Hi, I'm Robin Thomson and I have been a musician for more than 50 years since I first picked up a nylon string guitar at the age of fifteen to learn Led Zeppelin riffs. I have been playing the piano since 2009 since I decided I wanted to learn it after playing and teaching guitar for over 30 years. Apart from one year of traditional piano lessons, I essentially taught myself, because I was able to transfer the skills I had learnt from 10 years of classical guitar lessons. Interestingly, considering my traditional training on guitar at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, I took a non-traditional approach to the piano. I shunned technical material such as scales/arpeggios, theory and practical exams concentrating on improvising and playing a whole variety of music including blues, classical, contemporary and my own compositions which I would generally learn to play from memory. Composition and improvisation are both important parts of my musical life and the main reasons why I switched to the piano.