she who was playing.
People say it is a gift to play by ear. I suppose there has to be something in it when you have the ability to hear music and sit down and play it back on a particular instrument, in my case, the piano. I think if it had been me rather than my sister who was sent to music, especially when showing a talent from an early age that could be developed and nurtured, I think my life would have taken a different path, but it didn't happen.
​
I continued to play and listen to music, mainly classical, light jazz and songs from the American Songbook expertly sung by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald arranged by the likes of Nelson Riddle and Gordon Jenkins etc and this gave me what I would describe as a great understanding of musical interpretation and arrangement which I think is priceless when you progress to composing music yourself. I consider myself to be a great listener of music having listened relentlessly to all the great composers for many years, namely, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Puccini, Mahler, Vaughan Williams to name just a few. I think you can learn so much from their works where I can safely say many of my compositions have been influenced by them in a number of ways.
It was not until my late teens when my father bought a Hammond organ that I started to really take an interest. I seemed to pick up the organ quite naturally and once the more modern portable keyboards arrived on the scene I was hooked. I then decided to study piano up to and including Grade 8 knowing this would advance my playing skills and introduce a whole new piano repertoire. It was probably around this time I realised that whilst I enjoyed playing other peoples' music, what I really wanted to do was compose my own and this is the path I embarked upon.
Having experimented with a Yamaha PSR1700 keyboard which helped me get a great understanding of this new technology, I eventually progressed to owning a Yamaha Clavinova Piano (CVP309) which had the more advanced onboard sequencer plus numerous sampled instrument voices and various rhythmic accompaniments to utilise as you see fit. This gave me the tools to start thinking like an orchestra and allow me to choose any sampled instrument and systematically introduce them via the onboard sequencer to build up a piece track by track. This pdf explains how I used the sequencer to compose many of my pieces on the Yamaha keyboards.
The genres of music I tend to stick to are classical, choral, easy listening/light jazz, film/TV, Latin, popular and ambient for which I've now written 81 pieces.
The next stage was to showcase my music and to do this I created this website. The website captures every piece I've composed, arranged and performed on keyboards/piano, music software and Digital Audio Workstation plus, I've already started to try and score the pieces for piano but this will be a lengthy process.
The music is of course restricted to my standard of playing and arranging hence the reason for showcasing the music so that more accomplished musicians/arrangers than myself could consider performing them to a much higher standard.
I have now entered the fascinating world of DAWs or Digital Audio Workstations which opens up a whole new approach to composing music via audio and VST libraries. For me this is the future where real instrument libraries can be accessed and incorporated into your compositions to give a more authentic sound to the finished product.
Accessing my "DAW Creations" page on this website gives a bit more of an insight into what hardware and software I currently use plus the tracks I have composed to date using Logic Pro X. I'm only scratching the surface and have so much more to learn but I look forward to the months and years ahead to get more proficient with this new technology hoping to produce music that will be noticed at some point where it can hopefully be taken further.