Years' worth of recordings stolen from Napier musician with cerebral palsy

Musician Kieran Taylor has had his music files stolen, some dating back 10 years. Photo / Paul Taylor

Napier musician Kieran Taylor is devastated after having a decade's worth of irreplaceable music recordings stolen, just weeks ahead of his band's first official gig.

"I came back from my break about 3pm and noticed my computer was gone, had a look around and saw my flatmate's computer had gone and realised we had been robbed," he said.

While he was disappointed to have had his computer stolen, Taylor, who has cerebral palsy, said it was the loss of years' worth of music kept on hard-drives that he felt the most.

"I write everything using software because of my disability and I had it on my Mac. I also had it backed-up on hard-drives that were sitting by the computer. I also had back-ups on flash drives and they stole all of it - they swiped it all.

"All the keys I wrote have all gone and part of it I won't be able to replicate again because it was saved as a pre-set for the plug-ins I have. There's also recording sessions with my band as well.

"We have a show coming up on January 20, so I'm hoping I can get things sorted so we can do the show. Actually, we have been getting some really positive reactions to what we are doing, and we've only really just kicked it of properly, performing this year. Everything over the past four years has been working up to this.

Taylor said he would be willing to pay a reward "no questions asked" if the drives could be returned.

"I started 10 years ago working on it, and it really picked up speed in the last four years when I was able to get some other musicians to get involved. I couldn't even quantify how many hours of work is on the drives. Basically, I sit down and work on it for a couple of hours every day. Even something as simple as a sample would take me a couple of hours to get right.

"This isn't just a thing, this is my art."