I am a writer, composer and guitarist, currently employed as an Associate Professor in Music Production in the Faculty of Arts at York St John University.
I have a wide range of musical interests which form the basis of my research and teaching. These include the use of digital technologies in music creation and production, phonomusicology, songwriting pedagogy and its relationship to practice, popular music (particularly heavy metal), the contemporary classical guitar, its history and repertoire and British classical music in the 20th century.
I began my career teaching guitar privately in Leeds in the mid 1990s, later working as a peripatetic guitar teacher for Roundhay Music (North Leeds) and Calderdale Local Authority. I taught at Leeds College of Music between 1998 and 2011, initially at Further Education level and then Higher Education for undergraduate and Masters degree levels, on a variety of music-related modules across the Classical, Jazz, Popular Music and Music Production degrees then offered by the college.
Between 2011 and 2015 I was Teaching Fellow and Programme Manager for the BSc Music, Multimedia and Electronics at the University of Leeds, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, before taking up a permanent position at York St John University, initially as Senior Lecturer and, most recently, Associate Professor in Music Production. I have also worked as an external examiner for the University of Brighton (City College), University of Hertfordshire, University of Chester and University of East London (Institute of Contemporary Music Performance).
At York St John I currently teach in the areas of musicology of production, history of music technology, musical composition, electronic music and final year dissertation projects.
My academic research is currently focused in the areas of musicology of record production, music technology and creativity, 20th century British art music and the classical guitar repertoire. I have published chapters with Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Routledge, and Future Technology Press and have contributed articles to British Music, Soundboard, the Musical Times, and the Journal on the Art of Record Production.
My recently published book, Recording the Classical Guitar (Routledge 2021), charts the evolution of classical guitar recording practice from the early twentieth century to the present day, encompassing the careers of many of the instrument's most influential practitioners from the acoustic era to the advent of the CD. A key focus is on the ways in which guitarists' recorded repertoire programs have shaped the identity of the instrument, particularly where national allegiances and musical aesthetics are concerned. The book also considers the ways in which changing approaches to recording practice have conditioned guitarists' conceptions of the instrument's ideal representation in recorded form and situates these in relation to the development of classical music recording aesthetics more generally. Recording the Classical Guitar was recently nominated as a finalist in the 2022 Association for Recorded Sound Collections' (ARSC) Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research (Classical Music).
I have been researching the Digital Audio Workstation (the predominant software interface for contemporary music production) since 2009. Initially my focus was on the employment of the DAW in the creative of practice of students on University music degree courses from the perspective of its effects on how they conceived musical ideas (results published as 'Experiencing Musical Composition in the DAW' Journal on the Art of Record Production, 5, 2011). The focus then moved to studies of the employment of the DAW in specific areas of popular music practice, focusing in particular on singer songwriters and heavy metal musicians. This led to chapters/articles in the Bloomsbury Singer-Songwriter Handbook ('Composing in the Digital Audio Workstation', 2017) and the Journal of Metal Music Studies ('From DJ to Djent-step: Technology and the Re-Coding of Metal Music since the 1980s', 2017).
My doctoral research at Leeds University (completed 2002) was the first study of the life and work of the British composer Denis ApIvor (1916 to 2004). In 2014 to 2015 I was involved in curating the ApIvor archive held at University of Leeds Special Collections, an important resource for the composer's scores, recordings and personal papers.
Recent publications
I am currently contracted with Routledge as writer and series editor on various academic book projects related to the field of music production most notably the Perspectives on Music Production series (including Mixing Music; Producing Music; Gender in Music Production).
I have also been involved in a number of guitar related publishing projects over the years, which have often been pedagogical in nature. These include Guitar from Scratch, which I co-authored with Microjazz's Chris Norton (Boosey and Hawkes) in 1999. Here I contributed much of the text and recorded all of Chris Norton's specially composed pieces for the audio CD that accompanies the book. I also acted as a specialist guitar consultant for the Usborne series, Very Easy Guitar Tunes, Easy Guitar Tunes and Guitar Tunes for Children (2004), working closely with author and composer Anthony Marks to arrange and edit the musical examples. My collection of solo guitar arrangements, Nineteen Gilbert and Sullivan Favorites for Classical Guitar was published by Mel Bay in 2004. The anthology contains nineteen of the most popular Gilbert and Sullivan classics arranged in easily sight-readable versions for beginning to intermediate classical guitarists.
