I have played guitar seriously since I was 11 years old. I have taken a classical guitar class during the earlier days, but halted as I have to continue my study at Sekolah Menengah Sains Teluk Intan (SEMESTI). During my time at SEMESTI, guitar is forbidden. You can’t bring your guitar to dormitories. However, I managed to play in a band during an event after PMR, which the band is a complete disaster with all tuning problems, lack of confidence, lack of knowledge and lack of everything (at least for me..hehe). But, from there, I manage to get a position in the school’s orchestra (which became a group of clowns being laughed at during the Wind Orchestra Competition at Sekolah Dato’ Abdul Razak). I played bass guitar in the orchestra.

But the most important thing that I want to address here is how a person (Mr. Mastor Jarkaseh, please google him), despite of the major lacks in instruments at the school, managed to made a huge leap for the school’s music field. Everything about music back then were related to Mr. Mastor such as nasyid’s minus one, rock band’s arrangement, orchestra, kompang arrangement, piano accompaniment during “Negaraku” and so on. He never get angry when we do mistakes during practice (usually music teacher is so fierce, which is the reason I hated music lesson at primary school). And there was one time where Mr. Mastor replace our drummer for our orchestra practice session, and everyone stopped playing, stunned with the sounds he made from a broken drum-set with teared cymbal, torn snare and everything you could imagine. By the way, he is very-very-very good at drums while he can play the piano and guitar as well. Once in a while, I learned how to read sheet music from him (there was only one class that take music lesson during that time, and it was not my class).

“Belajar elok-elok, awak ada peluang belajar yang bagus. Saya dulu tak ada peluang, terpaksa mula lambat”

“Kalo awak nak baca muzik, awak kena baca pelan-pelan, jangan hafal not-not yang awak nak main, awak kena baca”

“Saya ada rm50 je ni, awak makan la berempat, saya tak apa”, kata Cikgu Mastor sambil hulur not rm50 kepada budak-budak band.

And he taught me how to play the “Hati Emas” guitar solo, one of the first guitar solo that I’ve learned and improvised by myself.

This guitar cover was made for [anis] for her birthday. I like the melody of the song, so I studied the song for about a day, then I recorded it. There are mistakes here and there. I recorded 3 takes for this song, but I gave up as there was still mistakes done on the 3rd take. hehe. Sape suruh malas praktis.

Enjoy. Thanks Mr. Mastor.

Upgraded my OS to Windows 7 Ultimate 2 days ago, and impressed with the performance. No more laggy and buggy Vista. Vista used up my 3Gb RAM to the max, and simultaneously raging my laptop’s processor, heated it like crazy especially when using demanding softwares such as Photoshop (worse when dealing with RAW files), Illustrator, and Ableton Live. I am squeezing all the functionality of my laptop totally, editing photos, recording guitar, tracing works, shirt’s designs..my laptop should be proud of the service given to me

By the way, I am no longer using Ableton Live to record my guitar, as I find a better solution for the recording, Adobe Audition 3. It was not a full blown professional DAW, but the interface is much better to handle compared to Live. Wait for guitar update as I am working on some guitar recording, but the guitar string is rusty, and it is not worth recording with such strings. Have to wait for the guitar strings to break before changing it,hehe…

The photos in this post are not photography. This is some of the wallpapers that I have made for my laptop since 3 years ago. All the photo composite and the editing was done in Photoshop ( PS7-PS CS4). Actually, I have known Photoshop much earlier than knowing a camera. I started to use Photoshop in 2001, Photoshop 5 if I’m not mistaken. It is an advantage as I don’t have to struggle learning about photography post-processing. Some of the wallpapers were made with reference to tutorials I’ve founded across the website especially wallpaper no.2. Wallpapers 4,7 and 8 is totally my imagination, during boring time.

Enjoy.

Supposedly I should have a class this morning, which was cancelled right after I manage to prepare myself (rushing of of course).

Played the guitar throughout the morning, which suddenly I was interested in Naruto’s anime soundtrack composed by Toshiro Masuda entitled ‘The Raising Fighting Spirit”. I have heard the song since about 4 years ago, but never made an attempt to study the song, but this morning when I browse through my MP3 folder, I played the MP3 and played along with it. The reason why this song was interesting is the composition is comprised of several Japanese traditional musical instrument, notably shamisen and a kind of flute( I can’t remember the name) mixed up with modern instruments. What makes it more interesting is the shamisen was played with a modern pentatonic scale (I am not sure if some of Japanese traditional musical scale is identical to pentatonic scale, I am sorry if I made the statement wrong).  The riff is pretty simple, and the melody is catchy. Maybe I will make a guitar cover soon.

Cats never failed to fascinate me. [anis] with her cat Loba posed and I was there to capture some of the moments. The lighting was not very good, at about 6p.m. the sky was cloudy. [anis] always muttering about missing her cats (she has 3 cats at the moment), and I couldn’t say much because the cats are super-cute and adorable. Loba even made an attempt to touch his nose to front of my lens during the shooting :p

I miss [anis] too.

Photo’s EXIF data…malas…

Enjoy.

Being busy for a while. Plus there was nothing to shoot. Playing guitar on all free times.

Went back to Ipoh a few days back, Chinese New Year holiday. The journey back to Ipoh was smooth, but on my way back to Shah Alam, the highway packed with cars heading back to KL. Usually it takes about 3 hours at most to travel from Ipoh to Shah Alam , but this time, it took 5 1/2 hours to reach Section 17, Shah Alam. The most annoying thing that happened on that bus was that I realized Malaysian peoples tend to slow down their car whenever there is something at the side of the road, just to watch what had happened, which most of the time, was just a car breakdown. Consequently, the highway jammed, for nothing, as cars slowing down caused the slow traffic. Plus, selfish driver that use the emergency lane made it worst.

I went to Kuala Kangsar, to my grandmother’s house at Sauk, near Jenalek. That was the place where I lived during my early childhood time. Back then, when I say ‘Sauk”, peoples like to ,” Sauk, where? Tempat jin mesyuarat?” (humans are the only creature that love to quarrels with each other), but after the Al-Maunah incident, Sauk became a little bit popular among Malaysians, at least to peoples that read/watch news. There is a lake just behind the house, Tasik Chenderoh, where I like to go during my childhood for a dip. But humans are destructive and ignorant creature, the lake polluted with all kinds of non biodegradable materials, made me doesn’t realize now that there was a beautiful lake there, back then of course.

So, the only option now is going to a reserve area of Lata Kekabu, about 10 minutes drive from Opah’s house. I was delighted when my uncle ask whether we want to join him to Lata Kekabu, as I haven’t shoot anything for a while. We went there, parking was a mess (a lot of peoples are there, Malaysian kind of holiday, multiracial). Luckily, I managed to get some decent photos (at least they are decent to me). Frankly, I never know that Lata Kekabu has a very nice waterfall, as before this, I never go as far. I enjoyed the short trip.

For the camera setting, ISO 400-1600 (I just don’t prefer to use flash). Aperture priority at most of the time except for the waterfall photos. Aperture set variably, as the natural lighting was not consistent. ….. (it is boring to write about the camera setting…and I am lazy)

Enjoy. Think. Do.