Tonight I Celebrate My Love For You

Tonight, Mayenne was not at home, because wifey has to work on a big project proposal. So the night is ours to do what we wanted.

I have no other photo projects on hand, and I have a cameo performance for my friend's wedding banquet this Saturday, so I switched on my digital piano for the first time this year and practiced.

The opening song that I am intending to play for the performance is "Tonight I Celebrate My Love (For You)". While practicing, I decided to make a recording, a simple straightforward rendition. The song has been uploaded to my blog playlist or you can listen in my Facebook.

After that, I practiced my second song, a Mandarin song by David Tao, called 爱很简单 "Ai Hen Jian Dan". Instead of the straightforward rendition, I injected a dramatic arrangement. Warning: don't turn up the volume, as some passages may get rough.

Let me know if you enjoy the new songs.

Playlist Update - Leo Ku "Xi Huan" (Favourites) 喜歡

It's been so long since I added new songs to my playlist. But recently I have been receiving a lot of feedback from friends and site visitors about my playlist, and how they actually visit my site everyday and play the playlist on their PC.

And since I have not done any new songs or arrangements for the longest time, I dug up some of my old tracks that was unpublished.

This new track was once a very popular song on the Mandarin Charts. Leo Ku was a cool-looking actor and an okay singer. "Xi Huan" is a commercially successful song and I arranged this in New Age instrumental style as requested by the album producer. This track, together with "I Believe" and 14 others, was never published.

For those who inquired about the availability of the Mandarin songs, it's currently unavailable anywhere in the world - except on the IMEEM playlist. You cannot purchase it because these songs are cover versions meaning I have to pay royalties to the original song publishers if I want to make it commercially available (not the case if they are unpublished original compositions). We have to respect commercial laws so that people can continue create music for all to enjoy.

Red Nano for the Red Dot

Today, the Straits Times (and probably many other national newspapers) features large prominent adverts on Red Nano, the new search engine created by SPH (Singapore Press Holdings) solely on the Singapore market. It makes sure that all the search results are localised to Singapore context. One of the methods is to pick up keywords unique to Singapore, for instance, street names, food terms, even Singlish.

So this morning I tested it out, using keywords like "Chester Tan", "Piano Spa", "Dance Photographer", "Ballet Accompanist", "Piano Composer", "Photo Story", "Rock On Piano". Happy to say, my site came up as the top of the search list, while some other keywords like "Wedding Photographer", "Portrait Photographer" came up within the first page.

What really surprises me is that when I search using the keyword "Timeless", my first CD album also came up tops on the search engine! Seriously, I have no idea how it got there.

Haha this is so exciting! Feels like as if this search engine is created for me!

Red Nano is really great, not just because of the above. Now, using Red Nano, I can search for sites that is truly from within Singapore. No longer do I need to dig through pages of Google to find relevant local sites.

Quiet, Don't Tell Her the MP3s are here

I've been doing so much photo taking and editing that I have not touched on my music side of me for the past month, so I decided to arrange 2 pop songs.

"Quiet" 安静 by Jay Chou, is a favourite song to many many people out there. I remember my cousin asking me to teach her how to play this song a few years back, and she only had electone organ training which she stopped for a hundred over months. My arrangement uses the warm pad and strings as accompanying instruments to my piano.

The other song I did is "Don't Tell Her" 不要对她说 by Jeff Chang. A 1995 oldies by pop song standard, songs like this are worth reminiscing. I was reminded of this song when I saw one of Huirong's blog post.

The songs can be listened on my IMEEM playlist at the top right of my blog.

I Believe... in I Believe

In 2004, my music manager got me to produce an album by re-arranging a list of Mandarin pop songs in New Age style. I did 16 tracks and submitted to the record label. It seems that the album was ready to be released, but months went by and still no news. The label continued giving reasons for delay, but I figured that the album would never materialise.

I personally loved the transformation I did for the Mandarin songs. I tried to apply the same style to some of the tracks in my upcoming piano album featuring English soft-rock songs (I do hope this time the album will come to fruition - I was told it will be released this month).

I have this belief, that if a track is not being used by any record labels after a period of time (for this case, more than 36 months), it probably means it is not worthy to be commercially exploited. So I might as well share the work publicly.

So here's one of the tracks, I Believe, originally a Japanese song that has been re-sung in Mandarin (by Van Fan Yi Chen), in Korean, in numerous instrumental pop versions. Here is my version in New Age.

I actually performed this song in public in late 2004, as part of a publicity for this (stillborn) album. So perhaps many you might find it familiar.

To listen, look for the track in the IMEEM music playlist on the top right of this blog.

If you like what you hear and want to use this track for commercial purposes, please contact me.