I wanted to be a singer

We always wanted to be something when we were young and we always had to write an essay or do a speech about it.  Singer, actor, teacher, doctor, models and everything else.  I wanted to be a singer.  When my sister and I discovered the tape recorder, it was the most amazing thing imaginable.  The earliest tape recordings we found from when we were four and six years old was filled with plenty of our songs and nursery rhymes and child nonsense mumbles.

 

My parents bought us each a portable tape player and mine was especially advanced, with not only the ear phones but also a microphone device where your voice could be clearly recorded.  It also had a clip so that can be attached to your collar, just like the ones you see on TV shows and on the news; the on-scene correspondents would have these.  It was so cool!  I discovered that if I played the tape of my favourite artist and singing along out loud with my ear phones on, it sounded exactly like her.  Ha-ha.  I really could sing very well and my dream of becoming a singer was not impossible.  There was another problem though; I couldn’t listen to my own singing afterwards, so I made a plan to tape it down.

 

In my early teens, we were staying at the company’s house with a few other people including my aunt and uncle and cousin. One evening after dinner in the living room, using my parent’s tape player, I put in the original tape at the spot exactly four seconds before the song starts.  My cousin sat on the couch watching TV.  In my own portable tape player, I put in a blank tape and had geared up with the microphone and earphones on.  One, two and three and I press down on “play” and “record” of the respective machines simultaneously.  I waited four seconds (those who are familiar with tapes would know there is a short blank strip at the start of a tape) and the artist started singing loud and I started singing loud with my earphones on, microphone recording.

 

My cousin started frowning at me but I could only indulge in my own voice, I was singing beautifully!  The song ended and I was proud and felt triumphant after my first recording.  I pressed the button with the square on both machines and reversed the tape back to the beginning.  My cousin said: “that sounded so bad!”  I didn’t think she said it out of jealousy because she is a very pretty girl and I admired her but I think I sang pretty well.  I replayed the song with my earphones back on, just to be cautious. 

 

The artist’s voice was almost inaudible in the background and my voice was booming very, very loudly and barely following the tune of the song.  Where the tune went high, I wasn’t high enough and where the tune was not high, I was flat with no melody.  I wasn’t that stupid and did immediately realised that the reason why I sang so well was because I could never hear my own voice as the earphones were blaring with the artist’s voice. Ah-ha!

 

That seemed to be the conclusion of me becoming a singer.  My last attempt was later during my college years, a classmate and I decided to be brave and enter a Chinese singing competition held at another university, to be attended by all the people we wanted to impress.  We would do a duet so that we can encourage each other on stage.  We both chickened out off stage.