Tea-iladha naalilaa..oru radiovilaaaa

We used to live in the top floor of a house facing a cemetery in Mandaiveli when I was a kid just starting school. It was more of an asbestos roofed shed than a proper floor. We had to go out of this room to use the bathroom. It was one large room with a countertop for the stove. There was the small terrace where me and my brother could play. My sister was a toddler. The big plus was the windows facing the cemetery, the main road and the intersection that had a few stores, not to mention a clear view to the tea and bhajji stall, right below the window.

Just watching the tea and bhajji's being made in the evening and served to the standing customers was quality entertainment for a 6 year old. As the older kid, I was allowed to sit at the window and watch the road. I also used to be sick a lot with a skin infection and my parents just let me be.

If the tea and bhajji stall was not entertaining enough, the radio in that stall that would always be on provided even more entertainment. Would sit and listen to movie songs from the window and hum along. Was introduced to the magic of MSV and the then sensational breakthrough genius of Ilaiyaraja.. without even knowing their names. We were not a movie going family.. that shouldn't be news to the readers of this blog.. there was always music though. A gramaphone record player where we would listen to MS, MLV and KJY (all carnatic!). I didn't know then that KJY sang some of the movie songs I was listening to from the window.

Usually the same songs would play at the same time for a few days or even weeks till a new song broke into the list. A few of those songs have stayed deep in my head and when I hear them even today, my mind goes back to that window!

One of those songs is "Vaan nila nila alla..". Had no idea about the movie it was part of or the significance of that movie as a debut for so many famous actors.. the song and the alternating violin were haunting.. all I got was the "nila" (moon) part and would see the moon through the window and would wonder why this song moved me the way it did! 

(could not resist the temptation to mix two photos.. one. of the harvest moon from our front yard and another one of me with a violin and use some effects on Photoshop)

Got to see a track for this song recently and sang it.

Didn't even have to practice for this one. Just listened to the original song once and gave it a shot. Had no idea all those song line variations were etched in my head! It just came out like I had been singing it all these years! This was as surreal an experience as me reciting Sri Rudram off my head sitting in some temple and suddenly imagining sitting in my grandpas lap and almost feeling his hand holding me by my stomach so I don't run away.

The song which has an amazing use of words ending in "la", takes you instantly to la-la land and probably sounded like a nursery rhyme to me as a kid. It was easy to hum.. even if I didn't understand at that age!

There are a few more songs from that time that still come out and I don't know how the lyrics went into memory..Machchana paatheengala, chinna kannan azhaikkiraan, Raja enbar, kadavul amaithu vaitha medai... just to name a few. 

It is amazing how music works its way into the brain.. subconsiously. More amazing is how irrespective of the sadness of happiness level of the song, the way they transport me back in time usually end of making me smile. Music is magic! 

My only recommendation from this is to expose kids to music. Especially melodies! It will definitely help them subconsciously during their adult years!  I am one small living example.

If you have similar experiences, please do share!

Someday I wish Paadarivom Padipparivom will teach this song as a solo, or I get to sing this in one of the platforms they provide for the students to showcase what they have learned over the years!

An age for everything

It has been almost two years since I got the Smule account and started singing. 

As of now, most of my friends agree on one thing. I have consistantly improved week on week by singing one song a week.

This has continued to this day. The song selections are not my choice though. They are all duets, but cover different times from the 1960's to 2010's and different music directors, singers, song genres over the years. 

Some are simple lyrically and crisp with no hidden meanings, some are risque and some are downright NSFW.. if you are in a workplace where folks speak Tamil that is.

While the compliments for the singing improvements keep coming on one side, there is also the comments on the songs themselves.

There is one repeated theme from family and extended family. Sing songs that are appropriate for your age.. aka Bhajans and devotional songs. It is no secret that I turned 50 a couple of months ago and this "age appropritateness" always makes me go "where is this written down?".. "who made these rules?".. at what age is singing what appropriate? 

I am not going against this logic blindly. Just trying to understand the categories and what age is good for what..

For example..

0-3 years: Nursery Rhymes

3-5 years : just Rhymes and kids songs. (think Rafi songs like Baby Beluga or Down by the Bay, when I write this)

5-15 years : Carnatic training (geethams varnams keerthanams , I guess if you are lucky enough to get trained?)

15-25 years : Movie songs (one has to sing them as youth or when else can you sing love songs?)

25-40 ? : Mature movie songs? 

40-50 ? : slokams?

50+ : Bhajans only?

60+ : stop singing ? as it is no longer age appropriate?

These questions have no good answers but have summarized the general suggested direction with ? 

Not sure if this is the generic thought process across Tamil families .. any stats collected in this regard would be nice to analyze!

If you actually analyze some of the slokams or devotional hymns that are in praise of the female goddesses, they describe the goddesses and their beauty with unparalleled metaphors that would make the modern day movie song lyricists look like nursery rhyme writers.. not that there is anything wrong with writing nursery rhymes!

As per this unknown age guidance, I am to sing devotional songs only for the next ten years and taper off to recitation mode only. Maybe this is written down somewhere and I am not aware of the source. Maybe it is the right thing to do. Who knows?

For now, I am just going with the flow and singing the song that is taught each week. Some songs suit my voice. Some suit my voice and pitch (preferably C# to D!.. now that I know what those mean). Some songs also work with my ability to show some emotion in the voice (Sadder the better ?!) 

I do put warnings when posting the songs if they have some double meanings.

If any of you would like to share your thoughts on the age appropriateness of select music, I would definitely be interested in compiling it and updating this post!

In the meantime, one song a week. You can check it out under my smule id sundar72ps.

A method to the madness

Almost every week, since I joined Paadarivom Padipparivom as a member, have learned a new movie song. Except for 7 or 8 weeks out of ~70, have tried to learn the song, sing it and have submit it for reviews. 

Many years ago, I was at a dance competition. One way to get a subsidy on the competition fees or hotel was to be a volunteer at the competition. You run errands for the judges, you walk around the ballroom and collect the score sheets the judges hand over after every round and rush it to the score tabulator, you do score tabulation, you help the guest star performers with things .. a long list basically. Sometimes you end up having breakfast with these judges. Once at such a breakfast, a renowned teacher by the name of Ray Rivers (my memory on dance stuff is intentionally bad..know his last name is definintely Rivers) told me "I heard you have a doctorate in engineering and are dancing competition. Why?" and my response was "I like to dance!" and he said "going to give you a piece of advice! The name of the game, is to stay in the game! As long as you keep dancing and don't give up, you can be a really good dancer!".  He was right. I quit dancing shortly after marriage and that good dancer thing went poof!

Why bring this up?!

If you do anything with diligence, intensity and sincerity and keep working on it, you will get better at it. My yoga teacher Matt tells me all the time "you get good at what you practice. you practice the right way, you good at doing it the right way. you practice the wrong way, you get good at that too! So be careful what you practice!"

I am not planning to give up on music this time. Will keep working on it at my own pace with no timetable, but there will always be music. Over the last 17 months, the method to learning and singing this "song of the week" has evolved and it has kind of reached a set routine. I am documenting this routine in hopes that it helps aspiring students who are in the same boat as me. No formal classical training, but want to improve their singing.

1. Listen to the sound track 20-30 times on a loop while walking, cutting veggies, while in the bathroom, when taking a walk at lunch, basically when time permits. 

2. Listen to the music on Youtube video but at 0.75x speed. I didn't even know you could listen to Youtube videos at different speeds till this music interest! 

3. Listen to the recording of the teaching show. (given the Chennai to California time difference, I always end up watching the recording of the teaching show).

4. Take notes by hand of what you need to pay attention to. Write down every word. My notes are probably for me and may not help others. To each his own! The notation you use might be different.. I put some wavy lines which mean something to me which doesn't make any sense to others. Where possible I write down swarams or notes for select syllables so I can hit the right starting, highlight or ending note. 

5. Correct the notes by cross referencing to the OST (Original Sound Track, another abbreviation that I was not aware of!) and the Youtube 0.75x listen. 

6. Start singing a few times with audio only to finish entire song. If you make a mistake keep going to finish song. Delete all the wrong ones. Listen but don't save.

7. Once you are okay with singing the entire thing by heart, now go for the feel of the song. Lyrics you know by now. Ragam and Taalam you know by now. So now after 20-30 tries work on the feel and emotion. 

8. Once that also seems as good as it can get under current skill set, start recording with video. This is the painful part as you cannot overwrite a specific line in video. You make a mistake, you have to start from scratch. Do it! In video there is no point in finishing song. Here you just delete after a mistake and start over!

9. Verify song before saving.

10. Send song to MIL for review. If she says "okay" or "decent" then submit. Else, delete and start over after figuring out what was off. 

This method is the current status quo. Song is taught over weekend. Listening is done over weekend. First few tries on Monday evening, second try Tuesday. Video attempt on Wed and if fail, Thursday. Submit Thursday night or Friday AM before deadline. 

Will keep doing this approach. It used to take me 60 tries to get an "OK". These days I get it in 30 tries which is good.

However that said, there are songs which have taken me 100+ attempts to try as they are way outside my current skillset and I am practically memorizing notes and just brute forcing it by repetition. 

When singing something not taught yet by Paadarivom, I do same method, except there is no teaching show to watch and the notes are from the OST and slowed down Youtube video. Picking the right track that matches the tempo of the OST is key. Sometimes folks speed up the tracks to make it easier for beginner singers to look good, but that backfires if you want to sing it right and do justice to the song!

Let's see where this method gets me in 2023! Who knows, this method might change as things improve, or more steps might end up being added as more things become obvious! It is all part of the learning!

Wishing all of you a wonderful new year filled with music and happiness! 

Learning the hard way

Started writing this post last year, same time.. but it kept getting revised as time went by to the extent that it never made it out.

Sometimes a journey takes you through so many intermediate sights worth seeing that if you start waiting to post till you reach your final destination, all those posts just don't make it.. that is if your final destination is mind blowing. 

When it comes to the music learning journey, have no final destination planned. So it would be ridiculous to wait for some special moment to finish this post. So here goes. . . while this post definitely gets the "publish" button today, the music learning will keep going.

The previous posts in this blog tab tell you everything that got me to this point. I became a "student" yet again, trying to sing movie songs better than the average bathroom singer.  (I am pretty quiet in the bathroom as the showers are always 2-4 minutes maximum. Keep pushing my family to take shorter baths to conserve hot water and the associated electricity bill!). The singing happens in the car when no one else is present. 

After joining Paadarivom Padipparivom as a student, I got a chance to be a mentee in a live show. Got a call from my teacher and he asked if I am free on a weekend morning at 5:30 AM. Told him I will obviously be free, but singing with the family is asleep will be a challenge. Was also not ready for this! They knew I was a beginner. What were they thinking ? Putting me up in a live show to learn in front of everyone?  My teacher (as for some strange reason like all my other teachers) had more faith in me than I had in myself. Maybe that is a common trait for all teachers? Or maybe I just luck out finding teachers like this? One has to be very lucky to find the right teachers, for any subject! He said "you will do just fine! it is better for everyone to see how you learn from this experience as a beginner!"

There I was sitting on my meditation pillow on the floor in front of the now familiar "manja suvaru" or "yellow wall" at 5AM testing out audio and video. It was one of my favorite songs "Mounamana Neram" and I had been warned by family not to touch songs like this so as to keep SPB's memory alive. The fact that a million others are butchering SPB song's even as I type this post somehow didn't seem to matter to the family!  At least I was being taught the song by a teacher, word by word! 

The instruction 5 days ahead of this live experience was simple. Listen to this song on a loop 20-30 times. Listen to it and not just hear it. Pay attention to little details as you listen. So I went and did just that, or thought I did! This was also the first time the format of this teaching episode was changing to have two teachers teach two students at the same time. Male teacher teaches male mentee and female teacher teaches the female mentee. The female mentee was a quiet down to earth "pro". She was as tense as me as it was her first time being live, but later I learned that her hubby was her pillar of strength and was giving her a tutorial class at home. Me?! No such luck, as my family was trying to not get involved in this process at all. Gandhiji would have learned a thing or two to speed up the "Quit India" movement, if he had watched my family quit me that week.  I sat through that live teaching show and learned one thing. Listening to a song 100 times didn't do shit for my ability to sing it. The little nuances I thought I had understood, all nonsense! What was I even listening to?

Then came the harder part. Having to put out a song invite within 36 hours. There were two lines that I simply could not deliver! I got voicenotes from both teachers giving me a lot of confidence. The female teacher gave me slow motion notes on how to sing the thing and I still was struggling to sing it at regular speed. At one point, they took pity on me and said "this will do!" for the invite.  It reminded me of "that will do Pig!" dialog from Babe! A few people were nice enough to join my invite. I could have definitely done a lot better and have done better, since then. Given that moment in time when a zillion lightbulb moments happened in two days with respect to learning something, having a time crunch to deliver <100 words in a 4 minute song to near perfection and knowing I failed in 80% of the words, it was gut wrenching!

I am not just a student. I am also a yogi. If there is one thing my yoga gurus have taught me, it is that "falling down is human but getting back up and trying again, now that is a yogi!" 

Dusted myself up after that debacle and decided that I will do better every week compared to the previous week. Whatever that experience taught me, I was going to internalize it and improve on it every week. Was not going to give up on singing because I made a fool of myself on a live teaching show. If anything, this was like getting into an arranged marriage. You like or don't like something about her? It doesn't matter because you are already married to the girl. Just figure it out! Had already embarassed myself in front of the all the teachers and students in the music group, not to mention all my friends and family. This was like rock bottom. There was only one way to go from there! Improve week on week!

My teachers however, were talking as though they had struck gold with me. They were very happy with my sincerity and my ability to pick up at least half of what they were saying. One thing was also clear to me a month after this experience. I had to pick up the pieces and start learning Carnatic music at the earliest to be able to sing film songs better. My ability to place a note where it needs to be was pathetic. 

Given most of the teachers in Paadarivom Padipparivom were classical music teachers, I decided to start learning Carnatic (South Indian classical) music as well on the auspicious Vijayadasami day last year. My teacher(Koushik) is a patient man in his early forties with a lot of experience in teaching folks of all age groups. In  the very first class he told me "I am not here to teach you knack. Will teach you hacks instead". Will never forget the way he said it. He was in the business of teaching old dogs new tricks and he meant it. Classical music is learned by kids in south India at the age of 4 or 5 and they pick it up over time with a lot of practice over two decades. I was almost 50 trying to start from scratch again!

This needed a different curriculum and syllabus. One designed to keep a middle aged man interested enough to keep going and still make slow and steady progress. Koushik has managed to do it so far. It has been 14 months since my first Classical music class (which is once a week for 50 minutes) and I can in all sincerity say that every class has had at least one lightbulb moment and every class has built on the incremental progress from the previous classes. We have finished a full book of songs in 14 months. Given that there was no planned schedule to get anywhere at anytime, at least from my side, it was suprising that he got me this far.

He always reminds me of the four stages in the learning curve:

1. Unconscious incompetence : I don't even realize what it is supposed to sound like

2. Conscious incompetence : I realize what the thing is supposed to be like but don't how how to do it yet

3. Conscious competence : Know what is required but still a work in progress. all it takes is practice at this point and hard work.. the understanding is there.. but it is a struggle

4. Unconscious competence : can sing it with eyes closed and practiced ease.. no need to think about it! 

By the time the mentee experience was done, was going from stage 1 to glimpses of 2. Now after 14 months of learning Classical music and singing one movie song a week with a systematic approach, have gotten to start seeing stage 3 in the horizon.  

It is my sincere hope that in a few years, will get to 3 and eventually on to step 4!

In 2022, have sang 36 songs and submit them for reviews and have recevied valuable feedback from the teachers on every one of those songs! Have definitely improved as a singer in the last 12 months. Have also learned to appreciate what I am listening to, thanks to the improved awareness! Also know why some of my fellow students are a class apart from the rest. 

The highlight of 2022 singing was this.

Very happy to have music back in my life now! Also extremely happy to have found this community of singers at different levels who really encourage each other and bring out the best that everyone has to offer muscially!

If you are someone who wants to improve your singing no matter what your level is, would definitely suggest joining this community!  

The systematic approach to singing one movie song a week is an unfinished post as well. Will post that soon, as it will definitely benefit other learners!