Cheerful Scores

Tech bros want us to pay for their free lunch

This post (originally published on August 30 ,2025) has been re-dated & published with updates due to changes in government policy revealed by a whistleblower. The first notion I had that the music ...

Here's what I learned from analysing my visitor data

Getting positive feedback as a living composer is not easy. Most avenues for sharing new compositions or arrangements are closed to us, buttressed with stern warnings against self-promotion. Sharing o ...

I'm introducing booklets to make my piano music easier to find and use.

If you're here for the first time, I'd like to welcome you to my site and my music. During the lockdowns, I wrote a large number of original compositions, many of them for solo piano. My int ...

Check out my growing list of new trumpet arrangements

The aim of these arrangements is to extend the repertoire for trumpet at a rate of one every week or so (and play my favourite music!). These arrangements are divided between public domain classics an ...

See the music world through the eyes of the blind

I also introduced direct access to Musescore files of every score. This big change came about after I was asked about providing Musescore files on Reddit to a vision-impaired user.This seemed a f ...

The adventure of my first cover song EP, from recording to getting them onto the streaming platforms.

Today marks a huge milestone in my musical endeavours. I have released my first trumpet recordings. I've also published the backing tracks created for each track on YouTube so other musicians can ...

Find out what it takes to break into and survive in the Australian music industry

As a requirement of my TAFE course in music performance I have interviewed industry professional, Michael Chambers to share knowledge of what is important to get right when you're entering or survi ...

Crazy charges from Musescore have cost me a fortune

Musescore is a website built for storing and sharing musical scores created with the free software of the same name. The software makers have no ties to the score-sharing site apart from sharin ...

A look at what happens when you go viral on TikTok

I've only recently gone back into doing my music. A couple of years into my composing efforts, I'd gotten distracted by other things. A few weeks ago I decided to check back into my distributor's das ...

The Bin Chicken is as Australian as Bluey. I wrote a piece to honour their place in Australian culture.

I recently released an album of brass band/ensemble pieces, including the track titled 'Bin Chicken Banter. Considering much of my audience is from outside Australia, I thought I should explain what a ...

This blog post follows the story of my piece Antarctica from duet to chamber orchestra.

If you are at all familiar with my scores you may have noticed that there are usually several arrangements of the same piece. Writing for the general public chamber groups is very much a hit and mis ...

An overview of the different roles in making music

I haven't blogged for a while so I thought I'd get back into things with a blog post about the difference between music composition, production, mixing and mastering. These terms are closely related b ...

Composition competitions, are they worth it?

As a fledgling composer I have had the joy of experiencing many things for the first time over the past 18 months. One of those things is entering composition competitions. Not long after I beg ...

A basic intro to how composers create realistic orchestral music without an orchestra.

Since I published this blog post, I have gone on to write and produce multiple tracks for orchestra as well as several commissions for chamber groups for members of the local Amateur Chamber Music ...