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/.