Namaste ji. I just heard your submission on the student showcase page.

The alaap is extremely soothing and tempered. Beautifully done! Hope you are continuing the long notes exercises. That will give you stability on the notes. I can hear the struggle on a few places where you have held the notes a little longer. Also, work on the meend exercise. This will help you strengthen the hold over the instrument and also get better command over what speed you want the meend to be played at.

One word of advice – please try to play along to recordings of seniors and try to emulate what they are doing. This helped me tremendously as a beginner, and sped up my progress considerably.

Thank you :):)

Very impressive and delicately handled Komal Notes! Of the three videos, I liked this one the best. Though, I must insist that you try to play these songs with tabla accompaniment, even if on the app. The feel and expressiveness is already there, and will only be better with the tabla!

Critical Observation – MUST work a lot harder on meend, please 🙂

PS: No sugar-coating done here 🙂

I have similar observations on this one too as I had in the Singaar video.

This is beautiful on its own, but may I suggest also using the tabla (set to the relevant taal and tempo) and practice / perform this (and all other songs)? 🙂

PS: Slightly pitchy in the antara..

I feel the gamaks need more emotion (even if it is a rudimentary exercise)

There is an overall sense of excitement which gives me an impression of rushing through the notes

Also, around the 00:52 mark, the gamaks have become khatkas.

These are my observations. Looking forward to your subsequent submission 🙂

The whole point in those alankars is for you to use your ears to follow the notes. I have always maintained (and it is true) that music is an aural art form. So the learning should use minimal visual help (like tuners or notations) – unless you are learning a song and would like to keep a notation sheet for reference.

There is a fundamental approach to vocal music on any instrument – This is based on syllables. We use strokes of the tongue to depict the syllables. With respect to aakar, as it is a vowel sound, we avoid the tongue and use finger technique to move between the notes. An elaborate explanation for this has been given in the Indore Workshop. Please watch that for an in-depth understanding for Gayaki ang on Bansuri.

There is also a mention of the 23 unique vowel and consonant sounds we can produce on the bansuri using the tongue – this can be found in the technique master class course. Do watch that too! 🙂

Hope this helps!

Technically, yes. they are the same. But they vary in application of such glissando.

Whereas in Indian music, meend is where the music is actually said to reside (“What happens between the two notes is where the actual music is” – because of the expressiveness with which such meend can be applied), in western music, glissando is mostly used as an articulation to reach the next note. (Only fretless instruments and a few brass instruments use glissando. Piano, the concert flute (and a few other woodwinds), melodic percussion instruments such as glockenspiel and vibraphone don’t use glissando.

Specific articulations such as meend and alap are almost impossible to notate in the western notation (in my limited knowledge). Someone who knows more can correct me if I am wrong here, please.

On a different note (pun unintended), it is always helpful to learn the western notation system as, for the most part it is easy to communicate with other musicians with it as a general idea for any piece of Indian music.

Indian session musicians, specially from the 1960s through the early 2000s have relied on a hybrid of the Bhatkhande system and vernacular script. An evolved version of which I have developed, taking heavily also from the Ravi Shankar system of writing (in English – using SRGMPDNS) and the western system of Bars and Beats to arrive at a point where my notation system encompasses almost all that I have needed to read and play on my instrument. Especially during my non-classical pursuits. You may find this being used in most of my courses here.

This system is available to learn in both Hindi and English as a course here on https://www.ashwinflute.com/courses/nwce/

Do give this a try 🙂

ashwinflute.com

Introduction to a New and Comprehensive Indian Notation System - ENGLISH - Ashwin Srinivasan

A unique and very ‘Indian’ Method to writing Notaions for Indian Music

As I understand it, it is detail agnostic. When we use the extension on Chrome, it gives us the ability to only Globally change pitch and tempo separately. Unlike an auto-tuner plugin which pitch ‘corrects’ the audio, this extension only allows / shifts pitch and time elastically with minimum artefacts. 🙂