This is a song I tried to write when I first bought a Chinese Ruan upon arriving in Hong Kong. I wandered into a chinese instrument shop and think I freaked the owner out a bit with my excessive gesticulation, but after showing off my burgeoning interpretive miming skills ended up walking out with this under my arm:
The tuning is quite interesting to play with – it has four strings, and below is how I tune it for me:
a ———————-
d ———————-
A ———————-
D ———————-
It truly does have a beautiful sound to it, and though I probably don’t do it much justice in a classical sense the great joy I have always felt from playing music is sometimes in the “not knowing” of how to do something – and getting to this honest type of place of being exploratory with sound, and not being as good as others potentially are – but a place where you accept that.
Meant To Be
Only an inch away
Only a word too late
Only if everything I ever said
Was a lie
An honest word
Said too soon
A push when you tried to pull
A white lie you can’t turn back
Into light
All these words
Flutter like birds
Can you see
It was meant to be
TAB:
As always with a tab, its a skeleton – I add a lot more but tabbing intricately is not my forte. You can still tune your standard six string guitar to this, and in fact if you also tune out the 5th/ 6th strings to D / D respectively it can sound pretty melodic:
Verse:
a 2 4 5 2 4 5 I
d 2 4 2 0 0 0 0 2 4 5 7 0 0 0 0 0 I
A 2 4 5 2 4 2 0 I
D 0 0 0 0 I
Only an inch away Only a word too late
a 2 4 5 > 0 I
d 2 4 2 0 0 0 0 > 5 4 I
A 2 4 5 > 0 0 I
D 0 0 0 > 5 4 7 2 4 0 I
Chorus:
–
HK, 16 / 9 / 13
