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Proud to be a child of God, a faithful son (I hope lol) a trying to be hardworking student, a part-time worker, a nerf/milsim enthusiast, a crafting and music lover and an awesome friend. to you :) Hope you have an enjoyable time reading about my life, as much as I have fun living it! |
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I am a university student who loves chocolate! Coffee is my best buddy when it comes to taking on my finals. I have a tendency to want to try and do so many different things at once and as a result, I've found my hobbies to be as such!
Nerfing is one of them, but aside from that, I also love arts and craft. I have my own startup, Thumbforlego at: where I sell my works! 
I love to do all sorts of crafting, so you will see me uploading posts of my leathercrafts, thumbdrives, replica guns, nerf gun modifications and gundam models! I'm fortunate enough to be blessed by really supportive parents and given the chance to explore many, many parts of the world and try out a plethora of activities. This is also how I discovered my love for film photography, videography and piano. 
The film photo above is unedited! My family loves cold countries xD. We managed to catch the northern lights twice! 
I've also gotten the chance to experience many of nature's wonders 
And my most freezing experience to date: riding a husky ski sled into the sunset (It was -38 to -40 degrees celsius and the huskies were pretty fast.) 
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Why 36000feetabove? This is the altitude that commercial planes cruise at and I have always loved the view up in the sky, being amongst the sea of clouds. :) Personally, my favourite favourite food has got to be airplane buns! Does anyone else feel the same way?! With a slice of butter and looking out of the window, I have yet to find an experience that can beat that. 
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Tuesday, November 22, 2016
I know, i haven't blogged in a while, reason being i am extremely busy (what's new) with school work and my business. I just proof read all of my works for submission in about 2 hours time and they are music module journals. In the last journal, I decided to write on my personal experience with music. So i thought that it would be a good idea to share it here as well, as I really do not have the time now to create a new quality post! It's like you do have many topics at hand that you can write to share with the readers but there is just a lack of time! Then again, this is actually the busiest time of the semester, I don't know if I will ever be this busy ever again actually! Just kidding, a person who always packs his schedule is bound to be as busy. Unless he falls sick.Here is my journal entry, word for word.
I thought that it’ll be fun to write the last journal on my personal experience with music. So I’ve always loved to play the piano, although this passion of mine did not come forth until during secondary school. I learnt it since I was five, when my parents, being the typical Asian parents that wanted me to learn an instrument. I did not know what to learn hence they signed me up for organ classes for a start as mum knows how to play the organ. I didn't like it and hence moved to learning piano instead. For the approximately first 11 years of my piano playing, I have been under this piano teacher who taught me all the way till grade 7. It was only in secondary school when my friends heard that I knew how to play the piano, and since there was one at the atrium, I would constantly play on that during break times and after school. That was when my love for piano grew, as later on my friends did ask me to teach them how to play the piano and read “tao gey”, the standard musical notes. I was lucky enough that my parents could afford a Yamaha piano which up till today is still being used by me, although grossly outdated with a horrible repertoire of sounds. Nonetheless, it’s the piano that have stuck with me all these while and hence I’ve practiced on that for almost practically all my life.
Secondary school life ignited my passion for the piano and I enjoyed the hard work of practicing because I knew that at the end of the day, people would be impressed and I sought gratification from there. However as compared to now, the sense of fulfillment and gratification comes more from me being able to pull off a certain song with the amount of feelings and emotions invoked. Which also means that not getting it right would get me incredibly pissed off and disappointed which would then cause me to lose patience and well, patience is very much needed during practice. Hence it becomes a constant struggle of trying to always outperform my previous practice session. Even though I did have the flame in me in secondary school, it was pretty much stagnant and it was only during junior college days did the flame grow much brighter and as such, my skills also. It was when my teacher found out that I was interested in the piano, partly because I had to ask for an excuse because I had to take my grade 7 exam. From there, there was an opening for the school pianist and they needed two pianists. After an audition, I got selected to become the school pianist and since then i’ve been practicing a lot in school and performing at key events. I had to practice in school as my parents felt that I was neglecting my studies over piano. As such I gave them the excuse that I was doing night study in school everyday in school when actually my supportive school principal was willing to tune the piano in the hall and leave it open for me to practice everyday. It was there that my passion for the piano really grew as I listened to pieces to learn the expressions while trying them out on the piano. When I heard what other pianists could do, then there was this desire within me, even today, to be able to achieve the likes of it. To be able to play and express as well as them. It was a really memorable time having been given the chance to be the school pianist and being able to perform duets with another pianist, playing accompaniment while my General Paper teacher sang and also playing as a triplet with a cellist and a violinist.
Everything was very raw as we had no formal teacher to teach us how to perform together so lots of hard work was poured in just to get everything to run smoothly. We just pretty much said that “hey! why not lets just perform together!” and then it actually happened. It was one of those impulsive crazy ideas that you just blurt out but in the end actually see it happening. There were fun moments too when we did impromptus for certain events. As I look back, now I am also currently rehearsing with a professional cellist to come up with two covers from ThePianoGuys and realized that yeah, I’ve actually grown quite a lot. It gets scary when I realize how much things I do not know, like how to properly communicate with the cellist, the eye contact, glancing at the cellist and not just focusing on your own playing, being able to flow together. There is just so so so many things that I can learn when performing duets, which then made me realize how raw my performances were in JC, how little I knew. This sudden realization, not to make it sound too Kylie Jenner’s “year of realizations”, was largely due to a change in teacher. During the A levels period, I dropped piano to concentrate on my studies, of which oops I flunked. But this new teacher is able to really phrase things in a certain manner or teach me in a certain way and guide me that really allows me to grow so much more. That was when I realized the truly painful nature of practice. Before that, my practices were always simple casual playing and making sure I got the notes right. But one thing that my piano teacher taught me that up till today I strongly stick to, is to treat every practice like a performance. Which is really insane because it is so tiring! But the end result is worth it as the practice then becomes a really productive one, since you are giving it your all. Although there is also this thing of overpracticing? That when you keep playing too many times and then you may unknowingly reinforce a certain wrong part, well that’s practicing wrongly, but thank God for a teacher there to correct it. But practicing until you get so bored of the song, that it becomes so difficult to bring out the emotions of the song. It is kind of like you lose that flair that you once had as you already know exactly what it’s going to sound like as you’ve already practiced it so many times the day before.
During secondary school, I used to go for 3 hour piano lessons, inclusive of a practice time in between so that after practice, my teacher can correct me again or praise me, whatever necessary for me to improve on the song. However after having changed teachers, the current teacher of mine has sky high expectations that I can barely even reach it, falling short almost every week but the lessons are an intensive one hour session of which after 45mins i start staring at the clock. Piano practice has become a love and hate thing for me. I love it because I know that I will improve and I hate it because its a really painful and tiring process of always trying to invoke that certain emotion.
It was since secondary school days, when everyone was coming up with really bombastic names like say Ming Yang The Unicorn Specialist or something, or just those “xXcoolboyXx” days that I came up with the name Ming Yang ThePianist for my Facebook name. And because I kept that name throughout JC days, everyone knew me as MYTP, plus it was pretty fitting, did I decide to keep that moniker. It sounds cheesy as heck, borderline chauvinistic, but it holds great memories of the past, from how I gave my first piano lesson to all those memorable performances in JC where I had just so much fun playing the piano and finally to where I am today having learnt so much but yet still so much more to learn.
I’ll probably save up a few paychecks in future and get myself a nice piano la, to replace this half breaking apart 1975 piano of mine. Although I think it will be too sentimental to just dispose of it!
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