John Colwill changed his life for music.
He gave up a promising career in medicine to follow his true love, teaching music.
''I resisted something that came very easy for me and went for something that wasn't. I didn't have a choice. I had one of those moments [where I realised] I don't fit here, I really don't fit in here.''
It is a decision that has affected the lives of hundreds of children, as he went on to develop a piano-teaching method for young children using coloured keys for the foundation steps, ''Piano Play''.
Music had always been part of his life. His parents sang in church choirs and his mother pushed for him to get a piano when he was 7 years old.
Ironically, it was his mother who was most upset when he announced he was giving up medicine for music.
Once the decision was made, he went on to become a music journalist for the Brisbane Courier Mail through the 1980s and 1990s.
But he gave that up to dedicate himself to teaching music.
''My father was my teacher at primary school for seven and a-half years. I was apprenticed to it. I was born into it,'' he said of his love of teaching.
A Hungarian government scholarship to study at the Kodaly Institute was a wonderful experience, not only to be a student again in his 30s but to have the time to learn and play again, he said.
He then came back to Brisbane to work with children in a singing and dancing school where he still teaches, just not as much as he used to.
Mr Colwill describes himself as a dedicated studio music teacher and it was when he was asked by preschool children if they could learn piano that he developed his colour-matching technique.
He was at first puzzled by how he could teach piano to such young children, as most of his experience had been with 7- and 8-year-olds.
So he came up with the idea of putting a colour on one finger and blue on another and then putting matching stickers on the keyboard.
''So much was available to young minds that wouldn't have been available because there is immediacy; you have a green finger, a red finger and you just colour match with what is on the keyboard.''
His work has been presented at various conferences and workshops and published in Australia and he had presented the method at international conferences in the United States and for the International Society of Music Education.
He recently returned from Edinburgh where he presented his work to the International Kodaly Symposium. He was now considering an invitation to go to the World Piano Conference in Serbia.
He also continues to play the piano himself, especially accompanying classical singers, and also does a lot of music education work.
''It comes back to education, sharing my love of something I changed my life's direction for.''
At the piano he has directed performances for Queensland Performing Arts, La Boite (Brisbane) and Central Queensland Conservatorium, and has performed on radio as well as playing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Chamber Made Opera.
He also comperes for Opera Queensland, the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Musica Viva and has presented ABC Classic FM's Sunday Live from Brisbane.
He is the Queensland representative for the Australasian Piano Pedagogy Conference Association, a past president of the Music Teachers Association of Queensland and was formerly on the Music Council of Australia and the board of the Lev Vlassenko Piano Competition and Festival.
However, it was seeing a smile bloom on a child's face as they realised they could play that was the most important thing, he said.
The colour system worked because a child received instant gratification, important in today's world.
''If children don't feel an immediate return from what they have invested, they are not prepared to put in the hard work.''
Children leave his classes playing what they had been singing, simple songs they can absorb and build on.
''Because if they are overwhelmed and their expectations are not met, they get frustrated.''
The method taught children to play by ear and the rudiments of notation.
''Everything we do is sung, sung with our voices or the piano.''
It was a process of building and layering, ''musical multitasking'' in a group setting, as a practising musician would have to be aware of their colleagues on stage, whether singing or playing.
''So it's not just sitting there having piano lessons and doing what you want to do. It's a more collegiate way of learning.''
While there was always a discussion about the merits of learning to read music before learning to play, the method enabled children to interface with the piano a lot earlier without being overwhelmed by ''crotchets and quavers''.
What underscored his teaching philosophy was reflected in a quote made in 1818: ''that it seems strange that teaching of music [begins] through the eye and not the ear''.
''The historical weight of that sits very strongly with me, as up until recently we valued the reading of music so strongly.''
Children would still have to learn those skills, but later on.
''I've always felt, as a teacher, for the first five or six years of life we are using language, talking to our mum and dad, and when it comes to piano lessons we're expected to read before playing.''
His work teaching in the junior school at St Peter's Lutheran College, in Brisbane, had allowed him to refine his approach to teaching and his methods.
He had developed a method using the long forefingers on each hand across an octave without using thumbs.
It allowed students to access quite complicated melodies more easily and also opened up piano-playing to older musicians, who might be gifted singers but struggle on the piano.
The simple system of one to eight could be moved across the keyboard, making something they see as an impenetrable mystery easier to understand.
''It is tapping into innate knowledge but revealing it in such a way that it is not such a hard slog.''
With each method, it came down to having one system which unlocked the ''mystery''.
''You are not overwhelmed with lots of unnecessary information which in time you have to learn.''
Playing by ear had been seen as second-class music-making for many generations and if people could marry their ear and eye, it was very powerful, he said.
''I'm not saying this is the only way to do it. Lots of people have this as a gift, then again lots of people don't. This is a way of working with everybody.
''It is not initially intellectual, it's more intuitive, it's kinder.''
At the end of the day it came down to keeping up the love and passion for the piano, because without it children would give it up, he said.
''To keep that love and passion you have to have rewards.''
