Greetings to all my old friends, past players and Vigilantes and Rick and The Goose followers.

I’m not doing gigs these days because of family commitments, but I’m spending a lot of time in my studio writing, recording and doing work for other people. Have so far done two albums for Clayton Black, one and a half Rick and The Goose albums, edited some stuff for Jazzworx here in Brisbane and even recorded two albums for an Irish choir among other projects. Got to keep your hand in.

Much of this site is about recording, mixing, reviews of gear and software (see the Reviews page) and some general meandering.

Apart from playing guitar on the road for 100 years, I’ve also spent a lot of time behind the desk in studios, from the olden days of splicing tape and working with mono recorders, being the audio guy at Melbourne Uni (the Conservatorium and electronic music studio at the Percy Grainger Centre) way back in the 70’s, to more recently running my own little project studio at home and teaching audio engineering for a while with a really good local school and studio, Vandersound. Hey, Joe!

I also worked as amplification manager for Roland when we introduced the first guitar synthesizer and spent a couple of years touring the country doing in store clinics.

In the late 70’s I was lucky enough to complete the JBL Acoustic Design Certificate course conducted by the renowned studio and monitor speaker designer George Augsperger.

I am relentlessly  unimpressed by bad electronic dance music and cookie cutter pop stars with autotune voices. I think of the more banal “edm” as corny noises for teddy bears to dance to at the teddy bears’ picnic.

Luckily, I still find the occasional  gem out there in contemporary music land. Real music and real musicians still exist.

There are many talented people around now who grew up listening to the music their parents were into and are fusing that with modern colours to create new and exciting contemporary music, and I appreciate that.

For a perfect example of what I’m talking about, check out this excellent track, “Wolf”, from the extremely talented Caiti Baker: