My Journey With Bansuri

Summers are picking up here in India, and so is the heat. You do not feel to do much now in this season. You just want to lay around, being lazy. Well, hopefully, my previous posts have been useful to aspiring flautists like myself. Today, I shall share with you how to produce the notes. One of the most important lessons as far as any musical art is considered. What is an octave??? This word is commonly used in the western music. We use the word Saptak in India. So what is a Saptak after all?? A Saptak can be defined as a set of all succeeding notes starting from Sa. Hence, none of the notes are repeated in a Saptak. There are three main octaves(Saptak). Mandra Saptak ( Lower Octave) Madhya Saptak (Middle Octave) Taar Saptak (Higher Octave). Uptil what notes and octave a performer is able to perform is known as his range. For Hindustani Sangeet vocalists, the range is around 3 to 3.5 octaves. For instrumentalists, this range is dependent on the instrument. Bansuri has a ...

Hello Musicians, I seriously feel like I have successfully teleported to some different world, whenever I heard music. Especially Hindustani Shastriya Sangeet (Indian Classical Music). No music is above or below another. Although, the effect that this particular music generates is something which I cannot explain. I just love it. In this post, I will share the instance when I first touched that magic. I had started playing flute after my father gifted me my first one. He knew that I wanted to play the Bansuri. It was of the scale of C small. I tried very hard to produce good sound. When I started blowing into it, I had not read or seen or heard anything about how to play. I was totally unaware about any such lessons. I just picked it up and started blowing. One of good things about the small scale Bansuri is that you will be able to hear atleast something other than the hissing of your air blow. But, it requires too much power to continuously play the small scale instrument. S...

Is it not amazing, how a small piece of bamboo, with lots of holes on it, can be used to create music so divine and peaceful?? I sometimes just cannot stop thinking about those people, and their level of intellect, who first discovered music, the notes, and all those combinations. How were they able to do it?? Who taught them?? We might not have answers to all, but, whatever it is, it is mesmerizing. Let us push the boat forward in the ocean and know the first practical lesson on Bansuri playing. I have not learned anything directly from a Guru so whatever I know, is from my own mistakes. To begin with, let us learn how to hold the Bansuri. If your fingers are decently long, i.e. of medium length, you would be able to hold the G Natural Meduim Scale flute comfortably. The most used fingering technique is the one propagated by the legendary Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. You can easily notice that the holes of the Bansuri are covered with the pads of the fingers and not the f...

The Sun has started lengthening the duration of the day and also the temperature scale here in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Summers are good though for Bansuri playing. Cold makes it difficult for your lungs to breath. Also, your mouth and tongue become dry regularly. In my previous post, I shared some information about the instrument. Now, I shall try to share the basics of what we have to learn and play on the instrument. I will talk about music in general and a bit more detail about Hindustani Sangeet. Hope you find it useful. Music Any music, in any part of the world, comprises of two main components: a) Notes     b) Rhythm. a) Notes: A note is actually a predefined method(pitch) of producing sound. It is this method which differentiates between any ordinary noise/sound and music. If you consider, except a few languages, all others are based on sound. The alphabets that actually form a language are nothing but a particular sound humans can produce through the...

I was thinking today to start this post in a different way. Always starting with a 'hi' or a 'hello' sounded more like an email. Isn't it?? Another dilemma haunting me was, should I post about basics of Indian classical music first or about Bansuri the instrument itself. Than I thought starting off with the instrument would be a nice idea. So, here we are. Lets see, hmmmm... Bansuri as you all know is made up of bamboo wood and is one of the oldest musical instruments known to humans. It is found in many civilizations. Hence, it has many different versions or types too..Irish flute, Indian flute, South Indian flute(Venu), Chinese flute etc. Indian Bamboo Flute - Bansuri Irish Flute South Indian - Venu Chinese Flute Dizi All of the above flutes are played transversely, but, there are flutes which can be played like a whistle, in a straight way. Straight and Transverse Flutes The instrument that I am learning and the one a...

Hello Friends, Could not restrain myself from writing. Let us get straight to some primary and most necessary requirements, which according to me, are very important for learning Bansuri. First of them all is Listening. According to someone "Listening is completely forgetting yourself. Only then you can listen". Listening creates a relationship, a bond, between you and the subject. So, listen to all kinds of music. For Bansuri, you can listen to Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, for vocal Pandit Jasraj. Both these names belong to the Indian Classical Music family. I have mentioned them because that is the music which I myself am hoping to learn. They both are the best and have numerous videos on YouTube. Second is determination and clarity. Bansuri is very very hard to play. Not only to play but, it is very difficult even to produce sound from it. I myself have felt many times to quit. However, I take a break of 30 mins or so, remind myself about how much tim...