Most of you will be aware that there is a certain Bengali music channel which goes by the name Tara Muzik ... and also that it's quite popular as a fore runner among the channels in it's genre (or should I say category?). Now in an attempt to increase their TRP, this channel started a club called Tara Club which was planned from the beginning to be a club comiprising of all the interested viewers of this channel. My very adorable mother (see previous post for more!) she satisfied the required conditions a) interested and b)viewer of Tara Muizk, and so sent an SMS professing her desire to the Tara Muzik SMS number,and very soon got a confirmatory reply. The first Tara Club meeting was held on the 28th of January 09, to which my mum was invited.
I wasn't much interested in this thing, and stuck to being a dispassionate observer of events ... moreover my studies were my first concern at that instant, so I chose to stay inert. From what I heard from my mum, it had been an extremely cordial meet, and she had enjoyed it a lot. Moreover she had also met a large number of similar minded ladies and had struck up a fine acquaintance with them, taking their numbers and stuff.
Now there's this breakfast show on Tara Muzik called 'Aj Sokaler Amontrone'... literally meaning 'this morning by invite' where they invite some eminent person and talk with him/her from 7 to 9 am, live. Since it's a breakfast show, they also have phone lines open for viewers to call on ... and you guessed it right ... my mum is a regular caller on this programme, where she recites her one minute poems and writings. This made her quite popular in the Tara Muzik off screen dept, and very soon she recieved requests for more. Infact, this breakfast show is synonymus with the channel itself, being telceast thrice each day, once live, and the other two, recorded versions for international viewers at 2 o'clock in the morning, and at 11 am.
It wasn't till my IITJEE got over that my mum heaved a sigh of relief and organised a meeting at our residence, inviting all her friends from that one day at Tara Club. By then her popularity at Tara Muzik enabled her to organise a program in one of the Tara Club meetings. So on May Day, her friends came along, and they got off to a flying rehearsal. I mixed in quite freely ... I didn't have much problems ... since every one was older than me, being the youngest gave me a sort of ... "recognition". Now for the music department, there was one guy who played the tabla, and another who played the keyboard. Infact the tabla-player's wife had also come along to join the group. This group of ladies and two gents prepared a Rabindra sangeet, and another self composed song (written by my mum), and after another rehearsal went to the Tara Club meet and performed. Even though there were technical problems during the performance ... in the form of the keyboard losing power midway into the concert, it was a huge hit.
It was on the day of my BITASAT, that the guys at Tara Muzik called up my mum and asked her to do a formal audio recording of the self composed song ... which was to be played on the birthday of the hugely popular breakfast show. My mum got all excited and worked up, and like a delightedhat 20 yr old she broke the news to me after my exam. Phone calls were interchanged, but on that very evening a blow came in the form of the musicians not agreeing to participate, owing to monetary reasons. My mother had previously made it clear that this was to be a non-profit venture, and they had then agreed, but now they backed out.
As a result the group (named NayonTara, I had forgotten to metion) remained stagnant without any one in the music department, till it seemed that this would never materialse into anything real.
Then guess who came to their aid?
TAN TA RA!!! Yours truly...
Until then the only job I had done had been take photographs, but now I knew everything sort of depended on me.
I had to get down to business immediately. Everyone met on the 13th of April, election day, and I made short work of the self composed song (titled Geet Govindam), and composed a very sweet keyboard solo, and found a very nice drum cover on my keyboard (a Yamaha PSR E403) to go with it. The best part of the day was the quick work we made on yet another song (this one written by Jayanti aunty, one of us). With a fast head-banging beat that included a rather snazzy beginning solo, Priyanka di (Jayanti aunty's daughter, the member in the group closest to my age) and I invented a very fine chord pattern (a rather simple one too ... a cyclic pattern of C, F and G) that went with the song, and within 15 minutes this song was through too. Audio recording was fixed to be on the 14th, and it was in the afternoon, that we, an eager lot, boarded our Qualis, and sped off for the studio. I had never done this sort of thing before, and so was naturally really reeeeally excited. In the studio, which included two sound proof rooms, one where the sound mixer sat, in front of a huge console with loads of switches and knobs, and a huge split-screen computer moniter, and the other room, where we sat for the recording.
Since it was to be a track recording (meaning first just the music is taken in on one track, and then the voice on another, and the two are carefully overlapped, just how Linkin Park do it ... the thought gave me the shivers). An ampifier plug-in was fed into my keyboard, and I played the music pretty nicely, including drums, bass, and strings. The group sang too, but their voice wasn't recorded on this track. I then did the other song too, the fast one (calle Koo Zig Zig), and there I put in a brilliant flute arpeggio at the end which made the song a hell lot better, and after that was recorded, my job was done. It was then the others' job to do the voice over. The seven singers put on those really cool looking headphones, recieving my music input from the mixer's room, and they sung. It took just three takes to finish the thing. There was a slight problem in the Geet Govindam track, where the music pauses, and then the singer has to sing without a drum beat for around 8 seconds, accompanied only by string chords (infact F, E flat, and B flat). The reintroduction of the drums took some track synchronising brilliance on the mixer's part, but after that both songs were done.
The 15th was to be the video recording. We left for the Tara Muzik office in salt lake early in the morning, and by 1 o' clock we were through with that. I had a really crappy role to play in the video, that of "directing" the song, maintaining the beat by banging my hands (supposed to look sort of cool, but wasn't quite!).
The video was telecast on Tara Muzik on the 16th thrice. I connected the TV to my camcorder to get the video, and did a fine job at editing that in Windows Movie Maker, in the evening, but sadly won't be able to put it up now on You Tube or my blog owing to copyright reasons. But that should be sorted out within a week. Keep checking my blog for that.
And by the way, here's a short glimpse at the NayonTara team:
And by the way, don't miss the videos, which I'll put up here, as soon as I get the green signal from Tara Muzik
And by the way, here's a short glimpse at the NayonTara team:
- my mum, Indira Mukerjee, who sperheaded this endeavour
- Jayanti aunty, and her daughter Priyanka di, both extremely talented in singing
- Moumita aunty (also very talented in singing, and with a very nice sense of humour, also the eldest of the youngsters in the group)
- Ruma aunty (the reserved sort of person, generally forms the butt of Moumita aunty's humour, a very nice person all the same, takes the humour in good sense)
- Chandana aunty (the serious sort)
- Sanghamitra aunty (also a quintessential addition to the group)
And by the way, don't miss the videos, which I'll put up here, as soon as I get the green signal from Tara Muzik
in fact, here are the videos:
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