Animethon - Conducting Orbis Orchestra & Judging Take The Stage

Last weekend was a day filled with fun and excitement at the 23rd Animethon convention in Edmonton, AB Canada. From Thursday to Sunday, I attended the convention with the awesome staffs, media, and industry personnel.

Saturday was the Take The Stage talent show preliminaries that I was judging in and Sunday was the big day where Orbis Orchestra returned to Animethon to perform backed by popular demand.

The Orbis concert was met with the same amount of excitement and hype that you would expect from the amazing attendees of Animethon. It was surreal to enter as an orchestra and have people cheering and screaming throughout the show and to be treated almost like rock stars. We featured our last year's awesome guests Vicky and Rochelle to sing with us, and the addition of having cosplayers on stage and being able to take a group photo with a number of our lovely audience, made this concert certainly one to remember.

After the orchestra concert was a tight panel schedule half an hour later which was judging the Take The Stage Talent Show finals. All the contestants this year gave a strong effort in performance full of surprises, energy. Congrats to all the contestants as well as the winners! Hope to see everyone next year!

Take The Stage Finalists

Chicago Tour

Just finished a tour with the UofA Symphonic Wind Ensemble to Chicago, Illinois. The trip took place from March 9 till March 13 and performing at the famous and breathtakingly beautiful Chicago Symphony Center, home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Thank you to the people of Chicago for making the performance a success!

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The tour was an overall amazing experience! Chicago is a wonderful city full of wonderful culture, people, and amazing food.

Edmonton Concept Pop Orchestra First Concert

The Edmonton Concept Pop Orchestra (temporary name) has made its debut performance  (as well as my debut performance in conducting) at Animethon, Edmonton's annual anime convention. The performance was absolutely breathtaking, we had a turnout of hundreds of the most loud, hyped, excited, and passionate audience the members of the orchestra, including myself has had the pleasure of performing for. Thank you Animethon for having us!

This orchestra has been a dream of mine to put together, though I never found the right reason to start it, so when Vicky Lau from Animethon proposed the idea to me, I immediately took it up. It  took us 4 months in total to put together our members and rehearse. All the music was arranged and orchestrated by our guitarist Geoff Li and myself from scratch. Our sets included video game and anime music such as Pokemon, Final Fantasy, Cowboy Bebop, Legend of Zelda,  Sailor Moon, RWBY, and none other than the extraordinary work of Joe Hisaishi from the Studio Ghibli movies. Our orchestra members worked extremely hard for this show, and we all agreed all the hard work has certainly paid off. Stay tuned for more news from the orchestra!

PS. Video of the concert will be coming soon!

New Original Album In The Works

I am very excited and pleased to announce that I have officially begun working on a new original composition album!

It's been around...4 years (?) since I released my previous and first ever original album Diamond Wings and like any artist, as the years of practicing, progress, and improvements as a musician went on, that album now feels no longer good enough to be my one and only album repertoire. For those of you who has stuck around with me for a long time, I said after the release of Diamond Wings that I will not make a new album until I get better as a composer and musician, as that album reflected my best writing at the time. Despite that, the album sold way better than I thought.

  • Over 1000 total copies sold in 6 months!!!
  • Last time I checked it was over 2000 copies in total!!

That was way more than I could wrap my head around, and for that I want to give a super super warm thank you to everyone who have purchased the album both physically and on iTunes. Your support means so much to me and I am so grateful that you guys enjoyed it based on the feedback I received.

For those of you who did not get your hands on it (I know a lot of you didn't because you guys told me you were too young to have a credit card XD) I hope you will really enjoy and appreciate this one! As I feel it will be a huge improvement from my works from 4 years ago.

So here's a little overview of what to expect from the new album!

  • Songs and pieces of a very wide variety of styles and genres, with inspirations from Asian pop, jazz, classical, film scores, prog rock, celtic, traditional world music, latin, and many more
  • More textures from more instruments! Yes I have learned many more instruments since 4 years ago, and my method is "if you can play it, record it, don't use computer to generate it"
  • Many new and familiar friends to be featured! I know~ what a surprise~ I have friends 8D. I've gotten to know many REALLY KILLER local and international musicians over the years, and I will definitely ask them to share their amazing soul and techniques with you guys through this album, as it will be an amazing pleasure for myself personally to work with them as well.
  • Storytelling - Diamond Wings was mostly a series of songs and pieces that I wanted to write for the sake of getting inspiration out. This new album will feature pieces (or a series of pieces) that will tell a story.
  • FREE CONTESTS - Yes there will be a few contests and prize draws to give away the new album for FREE!
  • Sheet music - Official TABS and sheet music for certain songs will be released to the public.
  • Music videos will be made as well!

So when will the album be released? No set date yet, since it's in the compositional stage right now, and I'm balancing writing and University as well. I will however be keeping you guys updated on the progress of the album.

IT'S OVER 9000 SUBSCRIBERS!!! Thank you so much everyone!

There's always that time of year that I celebrate every 1000 subscriber mark. To think it took me almost 2 years to get me my first 1000 subscriber and all the years that have passed...it's pretty crazy...but I can never help but feel grateful every time I get an e-mail telling me that somebody have subscribed to me. I love to make music and produce music more than anything, and I am so glad that I have OVER 9000 (I'll stop that reference now) of you to share my passion with me. I feel so blessed to have you guys watch, like, and share my random and weird videos!

Happy Spring Everyone!! 8DDD from Canada.

Happy Spring Everyone!! 8DDD from Canada.

I feel this would be a good time to leak some upcoming things that I've been...or...going to be up to. 

  1. I'm going to start working on another album this summer. Since Diamond Wings, I've committed that I won't work another album until I become a better composer/player. This new one will be just as ambitious...if not even more so than Diamond Wings. It will feature different spectrums of music and musicians of many different genres both locally and my international friends that I have made from YouTube :) so expect a few new and familiar people in this new album. Like Diamond Wings, this album will be released on iTunes, as well as in physical form in case if any one of you wants a physical CD copy.
  2. I will be applying for a Bachelor in Music Composition at the University of Alberta, so I have literally a month to go from electric guitarist to a classical guitar player...wish me luck >.< whew....
  3. It's not written in stone yet, but Edmontonians, there's a high chance that I will have quite a few events going on in Edmonton this summer such as Heritage Days (China and Jamaica Pavilion) as well as Judging the Animethon Karaoke Competition.
  4. I am composing for an RPG game as well as a few film projects.
  5. Getting a few near gears for my home studio setup such as PreSonus Eris E5 Monitors and VST Softwares
  6. I got my eyes on a beautiful hollow body guitar but it's only available in America, so I will be doing a road trip to Seattle this summer perhaps around June :) come by and say hi if you see me :D I'll be more than happy to meet you ^.^

Those are all the major things that I got in store for you guys.

Again, thank you all so much. To the new subscribers, thank you for liking my works, and to the old subscribers, I love you guys so much and thank you so much for sticking with me all this time. 

Thank you my wonderful subbies <3, stick around for more songs and videos to come!

Let's aim for 10,000!! :DDD

Shawn