Learn keyboard harmonium in desi style with raga based songs

Music lessons edited by great music composer Nisar Bazmi

Music Keyboard Or Piano

Music Keyboard offers a wide variety of instrumental sounds, in addition to the basic piano sound. Even fairly inexpensive ones usually also offer preprogrammed rhythms or styles and "auto-chord" accompaniment, which provides a harmonic background against which you can play a melody. Higher end keyboards have touch sensitivity, allowing you to vary your volume by how hard you strike a key, and midi capacity, which lets you connect your keyboard to your computer to use music-writing and practice with software.

The instrumental sound you choose is called a voice. Before you play a song, choose a voice that you like. Practice selecting different voices, and remember the setting for the ones you prefer. Look your keyboard owner's manual to help you. When you play the songs you can use any sound you wish. The rhythm controls provide drumbeats to play along with.

The drum rhythms can be changed to suit the kind of song you are playing. Moreover you will find tabla styles like kehrva, dadra, teentaal, rupak and jhaptaal in our website. If you have a keyboard equipped with floppy drive or USB then you may copy these styles in your keyboard user memory to play along music. Melody keys are used to play the tune of the song with your right hand. The chord keys are used to play chords with your left hand. This makes the song sound full and beautiful. If you do not know how to play chords then you may use auto chord along with the melody.

Great Music Composer

Nisar Bazmi

Keyboard VS. Piano

Keyboard is an electric version of the piano. The sounds from a piano are made by the mechanical action of the keys hitting mallets on strings. In other words we can say a keyboard is electronic whereas a piano is a percussion instrument meaning it makes it's music by being struck. Pianos are referred to as an acoustic instrument which produces its own unique sound. Keyboards usually refers to electronic instrumentation, however the keys are laid out the same as the piano.

Even a high quality keyboard isn't a substitute for the sound of a good piano, but it's an affordable way to get started playing with keyboard, and has the advantage of portability. If you're considering buying a keyboard, I would suggest going for one with full size keys, as opposed to the "miniature" options out there. You don't have to have the full 88-key range of the keyboard but 61 key keyboard is better selection. It is important that the keys themselves should be the same size as piano keys.

About Harmonium

Harmonium or Reed Organ is a musical keyboard instrument similar to a pipe organ. It consists of reed pipes and sound is produced by air being pushed or sucked over reeds resulting in a sound similar to that of an accordion. The sound from a harmonium is produced, as with the accordion family, by a stream of air being blown (or sucked in the case of an American Organ) through a reed.

However, harmonium is a keyboard, and so these lessons apply equally to the harmonium as well as to the electronic synthesizer keyboard. The important difference between keyboard and harmonium is that you can - and do play the keys with your left hand also; but for harmonium, your left hand is used in pumping the bellow to force air under pressure into the inside of the harmonium. In keyboard our left hand is used for chords. An ordinary keyboard is sufficient to master all the lessons that will follow. If you already have a keyboard, you do not need to buy anything else as of now. For solo performances, you may use a synthesizer keyboard or a harmonium, depending upon your taste, convenience and availability. Harmonium traditionally suits better for accompaniment during performance of Ghazals, Thumri, Indian Pakistani classical music, and some other types of Indian music.

Sargam Lessons

Natural notes (pure or major) are called Shudh notes which are shown as S, R, G, m, P, D, N. The notes, or swars, are Khraj/Shadj, Rekhab, Gandhar, Madhyam, Pancham, Dhaivat and Nikhad. When singing these become Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, and sargam stands for "Sa-Re-Ga-Ma". Only these syllables are sung, and further designations are never vocalized. When writing these become, S, R, G, m, P, D, N. A sign of apostrophe on the right side of a letter (S') indicates the octave higher, a sign of apostrophe on the left side of a letter ('S) indicates the octave lower. Re, Ga, Dha, and Ni may be either shudh or komal; Ma may be either shudh or tivar and is then called tiver Ma. Sa and Pa are immovable (once Sa is selected),

Don't think there is anything that you can practice that will have as much an impact on your playing as sargam. Take the sargam challenge. Play the sargam every night for one month and then re-assess your playing skills afterward.

In other words Sargam is the collection of music notes or the swar of the scale. It has been mentioned earlier how notes of the sargam relate to the western scale. Practicing to play sargam in music is bit like weight training. Basic rules of weight training are to start with simple exercises with lightweights. As you get comfortable with lightweights, you increase repetitions or increase the weight you are lifting. You also focus on muscle group you work on. You go to heavier and more complex exercises after you feel comfortable with the basic exercises. When we say sargam, we don't just mean a scale of notes but it means the act of playing the sargam. Playing the sargam is the single most important thing you can do when you are learning harmonium or keyboard. When beginning to learn harmonium, the teachers should not stress the playing of the sargam too much or enforce it. After all, there is nothing joyous about playing one note after the other in succession, over and over again. Students tend to hate sargam for this very reason. Getting students into sargam is a challenge.

Sargam fixes everything. If your right hand is not strong enough, sargam fixes that. If you are not confident in class, sargam fixes that. If you don't know where the notes are at the beginning, or how to sit properly for long periods of time or need discipline or you are trying to increase your speed or clarity or timing or rhythm or etc; sargam fixes all. Sargam needs great practice, but it doesn't have to be boring. Nothing is more boring than playing the same notes over and over again, so spice up your sargam with some of the variations. This will sound like you are actually playing something.

There are various books written on harmonium or keyboard but no suitable book is available on basics. These books were for advance learning and lessons were difficult to follow. This lesson of sargam is the first effort to produce sargam lessons in easy and with simplified exercises. With these lessons you will be able to play and sing-along with your harmonium or keyboard. All the exercises are produced with simple diagrams and notations. Thanks to great music composer Nisar Bazmi Sahib and all those colleagues who cooperated with me in compiling these fundamental lessons.

Learn keyboard and harmonium in desi style with raga based songs. Ebooks available. desi keyboard, keyboard in desi style, free harmonium lessons, teach yourself piano,

Lakshan Geet

Its a raga geet and its verses show the mood and the details of particular raga. It also teaches the way of singing raga and completely depicts the picture of the raga. Lakshan Geet is probably the most typical fixed composition used for vocal instruction. This is a style of singing where the lyrics of the song actually describe the features of the raga.

If the lakshan geet is memorized, one will never forget the raga. Throughout ones life, whenever the raga is heard the words keep coming back. Below given raga asavari lakshan geet is sung in a beautiful style by Iqbal Yousuf Ramzi (ghazal geet singer). This geet will show what is real mood and properties of raga asavari and you will be able to play raga asavari songs in a better way shortly after listening lakshan geet.

Alaap

The word alaap means a dialog or conversation. Alaap is a dialog between the musician and the raga. The purpose of including an alaap in a composition is for the singer to set the scene for the composition itself. In order to tell a story emotionally, the storyteller is required to set the scene for the listener. The alaap prepares the listener to receive the emotions from the singer. Suspense is also being built up through the alaap for the listener.

In other words, alap is the beginning part of the raga, starts with the key note of the mode it uses, that is “Sa”, both in the instrumental and vocal pieces. The tempo at the beginning is usually slow in order to show the scale and the key structure of the melody. There is no drum in this section; if it is a piece of vocal music, there are no lyrics with it.

The asthayee is the first part of the main melodies in the raga. It consists of two music phrases, and is the most important part that shows the raga’s main musical ideas. In vocal music, this part always comes with lyrics. Antra, which originally meant “the rhyme of the poem,” it can also be translated as “stanza". The length and times of improvisations mainly depend on the feelings of the performers.

Alankar

Alankars are different sets of the swars that will enable you to practice and familiarize yourself with the different sounds. You should practice these till you can play them correctly without looking at the keyboard. While you practice how to play, please sing-along too so that you can improve your voice and can learn how to sing more in tune.

Alankars are extremely useful for practice and are a great way of getting familiar with your keyboard or harmonium. In this website there are some Alankars for practice; try to play them continuously for an extended period of time; its extremely important that your fingers move smoothly on the keyboard because when you are playing a metered melody, an extra second's hesitation is enough to send you out of synchronization with the taal or rhythm.

How raga based film songs are formed using ragas. Watch raga video lessons.

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