Guitar Notation from Western to Carnatic (South Indian Classical) Music

For most of you who have visted our place, it is no secret that Daddy Narayanan plays electric guitar.

The rest of you know now.

Should say upfront that I am no expert and do this for the fun of it and have kept this one hobby to myself and very rarely play in front of anyone else other than Jr. and the little one.

Have been looking for a simple graphical cheat sheet to help people who are taught guitar on the western notation (or with Guitar tabs!) to translate Carnatic notation and have not found anything that you can print and hang on the wall as a quick start guide of sorts.

My teacher Paul is amazing because he reads my mind. He almost knows what I am thinking when I play, and figures out from my body language what makes me happy and what bothers me while playing.

After my long absence from the guitar studio with the accident, the physiotherapist suggested that the guitar lessons could start as it would be a good motivator for me to keep going back to physio. Their logic was "if you see your guitar playing improve and get easier over time, you will realize the work we do here" and they were right on!

Paul has been doing "guitar rehab" last couple of weeks. Was telling him that over the last two months, have been listening to more South Indian Classical music and less of 70's rock as the accident makes one moody and there is a lot of solace in listening to what you are used to as a child. He asked me to play something (anything) and I showed him "Raghuvamsa Sudha" and he said "okay, that was great, but why look frustrated?" and I told him that it would be nice to know what note is what on the fretboard instead of having to figure out note by note!

He smiled a big smile and gave me a cheat sheet for the entire fretboard and taught me each note. It was like giving my little one "high fructose corn syrup"! It was like the mystery of the fretboard revealed in one shot. Almost like God made himself visible to me on that green piece of paper!

Decided to make him proud by doing this sheet to convert to Carnatic notation and as an added bonus, included the octave information as a color code.

The Guitar is an amazing instrument. The fingerboard has multiple individual locations that give you the same note in the same octave! Isn't that a nice curve ball?

Hopefully this cheat sheet is reasonably accurate and will help beginner guitar players who are not new to Carnatic notation play classical (or Tamil film) songs!

ps. If you find this useful or you are going to post this somewhere, please do link back to this post.

pps. If there are any mistakes, do point them out and let me know. It will be much appreciated and will update this.

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Translating in your head

The kids have caught on to "vaadaa maaplai" a song from the movie Villu (which was played repeatedly on Vijay TV as part of singing, dancing competitions). They have also watched this song a gazillion times now on youtube and amused themselves with Vadivelu saying "bad girl" in his Tamlish accent.

Jr. even sings the song out loud and they both jump up and down in an attempt to dance to her singing (they have eluded the secret video so far. They stop dancing when they see me have the iPhone in the horizontal position.

So I just gave up and sat down to watch them sing and dance.

There is a line in that song which says "ratham varaadhu" which translates to "you won't bleed" or "no blood will come"..

Jr. actually sang "bloodtham varaadhu"!

I laughed and asked her why she sang that and she said "I know what the tamil words mean, but I go from the meaning in english to remember the Tamil song!"

It was amazing to see a six year old clearly understand what was going on in her head. What is really interesting here is that when it comes to English or Spanish songs, I would internally guide myself with Tamil for english songs and english for spanish songs.

Looks like speaking Tamlish in the house is not enough. It is very obvious that the primary language in our kid's head is English. Not that we expected anything different, but we know that Jr. thinks in english and then answers in Tamil.

Hopefully, a secret video will follow....

ps. the whole song is full of double meaning and the kids don't have a clue what they are singing.. while it is amusing to watch, it is also sad to see how a TV in the middle of your living room can influence your kids and how it is just not in your control .. then again, I have a reputation as a control freak dad already!

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