Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Shih Hung CJ Hsu. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Shih Hung CJ thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

My parents have a great influence on me. The school I graduated from was also my father’s dream, so in other words, I fulfilled his dream. Of course, he also supported my music career very much. Since I was a little kid, the only music on looped in the car was always 80’s rock, that surely changed my musical taste, I’ve always been different from the other kid since they started listening to C-Pop, while my play list was Bon Jovi, Gun N Roses, Scorpions…
I’m think the most important skill I’ve learned from the school is not only the music stuff but also more how to get along with people, of course I’m learning thing from my teachers, I love them.

Shih Hung CJ, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is CJ, A.K.A Teacher Fatty or Xiao pang(if you want to call me in Chinese way). I’m from Taipei,Taiwan, learning music was influence from my dad, he is my first music teacher in life, and also he’s the one who has the American Dream- back in the day his family was unable to support him chasing his dream, so that eventually he passed his dreams along to me, which is good because I also like music, though maybe not as much as he did at first, at the beginning he kinda forced me to play guitar so it took time to get into it, but we moved to the bigger city when I was 13, everything changed at that point, the kids in the city really had more “Talent”, all knowing how to play a lease two instruments, and most of them played piano and violin or cello maybe, and for me, I didn’t know much, I’m just a kid from a small town, who got bullied sometimes, so I decide I’ve got to make some changes.
So I started learning the guitar, no longer learning from my dad, but from the website YouTube, back in the day the site was not that popular in other parts of the world, so the way I learned from the video on Youtube is I’d spend all day learning certain riffs and songs by myself, during that time YouTube didn’t have a slow down playback speed feature yet, so I just kept watch a same part over and over again until I can play it. So I just kept learning like that until I dropped out of college because I was kinda bored, than I went to my first “truly” guitar lesson, the owner also graduated from Musician Institute in Los Angeles, so I started seriously learning the music and also during the same time my dad said that he can also support me if I want to go the States, so basically since then I started to prepare to move to the States no matter if for the music stuff or English, then finally I got an offer from the school, so here I am.
At first, my plan was to finish an Associate degree in a year then move back to Taiwan to start working, but then I realized that if I want to back to Asia and really start my music career, it’s hard without a Bachelor degree, so I decided to stay here and finish my Bachelor, after I graduate with all the experience I’ve gained to seek out some opportunities – either as a performer, hired session player, or instructor to future generations.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Back the day when I was started learning music, Im always try to learned it from YouTube, during that time YouTube didn’t have a slow down playback speed feature yet, so I will sitting in front of the computer and try to watch a same part over and over again until I know what are they doing.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

There are three movies that changed my life, the first one is call “Brother Bear” by Disney, I’ll always remember me and my parents sit on the chair watch this movie, that is a first time I know that the music can totally change the whole story. Second I’ll said is “Titanic”, everybody love this movie right? That’s the first time I know that you can used same melody but use it with different arrangements and that can change everything even sound like different song.
Last one is “Spirited Away“ by Studio Ghibli, I recommend everyone in the world should go to watch this movie, that is the first time I feel that the incidental music for movies is so important for a movie, every time I go back to watch these three movies I”ll always feel refresh and always can found something news in it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cj_hsuuu/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000563483930
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sovii1058