My music player on the music player will be ready with a great surprise for all of you on 28.04.06! Songs numbered from 16 in the playlist till 21 will be all songs which I sang Track for Yesudas, S.P.B, Chitra in films like Manichitatazhu, Bheeshmacharya, Butterflies, Mazha (My last Track for Ravindran Master). I proudly would like to say that these were the days of learning and unlearning. You will notice that the beauty of these songs lay in the fact that I could claim that I learnt it first from the music director and all thse songs were born with my voice on the magnetic spool! The singers with whose voices these songs came out have done better justice since they were my idols and I learnt all the tricks of the trade from them! It was a previlege singing for them and almost all these songs were hits. My family and friends heard these songs first in my voice long before they were released. All these were recorded in single takes and may have lot of mistakes. You can also notice the "one, two, three song number one take 1"....in some of them! All my tensions, fears...would be evident in most of the songs...But it was fun...when I look back.These are my most treasured songs!

MY TRACK SONGS

This is in continuation to my earlier post on the Malayalam Music industry to wich many of you responded.

I never said that youngsters liked only fast music. I believe the contrary. Since I myself am a Lecturer teaching Electronics/Computers, I constantly interact with my students at college and off it and have found that music presented with the following qualities would be 100% appealing to all the young and old alike.

1) Melody (fast or slow)
2) You have to sing in pitch (if you are off key always then you should be better doing something else than singing). This is true with the others who follow you on their instruments. We have to learn this from our western music counterparts. Every noted western musician who sings or plays an instrument never goes out of key.
3)You should give 100% i.e even if you do not dance or show your teeth (even when situation does not demand it some people do it) if you involve yourself fully in your singing it will appeal. If it were of the contrary then it would be an insult to the greatness of Chitra, Sujatha, S.janaki, Yesudas, Lataji , John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Luciana Pavarotti etc. If you are truly gifted then your singing is enough to take the audience to ecstacy! You need not resort to any other gimmicks.
4) Perform only within your limitations.
5) There should be expression in your singing. Dead singing is dead singing.
6) Select songs according to the occasion.
I have given lecture demonstrations at many places including engineering colleges on this topic.

I agree that home studios do help one to break out of the shell but it's being widely misused nowadays. One should study music (I mean understand, listen to everything, practice) and then only apply it. Otherwise it will not sustain. Many of the so called musicians do not even know who Mozart was or who Bismillah Khan or Mehdi Hassan are or do not care to hear anything other than A.R.R or Harris Jayaraj. The genius of A.R.R or Harris Jayaraj has come through years of hard work. They have studied western classical music and hear and adapt all forms of international and folk music into their film music. That's why they are successful. HEARING EVERY FORM OF MUSIC WITHOUT BIAS IS THE FIRST STEP TO BE A COMPLETE MUSICIAN!

Regarding CD's if a CD with 13 songs with songs from 5 films is sold for 50, what would the person who produces songs for 5 films be getting? What would be the person who wrote the song, who sang the song, who composed it, who played the instruments, who recorded it getting? Even I am happy about the lower price. But this does not show a growth in the business. It shows how bad the situation is! That's why I said that nobody is making any real money in cassette/CD business these days. So slowly no one will ever produce a film CD/cassette as it is not at all profitable. Real statistics tell that when something like 1-2 lakh number of CD/cassette sales were possible 5 years back, now they speak of 5000! Is this good?

Speaking of talent Jo, no one is willing to work hard like the greats of yesterday years. Everyone wants a fast way to success and money. Experience has to be gained by experience itself. Speaking of talent, there are talented guys like M.Jayachandran, Alphonse, Deepak etc. who have learnt music the hard way but who are bound by many factors of film music making. They should be given full freedom like their counterparts in Tamil & Hindi. Isn’t it demeaning to our musicians that when Sandeep Chowta can think of bringing the legendary Jay Oliver for his Keyboard Programming from the U.S and is given a fat budget by the Hindi/Telugu/Kannada film producers, we give our composers a paltry 25,000 & 50,000 and deliver! This makes them to demand the singers to sing free for them or sponsor the songs. This leads to lesser talented (but well off) singers singing songs and add up to the mediocrity. In the name of promoting new singers the level of film music is being degraded! This only adds to the speedily decreasing market for Malayalam music!

I only said that Broadband has given easy methods for getting songs from the net without purchasing them from the shop. I appreciate the freedom broadband has given to distribute free music. You can get any song from coolgoose/cooltoad etc. You may be happy about that but that's also contributing to falling sales. We speak in leap and bounds on anti-piracy. But till there are strong rules and they are really applied for real, you and me will be happy to get songs off the web for free! The real culprits are the cassette/CD shop owners who themselves write MP3 CD’s and sell it! “Kallan Kappalil Thanne”

My humble suggestions are
1)Free music from the clutches of the film industry
2)Just like in the US or elsewhere in the world apply copyright acts and rules strictly.
3) Use the net to sell and popularize your music
4) Just like Sandeep Chowta has done in the case of "Malika I hate you" break the concept of 8 song CD's' and cassettes. Come up with singles. Do a song and then release it.
5) Use Broadband to your advantage as you Jo have shown. I admire you Jo for bringing about this Broadband music revolution (I mean putting your songs on the net for others to hear and creating the concept of "BLOG SWARA" to Kerala. Hope many more really talented people join us.

And Swapna I would repeat my belief that only the best of talents should be singing in Films. I agree that state of things is bad in Malayalam. Everywhere else it’s different. There are music directors who are still supreme in Hindi & Tamil. So they only give breaks to real talents like, Sunidhi Chauhan, Sowmya Raoh, Sonu Kakkar (Sandeep Chowta’s finds), Kailash Kher, Naresh Iyer, (A.R.R’s finds). Our music directors cannot demand as they have to depend on the producer’s whims and fancies. Hence the final product suffers. But if a Medha Patkar can shake up the Supreme Court and the Prime minister of India then why can’t we all genuine music lovers make a try. Why should we leave it to others to take the buck? Let’s not be pessimistic and blame the society for our own mistakes since we all are part of it. If music lovers like you join with Jo and others like me, then we can make a try.

I am bringing out my first single shortly. The song is ready! Some of our friends are working on the Video of it. Once it’s ready I will release the song on the net with ample publicity. Anyone could download it for free. Let’s try to make good music and give it to the needy. Let’s try to gather all sincere, talented musicians and make a move. If LINUX could succeed under the Free Software Foundation under the GPL scheme we could start a Free Music Foundation someday!
Cheers!

I HAVE MOVED ALL THE SONGS FROM HERE TO

http://www.pradipsomasundaran.com/musicblog.htm

Is the Malayalam music industry (including film & album) in chaos? Is it in utter mayhem? Are the signs ominous? Well going by the signs it sadly seems so. I am not in fact commenting specifically on the abilities of any of the technicians & artists here but it seems that their careers are fast on the verge of closure. This is evident by the fact that out of the many cassette companies like Sargam, East Coast, Johny Sagarika, Manorama Music, Satyam Audio etc…only few have managed to survive.Music outlets are fast vanishing. Only Satyam Audio is active in the market in the case of Film Music. Manorama also is only coming up with film music very rarely. East Coast is mostly into low budget items like Mappila Pattukal. The glorious days of Ninakkai, Aadyamai etc….are over for them. It’s also astonishing to see that even Satyam is coming up with Audio CD’s with songs of many films put together selling for a paltry amount of Rs. 50/- This shows the desperation prevailing all over. Audio piracy, MP3, Broadband Internet, all have contributed to this. With the advent of the mushrooming home recording studios which have bloomed all over Kerala like a cottage industry, many of the reputed Recording Studios are facing closure. They are not able to cope up to the pressure. With the plummeting prices of computers a stage has come where even novices could record their own songs at home with the minimum of recording gear! The bad effect of such home studios are evident from the utter nursery rhyme type of music which is coming up on T.V channels in the name of music Albums. These songs have crappy “painkili” lyrics (himanglish? Hindi+ Malayalam+English). There is no maturity in these creations and many of the so called “kutti music directors” do not even know their music properly. The videos are also of utter low standards (the typical girl-boy on a bike or on the beach or in the water in the sea… story). I doubt whether in recent times any musical video has had the standards of the “Ormakkai” song from the East Coast album that was done by the genius “Shyamaprasad”. It's sad that even though many singers including myself would like to sing good songs they are forced to do such numbers as majority of the songs produced are of such kind. There are exceptions also as in every field. But majority are crap as also evident in the form of single or two songs in recent action thriller films. Most of such songs are reportedly done a shoestring budget of Rs. 25,000 to 50,000 ! How could film music be produced in such a small budget? This of course is done with compromises. A keyboard with MIDI and a computer with sound samples (Thanks to Broadband and software piracy) along with a sound card and a decent microphone are the hardware you need to get you going. Since these so called music directors have to work under such shoestring budgets, they never use original acoustic instruments. So Tabla Players, Sitar Players, Drum Players, Violin players, all are facing serious threats to their careers. Singers are willing to “sponser” their songs. This trend has been there since 4 or 5 years and has given a beating to even many of the senior pros, who in their days of glory resorted to unholy means to prevent new talents from coming on to the field. Now they are reaping the rewards of their doings. For the senior pros music is a career and money from film singing is their bread and butter. But in the case of the new breed of singers most of them are from affluent families and singing in films only is to add to the glamour. So they started new ways of beating it to the pros. They started sponsoring their own songs! Great isn’t it? But it worked. Many of them got hit numbers thanks to the booming T.V channels. When you keep on playing a song for thousands of times, eventually it becomes a hit even if the singer sings like buffaloes, crows or frogs! And then the “malayali” would finally say…Buffaloes also have a manly voice! Now when did someone say that frogs also croaked in a feminine voice? That’s the trick of marketing! So finally as a result of all these, a juncture has come when you cannot survive by singing in films or bringing out albums. If you manage to have a hit, it will give you programs in and out of India and would add to your moolah. But compared to what their Tamil & Hindi counterparts earn elsewhere, Malayali Singers earn peanuts! The “malayali” listener has short memories. Even if you have a hit you have to take the same initial steps for the next song, and the next song, and the next song…….Even the Maestro Illayaraja astonishingly uses very few acoustic instruments now a days. If you listen to his latest songs in Achuvine Amma, Rasathantram etc. you will note that violin ensembles are things of the past. It’s a great loss to the genuine music lover. The plummeting sale of music CD’s and cassettes has reduced the budget that’s allocated for film music. Now nobody bothers who sings or who composes. This is because nobody sustains for long. So what is the answer to all this mayhem? Well, I will come up with some suggestions in my next blog.