My name is Ke Bai and I was born on July 10, 1990 in one of China's rural regions. In short, I'm from the countryside. I learned to speak English right after I learned how to speak Chinese, and I eventually moved the United States.
Unlike many other singers, I was not exactly the musical type when I was young, neither was anyone in my family, except for perhaps my grandfather. In fact, I never would have guess I'd have anything to do with music at all. My first music experience came when I enrolled in chorus at my elementary school. My teacher, who was once a professional singer himself, apparently favored my voice and encouraged me to advance further into the field of music.
So I did. I took up singing as a hobby and eventually progressed to being recruited for the formal chorus of my school as a soloist. With the help of my instructor, I learned how to take my voice and project it out in the best way possible. However, things didn't quite work out at. It was when I stood in front of a crowd of about 400 parents or so anticipating the verses the soloist was supposed to sing that I realized that I had a major problem with stagefright and I couldn't manage even a single word. Needless to say, that failure on stage got me kicked out of school chorus. My first performance ended as a major disater, and after that I was just about ready to quite music altogether.
But by then music has become a part of me, and I just couldn't leave it forever. Coming to the United States gave me a new opportunity and a clean slate, and also a electronic keyboard to practice on. The only thing I lacked was a teacher. I never got the teacher, but I did get more experience in front of a crowd and gained confidence in performing. But piano was just not the right instrument for me. I had to choose between being a singer, or an instrumentalist, but I couldn't be both; playing the piano and singing was a little to complicated for me. Once again, my resolve for music began to dwindle.
Just like the introduction of an instrument inspired me into a renaissance after my debacle in singing, the introduction of another instrument saved the musician within me. By then I was 13 years old and in the 8th grade of middle school. It began as an ordinary day, but I heard the melody of a pleasing tune in the room next to mine. Class hasn't started yet, so I took a peek. Turns out, one of my friends brought his instrument to school and was practicing on it. That instrument really caught my eye and my mind, and eventually it would change my life completely two years later.
It was a guitar.
So I asked him to let me see it and he strapped it over my shoulder, and I made a fool of myself by strumming a horribly off-pitched note. Now of course, this wasn't the first time I've seen a guitar, but I never really had a chance to see one up close before, never mind hold one and so never had such an impression with a guitar. However, from that day, I knew what instrument I wanted to play.
Two years later, I finally got my first guitar as a birthday present. It was a used Epiphone acoustic the color of natural wood and of dreadnought size. I wasn't very tall at the time, I think about 5'6" (1.65m for metric users), so basically the guitar was disproportionally big for me, and I looked particularly awkwards holding it. But it was a guitar nevertheless, and I loved it. I seriously fell in love with it. So I took it home and, since it was summer and I didn't have too much on my schedule, practiced it everyday until my fingers hurt. It was a little frustrating at times, when I just couldn't get a certain chord to sound right or a certain string in tune, and sometimes I thought about giving up, but I knew I was improving and eventually I learned all the essential chords and techniques.
So now that I can play, how about trying to sing with it too? I asked myself one day. The answer came to me immediately after I tried. No, I was far from ready for that. Fortunately, I caught on relatively quickly learned how to quietly hum while strumming chords. Next came putting a defined tune to the humming, and words naturally fell in after that, creating a unified song. Next came the part of applying all the lessons I have learned in chorus before to the song. Could I do it? This time, the answer was yes.
So now I learned how to play the guitar, I learned how to sing with the guitar, and it was time for the test. Would I be able to do the same thing in front of an audience?
I was a sophomore at Parkview High School by then, and this was the first time I brought my guitar with me to school. The situation was quite good because people already knew who I was and that I know how to sing from my appearance on Parkview Idol, a singing contest at my high school, during my freshman year. And so, a group of people asked me to play a song for them. Well, I got my guitar, started strumming, steadied my voice, and gave it everything I got. Personally, I think I did quite alright that day, and the others probably thought the same too.
Bringing my guitar then became one of my "traditions". And in doing so and playing for people at the spur of the moment, I was able to efface my stagefright completely. The next step for me was to create some music from scratch. So I got a band together, called it Mornin' Glory, and started to write my own songs. My first songs weren't that good, in fact they are quite bad, but I singled out my problems one by one and fixed them one by one, and my songwriting skills improved with each new song.
Eventually I was able to hold a crowd with purely original songs. I was writing a new song every week or so. More and more people have heard my music as my audience became increasingly varied. Soon it got to the point where me getting confident enough to consider my songs as decent and wanting to put them down on media. But the problem was, I had no equipment for such a task, and Mornin' Glory was disbanded because the members just couldn't get together and play often enough.
Fortunately, I was able to scrape together a small collection of money and purchased all the equipment and software I needed within half a year. From there on, I was able to record the songs I wrote and bind them together into albums.
On January 28, 2007, I officially released my first CD: Birth of a Singer
To be continued...
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