The Making Of......

Friday, May 8, 2009

It has been some time since I did any proper blogging.

It hasn't been for the lack of interesting things happening with me. Except for a slight lull on the work front as a natural result of the recession, things have been good.

Weekdays are a mix of busy and boring days depending on the work. The financial year that ended in March was good as our team over achieved the target and we received lot of appreciation for the work from the head office. My name has been mentioned in all the right places. So even though I don't expect any personal benefit to happen out of it, it is still good to see results for your work.

Weekends have been full of creative pursuits. Dance classes are on full swing and I can't explain how much I'm enjoying those. Apart from that, I have been lucky to play a part, albeit small, in the creation of something beautiful.

My husband and his brother are talented musicians. Though both of them haven't really had formal training in music, my husband is a good singer and his brother plays the harmonium and the key board. They have lived and breathed bhajans all their life. So recently, my BIL decided to give form to his lifelong dream - of composing his own music and bringing out a CD.

So it all started with him composing a few bhajans of his own.

He has a small recording studio in his house in Abu dhabi and he would compose songs and then call up my husband, play it over the phone and discuss it with him. We were quite impressed by the music he churned out and so we also got quite excited about the CD idea.

Though most of bhajans were composed with lyrics, I did get a chance to help out in a few of them with the lyrics. It was really interesting, to say the least.

Soon, he had a set of nice new bhajans to which he added a few rare, traditional ones and made up a list for the CD. The plan was for my husband and some of their friends in the bhajan group here in Dubai to lend their voices.

The B was of the opinion that if it is done, it has to be done the right way. So the next step was to get someone to do the orchestration, sound programming and recording. He thought of a cousin back home in India who is a professional in the field. Soon we were recording tracks of all the songs and sending it to him to work on. There is no way I can explain the amount of communication that used to happen every day. I'll just say that Du got a lot of good business.

So the cousin would do the orchestration (using the keyboard) and send us songs which would go back and forth till the B was completely satisfied. He knew exactly what he wanted in each song of his and there was so much creativity around that I was just watching in amazement. I had never imagined the amount of work that goes into the making of one single song...

Once the music was finalized, the cousin was getting the original instrumental music tracks recorded in India for all the songs.Tabla, Violin, Guitar, Sitar, Keyboard, flute, Veena, Saxophone...

We had one problem that we did not have any good female voices in the group here. So we decided to get those done from India. By this time, the B had decided to go all out and do it perfectly since we were anyway spending lot of time, effort and money on it. So the result was that along with the H and bhajan group friends, we now had 3professional playback singers of the Malayalam music industry to sing in the CD.

We were lucky to get an excellent studio to do the recording here through some well wishers. So one weekend, the cousin came down with the entire instruments track ready. We spent a whole weekend in the studio recording the voices for all the songs. I was right there doing the job of providing hot water to the singers. :-) The cousin then went back and got the voice recording done from the singers in India.

Meanwhile, we broke our heads to come up with the right name for the CD. After lot of searching and discussions, we arrived at a name that we all agreed on.

The incessant communication between India and UAE continued - for doing the final corrections, adding the effects and a whole lot of things that they do after the entire recording is over.

Today, we are at the final stages of completion. The plan is to first bring out a set of 100 CDs and introduce it. Later, further marketing and distribution is planned. So yesterday, we were selecting designs for the cover and finalizing the caption to be displayed on the cover.So hopefully in another week's time we should have the first set of CDs out!

It has been a great journey so far and now we are eagerly waiting to see the response of the listeners.