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 ...

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...