About the Director

David Leeding is the director and founder of Audio Graffiti.

He is a musician who has been playing guitar, drums and bass guitar since around 1980. He has occasionally sung in bands, choirs, and as a reluctant soloist, but much prefers to extract sound from fretted strings or drum skins than from his own vocal chords.

David has also dabbled in playing other fretted instruments and keyboards, and aspires to learn the saxophone one day.

 

David has played in numerous bands over the past 27 years: rock bands performing original material, cover bands, "bush" and folk bands, jazz ensembles, and nostalgia bands playing material from the 1950s to 1980s. He has performed with these bands at clubs and pubs, churches and weddings, parties and outdoor events, CD launches and fund raisers. From time to time he has provided guitar accompaniment for vocalists in the Melbourne area. He has appeared as a guest artist on five of Monique Lisbon's albums, including The Lies of Love, If the Truth Hurts and the 2006 release Wounded Beauty.

Early in his musical career, David discovered that he had a certain knack for transcription, and often landed the job of working out parts for cover bands he belonged to. He quickly earned a reputation for accuracy and an ability to pay attention to fine detail.

Transcription required notation, so David embarked on a program of learning about the art of music engraving. In addition to this, he has made considerable effort to understand those instruments he does not play so that he can notate their parts intelligently.

By day, David works as a computer programmer, a technical writer, and occasionally a web site developer/designer. Computer graphics and desktop publishing have long been a sideline to his work in Information Technology, and he applies the skills he has acquired in these area to music engraving.

Musicians that have had an influence on him are many and varied. In particular, David covets the talents of Steve Lukather, Mike Porcaro, Neil Finn, Tommy Emmanuel, Sting, Joe Satriani, Gary Moore, Simon Phillips and the late Jeff Porcaro, to name but a few.

In those very rare moments when he's not working at his computer, David can be found playing his MusicMan guitars, engrossed in Dean Koontz novels, escaping into science fiction movies, dabbling in photography, walking his golden retriever, listening to his Siamese cats (they talk a lot, you can't get a word in), coaching junior basketball, or taking time-out with his wife and three daughters. Sometimes he just disappears for a few hours...and goes fishing.