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.