Ming Muk Cheung Dam (Ming Mu Zhang Dan)

Recently, I’ve been spending most of my free time practising the guitar. I’m so glad to have rediscovered my love for the instrument.

My love for pop music was what initially spurred me to join the guitar club at school. Amidst mostly classical pieces, we also did some pop songs (usually English oldies plus a few 80s/90s pop hits). Yeah, nearly everyone seemed to be wanting to learn how to play “Right Here Waiting”, “More Than Words” and “Tears in Heaven” then.

Later, I bought an acoustic guitar but the strings really cut into your skin much more than those of a classical guitar. The pain, plus the lack of motivation and company made me stop for several years. At one time, I even contemplated selling or giving away my acoustic guitar cos it was being a white elephant at home, but I’m so glad that I didn’t!

Now, apart from learning new chords and trying to understand the theory, I enjoy working out chords for hocc songs. Guitaryou.com is a pretty useful source, but I found that for quite a few songs, some of the chords don’t quite fit in. I find it very challenging to try working them out and even more satisfying to have finally found (what I deem to be) the correct chords.

I started with “Shampoo”, which is reasonably straightforward, and went on to my favourite songs in the “glam” album – “Glamorous”, “如無意外” and “明目張膽”. Even though I like the former two better, “明目張膽” is my song of the moment. The intro part is so Danny Chan and I like the simple arrangement which makes it very suitable to play on the acoustic guitar. 'If I have the right to love, I also have the right not to be loved'...so bittersweet...

Then I worked backwards and tried out “天使藍" (Angel Blue) and “二位一體" (Two in One), posted by Lf. And thanks to An’s piano score for "娃鬼回魂" (Doll Back to Life), I found it quite easy to work through the chords despite the song’s two key changes. I think it’s a very good piece to practise as it helps me to familiarise myself with three different keys all in one song. “勁愛你” and "千千萬萬個我" (Thousands of Me) sound difficult on CD but surprisingly the chords aren’t too difficult to play (it definitely helps that someone has already worked out the difficult bits!). The chords for "露絲瑪莉" (RoseMary) are not too hard either, but it will take more practice before I can do a smooth and quick chord change. I found "再見露絲瑪莉" (Goodbye RoseMary) harder to play than it sounds; many of the chords posted on the site didn’t sound very good and I tried my best to improvise on them. I will ask Lf for comments when I’m done!