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The 30-year-old beer buff spends his days as a travelling salesman for an Ontario brewery and some nights tending bar at a downtown Ottawa restaurant. Meantime, he’s quickly become Canada’s current front-runner in competitive air guitar, which is, in fact, a real thing. And it happened by accident.

Work took him to the House of Targ one day, where he saw a poster on the wall for Ottawa’s competition, and he signed up. What he didn’t know was that these competitions are fiercely wacky, zany and vibrant, with themed costumes and performances to complement contestants’ killer moves.

“I just showed up in street clothes. I didn’t know it was a costumed kind of thing,” he recalls. “Everyone in Ottawa had a costume except for me, which made me feel silly. It’s like if you show up to the prom in shorts.”

But he dazzled the crowd of more than 100 with his authentic inner rockitude, earning him a berth in the national championship round in Toronto, which he then won.

It’s all about “making it seem like the music’s coming from you,” he says. And you must have a signature move. One of his fellow competitors in Toronto, for example, shot fireballs from his wrists. McNeely finishes his routine by exploding a king can of beer over his head — a personal touch, and a fan favourite.

“You’ve got to be a little crazy,” he says. “You have to have a couple moves on stage that no one else is going to do that puts you apart.”

Staples in his repertoire are the rip-roaring Born to Kill by Australian ’80s-style hard rockers Airborne, which won him the national championship in Toronto on July 25, and his new muse, Play with Me by American glam metal group Extreme. He pays homage to American air guitar virtuoso David “C-Diddy” Jung, who also performed Play with Me and wore a similar outfit when he won the 2003 title.