The Story to the Song
Away In a Manger- A Chinese Christmas Cover
Hello and welcome once again to my blog!
As I mentioned in my first blog, Let’s Start At the Very Beginning, I went on a Mission for my church. However, I didn’t mention that I went to Auckland, New Zealand or that I was called to teach Chinese people in their native tongue of Mandarin Chinese.
Now don’t get carried away thinking that my Chinese is perfect, I still have a lot to learn. Since New Zealand’s overall language is English, I haven’t had the opportunity to be fully immersed in the language. But I have had plenty of practice speaking it.
Even before my Mission, I was taking Mandarin Chinese classes in Middle School and High School. It never got very advanced because every year our teacher would leave for one reason or another to go back to China and we would get a new teacher.
Looking back, I’m realizing that it was just like in the Harry Potter series where the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher changed every single year! I was pretty frustrated that each year my new Chinese teacher would start from the beginning and teach the alphabet and numbers. It was frustrating, but it helped me become a good speaker of the language.
But let’s get back to my first thoughts of being a Mandarin speaking Missionary. Though I’m very good at speaking the words that I have learned so far, I’m not very good at reading the Chinese characters. That became a problem when I was at church and all the Hymn books(books with the church songs we sing in them) only had the Chinese characters.
Lucky for me, one of the Missionaries was going back to his home in Taiwan and he had a small Hymn book that had both the characters and the pinyin(pronunciations) of the words. I’ve had that Hymn book ever since he gave it to me.
Last December, I was up late one night about a week and a half before Christmas debating whether or not I should clean my room. Before I had made up my mind, I looked on the top of one of my bedroom tables and saw the Chinese Hymn book laying there. I started to get curious if there were any Christmas songs in it, for not all songs in the English Hymn book were translated into Chinese.
As I looked through the section where the Christmas Hymns would be, I was surprised to find that there were quite a few! I turned the pages, softly singing the first verse of each song before moving on to the next Hymn. As I did so, I had this thought come into my mind, You should do a YouTube cover of a Chinese Hymn. I acknowledged that thought but continued singing through the first verse of each song.
As I continued singing, I kept thinking over and over about that thought. I also realized that the song Away In a Manger kept coming into my head. I love lullabies, so I thought it was a perfect song to focus on for my YouTube video. So that very night while I was still awake, I started brainstorming and recording the song in Chinese.
That’s how I ended up starting up my YouTube videos earlier than I planned and that’s the backstory of how this song became my first YouTube video. If you want to know the continuation of this story on how I dealt with the frustrations of making my first video, as well as the miracles of how everything came together, comment and let me know down below! In the meantime, I’ll be writing another backstory.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end!
Let’s Start At the Very Beginning…
Hello lovers of music and welcome to my blog, The Story to the Song. Every song that I've written has a backstory to how it came to be. There are even fun memories of how I got my YouTube videos recorded. I love stories as much as I love music, and I want to share my stories with anyone who is willing to listen to them. Or, in this case, anyone who is willing to read them. But where to start?
"Let's start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start." So the song goes in The Sound of Music. But to not bore you with a long post with every detail on how I ended up here putting together a music website and blog, I'll summarize with the most important turning points that lead me here.
Well the VERY BEGINNING was when I was in third grade and I had my first dream to become a world famous author!!
In middle school I still had that dream, but I was mostly just daydreaming and I didn't write that much. In one of my story ideas, the main character was a shy girl who could play guitar, sing, and write music. One day, I decided I might as well try to write songs for my book. That was when I first started writing music.
I'm religious and in highschool I wrote a few songs for a church project. I was reminded of these songs when I served as a Missionary and felt inspired to share them. I continued writing and sharing songs on my Mission, and I was certain by the end of my Mission that writing music would play a big part in my life.
In the Fall semester of 2018, I started going to college majoring in music.
At the beginning of 2020, I had started putting together accompaniment to my songs. Not only is there a backstory to my songs, but the songs themselves tell stories. When adding the accompaniment, I could visualize the story in my head. This was the first time that I started to think about the idea of doing YouTube videos.
I have had so many awesome music teachers! One of these teachers is my choir teacher who has a YouTube channel of his own. He told me about Audacity, Shotcut, and gave me some tips on how to record and edit good videos. If you want to learn about Solfege, vocal warmups, or anything educational about music, go to YouTube and search for Roger Hale.
In the summer of 2021, I finally got the courage to make a YouTube channel. My friend majoring in Computer Science helped me out and I realized that it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be.
In December of 2021, I had time to think about my YouTube channel again since I had a break from school. But I thought it was best to wait until after I graduated to start making videos. However, I soon felt prompted to not wait and that I needed to do a Christmas video. After that, I put in the effort to upload a video every month to keep things consistent.
I don't remember when I first started thinking about this, but for a while I was thinking about putting up a blog such as this to share the stories of my songs. But I also wanted to have a website so that I could sell the sheet music of my songs. Little did I know that I had the option to have both of them on one website. Once again, my computer science friend came to my aid this summer and helped me create my own website!
There you have it, the basic turning points in my life which have led me here. If you want to know more about these experiences in individual blog posts, comment below! Otherwise, I'll stick to my plan of writing about the stories of each song.
I hope you enjoyed my post, thanks for reading 'till the end!