Trying to impress grandmas and getting carried away..

Jr. and the little one both get a "ragam quiz" every night at bedtime. They can guess ~20 ragams from either a song I hum, the aarohanam-avarohanam or phrases or swarams I hum or sing.

Sometimes just play from iPhone for the quiz(usually GNB, MS, MLV, TN Seshagopalan, Ariyakudi from the music collection or the latest Sudha Raghunathan, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Priya Sisters, Ranjani-Gayathri straight from Youtube favorites).

They guess reasonably well, considering they have been at this for two three months already.

Every now and then, they pick a favorite and listen to the whole song till they memorize it and imitate it. While San thinks this is border line blasphemy, I encourage it. After all every kid is not going to be a super singer and the whole idea is to imitate and learn and this is my way of spending some quality time with them and having some fun.

The most important thing in learning, is learning how to learn! (if that has not been copyrighted, I am doing it right now)

So, here are the little Narayanan girls, doing their version of Vinayaka. They thought this was a rehearsal and did not know that the camcorder was on.

Don't know if the paati's will be pleased, what with the little one's novel concept of "variable thAlam" where she suddenly goes into a vigorous hand slapping to give herself some more energy to sing and Jr.'s attempts to sustain notes to try and get some semblance of a steady timing.

If they do improve over the years with lots of practice and training, they might look back at this and go "god, we have come a long way".. and if their interest in music dies out after some time, they might still look at this and go "we did try, didn't we"..

Getting these two to sit next to each other and sing in unison was in itself a workout for Daddy Narayanan. If they happen to sing this in tune and tempo eventually, will post that video as well...

For now the girls are a "work in progress"!

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Performance week...

Jr. sang on stage at her music school annual day over the weekend.

First time she is singing on stage. The kids were all giggles at first, but eventually settled down, got serious and started singing in unison.

It was a chance for them to show all the parents what they have learned, get to sing with a team, realize practice makes perfect and be exposed to stage fright. Although the intensity of the practice was initially making me go "Why all the strain. can it not wait a few years?", came round to the realization that this was a great experience for the kids.

Can already picture the beaming face of all grandmas in India right now, when they get to see this video!

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Trouble in Guitarland

Was practicing "Samaja Vara Gamana" which is in Ragam HindOLam using the cheat sheet, and Jr. asked me

"How can anyone sing in that hollow voice to match your guitar?"

It did seem strange that when spanning two octaves, the lower octave below the one I had chosen as reference "C" was a too low!

Then the nerd in me went on a web surfing spree (followed by a lot of practicing) and found that:

a. most folks misquote the Center "C" in the keyboard to be 240Hz.

b. Actually the center "A" or "A4" as it called is at 440Hz exactly (round number). The Center "C" or the "C" key between A4 and A3(which is at 220Hz) is at 261.6 Hz and not at 240 Hz.

c. Guitar folks deliberately moved everything on the notation up by an octave! Apparently this was done to facilitate the notations (on western sheet music) to appear in the middle lines on the music sheets.. Now that is a bummer, and wish I had paid more attention to fixing the base scale.

d. No harm done. Now that I have been practicing the notes for the lower octave, just have to reset everything in my head and go up one.

Based on that, the advice for other guitar players trying to figure out Carnatic notes to play songs or "swaram RIF's" (that is what we are calling it in our house) is to practice in the "green" color coded octave on the cheat sheet.

The Hindolam reference example is here..
Hindolam is S G2 M1 D1 N2 S S N2 D1 M1 G2 S

If you are trying to play the song, play the S G2 M1 on the green and the D1 N2 on the Orange and your 4 to 7 year old's will be impressed!

If you are not interested in guitar playing, what I wrote may not make sense.. but if you do, you might be happy that the mixup was cleared up.

Better late than never!

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Opportunity

A friends daughter who is in middle school showed a small demo of how she does her music homework. They have a software site to log on to, and once they log on, the "sheet music" for the homework shows up. They play the musical instrument in front of the laptop and the mic pics it up. If they hit the right notes in sequence, the notes keep lighting up in green. If they hit wrong notes, it shows the note they hit in red and helps them correct.

The teacher grades this online and they know which note is a problem for the student (which they hit consistently wrong) and suggests methods to help them improve!

The software also gives student sheet music access to hundreds of music books.

If I had access to anything like this during my student days, can totally imagine spending hours on this and practicing.

Now when you are older and can afford a music lesson and can with difficulty make time (because your kids can do a lot of things by themselves), your ability to learn a new language like sheet music is more difficult.

Jr. and the little one are going to be given the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of music so they can understand and explore. What they make of it later as they grow older is up to them. We will at least try to give them the basics...

Sometimes, we live through our kids. This is one of those things...

1. They are not going to wait till they are 30 to learn how to swim.
2. They will get to learn Carnatic music formally
3. They can learn dance if they want to and can keep up with it

and now

4. they will get to learn how to read sheet music and the notation.

and maybe Daddy will learn with them...

Hey, I am just old, not dead!

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Cheer up Grandmas!

Dear Paati and Kollu Paati,

Please listen to this. We know you will like it.

Now listen to "our" singing of the same song and

1. cheer yourself up
2. tell us how we did...

Lots of Love

Jr. and the Little One

ps. If you are not our paati or Kollu paati, you can still tell us how we did. Both of us now read the comments on this blog, you know!

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