Who are Protocol?

PROTOCOL is a Guitar/Harmonica Duo but only in the sense of the original instruments Peter and Tappy base their expertise on. The other musical elements of the show are in most respects even more important, such as the sequencing, mixing and recording of the music tracks. They are studio digital quality and are written expressly for the duo. All the live instrument recordings are performed by Protocol- there are no other players in or on any track. That means that all you hear on the show is music played or sequenced by Peter or Tappy, and this is a 100% Guarantee. Their repertoire is extensive and covers many genres of music. But it is quite a story how Tappy and Peter met, considering they were born on the opposite sides of the globe. Tappy was born in Hobart Tasmania and even though he has not lived there for over 30 or so years, he sometimes goes home to see old friends and relatives. It was on one of those trips that he met Peter, who had moved to Hobart to retire. They met at a mutual friends' house and hit it off immediately. Some extended jams resulted and eventually they decided to formalise the whole thing and PROTOCOL was the result.

Pete McLaren has been playing Harmonica since he was a child and as the years progressed, he graduated to more complex music. After the usual flirtation with the blues and Soul, Jazz captured his interest and he acquired a chromatic Harmonica similar to that of the legendary Larry Adler. He discovered it opened up an entirely new world of musical possibilities. Eventually playing in clubs and local venues in his native England, he met with quite a measure of success and when he moved to Mainland Europe (he lived in Poland for around seven Years and Turkey for five), he continued to play and found a way to thread a blossoming musical career through his other major interests- photography, fine arts and research and then as a highly successful restaurateur in Turkey, he perfected his harmonica style in his own venue. Tiring of the hubub of Europe, he and his wife moved to Tasmania where he and Tappy met and started PROTOCOL in June 2006.

Tappy is one of our true music characters. He started to play at the age of nine, by twelve years of age he was running the local dance, by fourteen he was playing in the tent shows and by eighteen he was big time in the Melbourne scene. In 1964 he was in W.A. where he heard a band called Ray Hoff and the Off-Beats playing soul and rock with a Brass Section and fell in love with the sound. He rounded up some promising players, bought a Trumpet and Sax and headed back to Hobart to form the now-legendary J.A.Madison Brass. They stole the show at three finals of "Hoadleys National Battle of the Sounds", getting beaten to third place by half a point by the Masters' apprentices. He was among the first to appear on Australian TV (1961), one of the first to be taped in Colour (1969) one of the first Australian Musicians to be allowed to play on a P&O cruise ship (1966) and he was there at Sunbury, the Wandong Country Music Festival, Channel 9 telethon, Bandstand (1966), and countless other firsts in our Musical History. Many Australian greats have found themselves under the spell of this enigmatic Tasmanian- John Farnham, Wilbur Wilde, Colin Hay, Graeme Russel (Air Supply), Kamahl, Dragon- the list seems endless. Tappy has worked with Ray Stevens, Dick Emery, Matt Monroe, Stephan Grapelli, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and countless more. But PROTOCOL is a new, innovative show even for him, and in his own words- "the sound is new and very refreshing, The Chromatic Harmonica in a jazz context is relatively unexplored, and Pete and I are having fun and you can hear that in the M

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