My special arrangements and tuition have helped many students to win awards in Eisteddfods and Music Festivals.

The overall success of my students in competitions is the result of our working together as a team, sharing ideas and inspirations.

All aspects of a performance need to be covered - technique, choice of music, voicing, presentation and audience acknowledgement.

Our success is marked on various Cairns Eisteddfod trophies, for instance; my pupils won the Organ Solo Championship trophy six times between 1981 and 1992. For me, these competition achievements are confirmation that my aim to encourage musicianship and performance is important and effective.

Surprisingly perhaps, with over 16 years of competition triumphs, I believe that music is a performing art and not a sport to be judged with winners and losers.

The automatic features and diversity of keyboards makes them exciting to play and spectacular to listen to.

These features also make it extremely difficult to judge competitively and as yet there is no local music festival for keyboards. 

Our first Win . . .

The first pupil that I entered in a music competition, Jenny McIntyre, won the novice section of the Cairns Yamaha Electone Festival.

Jenny had been learning for about 9 months and played a medley of two songs that I arranged to display both her technical and performance skills.

This began an exciting period of 16 years or so where my students were always winning or being highly placed in any competition we entered.

My students dominated the Cairns regional Yamaha Electone Festival, sometimes winning three or four years consecutively.

They were then often successful in the North Queensland finals for selection to play in the State Finals in Brisbane, against the other five or six top players, to find the best player in Queensland.

Here's a typical Newspaper clipping

All the winners in this photo were my students!!

Working with talented musicians was a special experience, the powerful music, crowd reaction and great mates was the very best of fun.

During my time playing in Kuda, No Comment, Shen-men, Sly Fox, Bodyshot etc, I learned about sound engineering and using big PA systems, lighting and managing a band.

While singing and playing keyboards at night I was also teaching, writing and recording songs during the day

My Keyboard 'stack' - Korg Polysix on top of an Electric Piano and Hammond Organ below.

I remember this gig with No Comment, we had a 4000 watt PA for front of house at the Tudor Room and a massive 2000 watts as foldback and sidefill just for ourselves. It was massively LOUD!!!

Our lead singer, Gary, can be seen prowling the stage out front.

I was lead singer for some songs.

I rigged up a mobile keyboard, so that I could play 'guitar style' and move around the stage - here I am, in the picture to the right,  playing a lead solo in Bodyshot.

Here's a rare daylight appearance of ‘Shen-Men”, looking unusually laid back with their trousers rolled up for the 'Fun in the Sun' festival.

I've also played solo in Restaurants and at functions, as well as playing in several other bands, covering many styles of music.

From Top 40 Rock, to Old Time Dancing, Jazz, Rock n Roll and Cabaret - a fantastic musical experience.

I was an early user of MIDI, the connection between computers and keyboards and I used this system to write and record 'jingles' for TV and radio.

Currently I'm not performing live. I have a project underway to produce a CD of original music and also 2 more Music Books to complete and publish.

It's an exciting time for keyboard players, we can now compose and record entirely on a home computer, add as many extra parts and instruments as we need, engineer the sound to high quality then burn our performance onto a CD - all at home.