Sundari Kannal Oru Seidhi - Strings section

When I went to the Ilaiyaraaja Live concert earlier this week, the orchestra was doing rehearsals / sound check of the 1st interlude of Sundari Kannal Oru Seidhi song. Each section was being played separately and I captured the audio of that rehearsal. I then listened to the individual sections and I tried recreating it using my keyboard and my computer. Here is the final version of the Strings section. I have skipped the chorus section and the horns section here.

Sundari Kannaal Oru by sripathyramesh

You can listen to the individual sections here:

Sundari Kannal Oru - Individual Sections by sripathyramesh

Let me know your feedback and drop in your comments. If you want to know the exact notes or want the midi file, let me know.

Endrendrum Raja - My experience at the concert

I attended the "Endrendrum Raja" live concert by Ilaiyaraaja earlier this week. It was a great experience similar to the previous Ilaiyaraaja live concert which happened in chennai around 6 years back. I absolutely loved the 34 piece Strings section. The sound of the violins was magical and they played it to near perfection. The numbers I enjoyed the most were Schubert Symphony No. 8 along with Idhayam Pogudhey, Paruvame, Chinna Kannan Azhaikiran, Poove Sempoove, Edho Mogam, Madai Thiranthu, Ayiram Thamarai, Sundari Kannal Oru, and Title music of Azhagarsamiyin Kudhirai. The others were good too. As I left before the show ended, I missed out on classics like Idhu Oru Nila Kaalam, Ilamai Idho Idho.

This concert was not as perfect as the last Raja concert in Chennai held 6 years back. There were a few issues with sound balance, certain singers did not prepare enough, etc. The previous concert was much better to me in terms of near perfect performances, even better selection of songs, lot of singers, less errors, etc. But above all, this concert was still worthwhile and there were enough magical moments. Expecting more such concerts.

This concert will be telecast on Jaya TV during the Pongal holidays. The making, rehearsals, etc will be telecast on Jan 14th and the concert itself on 15th and 16th. Don't miss it!

Before winding off, here is the video of a small demo of a 2-note composition by Ilaiyaraaja - just 2 lines.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=348203421872881

Raja uses only the notes Sa and Ri in the scale of Dm. He sings Sa Ri Ri Ri | Ri Sa Sa Sa | Sa Ri Ri Ri | Ri Sa Sa Sa | Sa Ri Ri Ri | Ri Sa Sa Sa | Sa - - - | with the note D as the Shadjamam. So he basically sings D E E E | E D D D | .... Then he asks to give the chords A and Dm to give a color to the song and sings it again. Then he changes shruthi and asks to give chords F#7 and Bm alternatively while continuing to sing the same notes D E E E | E D D D || In effect the notes in the new shruthi become Ga Ma Ma Ma | Ma Ga Ga Ga || Interesting to note this!

Endrendrum Raja - Live Concert by Ilaiyaraaja in Chennai on Dec 28

I attended the previous Ilaiyaraaja Live Concert in Chennai in the year 2005 and it was just great. Around 5 hours of pure awesomeness. All songs performed were 100% pure live orchestration with absolutely no minus-one or sequenced tracks. This time again Ilaiyaraaja is performing with his orchestra live in Chennai on Dec 28 2011, Wednesday 6 pm onwards. The venue is the same Nehru Indoor Stadium.

Get ready for the show! Tickets are priced at Rs. 500/- and Rs. 750/- per head.

Book your tickets now at http://www.jayanetwork.in/.

Here is a video of a rehearsal session. In this video, the orchestra is rehearsing the 1st interlude of 'En Iniya Pon Nilave' song from 'Moodupani' - one of my favorite songs.



Eagerly awaiting the concert!

Endrendrum Anandhame - Ilaiyaraaja

Rajiv Shankar introduced me to the song "Endrendrum Anandhame". It is a funky song by Ilaiyaraaja and is set in Sarasaangi raagam!

Listen to this song here:



Another intersting thing Rajiv pointed me out was the play in the time signature. The pallavi and rest of the song seemed to be in 3/4 except for the anupallavi - 'vaalibathin rasanai..." in 4/4. The beat seems to be similar for both portions. That is because for first 2 lines the beat plays 4 bars of 3 counts each and for the next 2 lines (vaalibathin..), it plays 3 bars of 4 count each. Very interesting to note this.

What I later noticed is that the melody (mainly charanam and 1st 2 lines of pallavi) seems to be in 6/8 time signature rather than 3/4. But the beat and bass follow 3/4 time signature. I don't know how to explain and so I added a tabla rhythm over the song to try to demonstrate that. Here is that version:

Endrendrum Anandhame by sripathyramesh

Beat   : 1 2 | 3 4 | 5 6
Melody : 1 2 3  |  4 5 6

I may be wrong too. So please correct and educate me if I am wrong. What do you think?

Jotheyali / Vizhiyile / Jaane Do Na on the Harmonium

This song, Jotheyali, was originally composed by Ilaiyaraaja for a Kannada film and that was a huge hit. This song was later reused as Vizhiyile Mani Vizhiyil in a Tamil film, Nooravudhu Naal. More recently, Ilaiyaraaja reused this again as Jaane Do Na in the Hindi film, Cheeni Kum, with a totally different arrangement.

This song has got wonderful melody and chord sequences. I wanted to try it out and so I set the basic arrangement for this song and created the Karaoke track. I then played the harmonium on top of the track and recorded it. Let me know your feedback.



Microphone used: Tascam DR-07mkII digital audio recorder

Notes: http://www.tfmpage.com/notes/ir/viz2.txt
Chords: http://indiankeyboards.11.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?p=613#613

Andhi Mazhai - our cover version

Here is a cover version of the wonderful song 'Andhi Mazhai Pozhiguradhu' from the film 'Rajapaarvai'. It was originally composed by Ilaiyaraaja.

We thought of performing this song for a band competition and that is when I started to take the notes and chords of the song and then created a karaoke track just for reference. But then for different reasons, we dropped this song. Recently I recorded the vocals for this song with my colleagues Srivatsan, Vijayalakshmi, Baranidharan and another colleague Anbu Chezhian captured it on Video. He did the editing of the video as well.

Presenting Andhi Mazhai:



Singers: Srivatsan, Vijayalakshmi, Baranidharan
Music track, Recording, Mixing: Sripathy Ramesh (Original music: Ilaiyaraaja)
Video Shot and Edited by: Anbu Chezhian

Do let us know your feedback in the comments section.

Ragas in Films

I started a new twitter account to tweet about the ragas that I notice in film songs. Not all songs are based on ragas. Infact, there are a very few songs that are composed keeping a raga in mind. So if I come across a song where the composer might have used a raga, I will tweet that. If you are on twitter, please follow @filmi_ragas.

http://twitter.com/filmi_ragas

I have also added a section titled 'Ragas in Films' in the sidebar of this blog which lists the recent tweets from the above mentioned twitter account.

Nizhal - A short film

Arunkumar, a colleague of mine, directed a short film called 'Nizhal'. I did the background score for this short film. Here is the video. Let me know your feedback.

Please note that we are amateurs and this is the first short film for most of us involved. So keep your expectations low. We hope to do better next time.



Director: Arunkumar
Music: Sripathy Ramesh
Cinematography: Arun Titan
Editor: Anil Krishnan
Actors: Dilip, Jayamalini
Crew: Ramachandran, Appadurai, Sabarinathan, Gopal.

ARR Discography Application

Recently, I noticed that the whole discography information was updated on ARR website: http://www.arrahman.com/v2/journey-discography.html

However, it was not searchable. So I wrote a program to scrap the pages and collect the basic information required for the discography and converted it into CSV files. I then uploaded those CSV spreadsheet files to Zoho Creator, an online database application and quickly created couple of forms and views. (Disclaimer: I work for Zoho). I also created a simple dynamic HTML page with the count of movies and songs fetched from this online database and those search fields that allow you to search. Here is the searchable ARR discography application:

https://creator.zoho.com/rameshs/arr-discography/

And here is a short video demonstrating its usage:



Though the discography pages on ARR site were similar, there were some inconsistencies in the structure of the HTML page. So the current database has some missing entries, which can be filled online. I collected only the movies related information.

PS: I was thinking of doing the same thing for Ilaiyaraaja discography. But then I found a better modeled application at http://www.rakkamma.com/.

FL Studio 10 has been launched

FL Studio 10 has been launched couple of weeks back. Here is the announcement:

http://www.image-line.com/documents/news.php?entry_id=1301017795&title=fl-studio-10

Features of interest to me in this new version include:
- Export score sheet as a PDF file
- Autosave your project every 5 mins
- Newtone (demo) - Pitch and time editor
- Pitcher (demo) - Pitch correction and harmonizer
and many more.

Before discovering FL Studio, my sounds were quite amateurish. FL Studio was the first software I used to produce really good sounding music. It is quite easy to use FL Studio. You can even start by downloading a free trial version with restricted functionality. And the best part is once you buy a version, you will get life time free updates for even subsequent versions in future.

Note: You get a chance to win prizes when you share this information with your readers. Learn more.

Good luck. Ping me if you want any help with FL Studio. I will be glad to share whatever I know.