I started to play the piano when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I went to piano lessons with my sister every week when I was a kid. Today I still got the piano books that I used at that time. We also had music and singing lessons at school. I loved singing the songs and playing the recorder. When I was a teenager, I started to listen to some Rock and Roll music and the blues. I played the blues on an electric guitar and I loved bending the strings. I also had guitar teachers at the time and studied books about improvisation. I was certain at that time I wanted to be a professional musician.
After high school graduation I went to a local performing arts school to study music recording and engineering, well, very serious! I had to study some basic electronics and learn about the signal flow of a sound system, there were courses like how to place a speaker, a microphone, how to do music mixing using different effects. They had a recording studio that has a million-dollar huge mixing console, which was called "Logic 2", it was at that time I recorded "Starry night" and "Baroque Finale", I used this "Logic 2" for the recording and mixing of my 2 tracks, well, that's great! Recording technology has changed a lot in recent years so it is not really necessary to use such a mixing console to get professional sound today, but it was great at the time. Because the school also has a classical music department, I got exposed to works by Mozart, Bach and Beethoven each day, it made me love them even more. I also took courses of classical music composition at that school.
After that I went to the USA and attended Berklee College of Music in Boston. It was the happiest but also the most stressful time of my life, partly because the tuition fee was quite expensive. I did meet a few great teachers there and the time I spent there really helped me open my mind both musically and personally. Most students practiced 8 to 10 hours each day. The school was full of weird people from every part of the world, even the teachers were weird :) Musicians, including myself, are not normal people, a lot of them had really unhappy times in their lives, I think part of the reason they wanted to do music is because they wanted to escape from reality. Music is so powerful that it can take you to anywhere in the universe whether you are a musician or a listener.
