Final Solutions

Ahhhh finally we got some project to work on ;). Things kept coming in whenever we started working on a song. Finally someone pushed us really hard into doing some music. Many thanks to Praveen Vaidy, who based out of Boise,Idaho and into stage play direction and acting. He is part of a theatre group "East Indian Follies" directing and producing plays for the past few years . Final Solutions is the title of their most recent stage play and we were given a chance to do theme music for certain scenes/acts. Glad that Praveen Vaidy pulled us into this project. Had some fun time traveling and spending time in Boise, ID.

Final Solutions is a play written by the famous Indian playwright, Mahesh Dattani, (Dance like a man, Morning Raaga). It was performed by East Indian Follies in Sep 2008 in Boise over the course of three weeks. Final Solutions and Mahesh Dattani attempt to set a platform to explore answers.

About the play -

The playwright suggests that religious fervor emanates from perceptions of being wronged and degrades to actions of doing wrong. Assigning blame only transitions to adopting blame. The fingers and their directions change, but they are always pointed. We thought the entire concept ...more

We did four main themes for this play. The religious themes presented here by no means express our opinions/views about any of the religion(S), and we kindly request our listeners to view these religious themes just from creative angles .

Another note - we sold our first official audio CD. The producers made audio CD's of the sound track after the first show, and honestly, we were flattered by the response to the music and by the fact that people were willing to pay money to buy our tracks! So a big thank you to everyone out there who bought the Final Solutions CD :)

We would also like to thank the entire East Indian Follies team, an amazingly talented and supremely dedicated bunch of professionals! We had so much fun working with you folks during the time we conceived the music for the play, sitting through the long rehearsals, and greatly appreciate all the inputs and encouragement! We definitely look forward to working with you in the future,

And, we fell in love with Boise!!!!

Hindu Mob Theme :
This is the first piece that we started working on. Its the theme for the hindu mob. Will be played whenever the hindu mob comes on stage wearing the hindu mask..

Vocals : Shyam

Muslim Mob Theme :

Vocals: Shyam . Chorus : Praveen Vaidy , Praveen, Prasan.


Sad Theme

Vocals: Sindhuja Bhakthavasalam, Deepti Navartana.

Thanks Sindhuja and Deepti for your help. We wanted to add couple of more vocals too. But due to time constraints we weren't able to get help from others.

Poojari's Death:



Credits :
Guitar and Djembe : Praveen Vaidy
Tabla and Bhol : Durga Panda
Solo Violin : Shyam
Flute : Praveen
Music: Shyam, Prasan & Praveen
Idea's conceived by TSJ Studio and Praveen Vaidy
Recorded and mixed at TSJ Studio, Chennai & USA

Ragasiyam mistaken to be Varanam Ayiram Song

Not too sure who did this, but someone has mistaken our Ragasiyam song as one from Harris Jayaraj's Varanam Ayiram song. We found this really funny. I'm sure regular visitors of this blog would have found it funny too! The uploaders of the Youtube version have edited the song a little (right towards the end) and also have created a slide show with some stills from the movie and have posted it on youtubue. We noticed it just today morning, thanks to Sudharshan who informed us about this. Before we could write about this on our blog the Ragasiyam youtube link some tamil sites like www.techsatish.com have already posted the youtube links on their website. Again we are not sure who posted this on Youtube and have no clue how they even associated this song with Varnam Aaiyram movie. We just wanted to make it clear that its NOT us who did this.

Just to clarify. This video is sure not posted by us or anyone we know. Sure we did not flick Ragasiyam Song from Harris Jeyaraj as you guys all know that Ragasiyam song was posted in our website long time back (the song itself is about a couple of years old). Harris Jayaraj is a very very good friend, and well wisher, of ours and has infact heard Ragasiyam song a long time back. We wonder if he even remembers it now. But we are quite sure if he comes across this youtube link he will recognize our song, We don't want him to mistake us for doing this. We are huge fans of his work and have the utmost respect for other composers' creative abilities and never had or have intentions of using others' work.

We are in the process of contacting the uploader to request them to remove the video from Youtube.

Kanavaa, New Channel ID & News

Finally the three of us got together after a period of 16 months! Sure it was a long and painful gap for us. We (Shyam and Praveen) went to India during our month long fall break. We also upgraded our studio with new equipment. Two new workstations (Korg M3 Workstation and a Yamaha Motif XS), a new condenser mic, and a pre amp are welcome additions to TSJ STUDIO :). The keyboards are really great but we didn't get enough time to explore them fully. However, we did manage to do some music. Composed two songs and two jingles.
Thanks to our singers, instrumentalists and lyricist for coming by our place and helping us for without them we wouldn't have been able to finish these songs/pieces.

Kanavaa



Credits
Vocals : Karthik Krishnamurthy, Anusha Pradeep
Lyrics : Ilaya
Music: Shyam Prasan Praveen
Song recorded and mixed at TSJ STUDIO, Chennai.

Started of with this one(probably the next day we landed in Chennai). It took us a long time to finalize the tune. All three of us were totally out of form (reminded us of Rahul Dravid at Melbourne!) and it took us few days to come back to our normal groove. Also had to spend a long time in learning the new synths and browsing through those tone banks and effects.

Karthik Krishnamurthy is Shyam's cousin. He is currently in SFO and he does quite a few stage shows in and around SFO. Luckily he had been to Chennai that time and we called him to sing this song for us. Thanks so much Karthik, for your time and effort. Hopefully you had a better experience this time around, as compared to the song that we recorded five years ago!

Anusha Pradeep, many thanks to you for rendering your beautiful vocals. Anusha participated in a music competition hosted by Vijay TV ( Vijay TV Paadum Office) and she won the first prize in Carnatic Vocals. Congrats Anusha :).


Channel ID




We started working on the Channel ID and News during Summer 07, but never got a chance to complete it that time.
These two jingles are for a Tamil Channel and for a News Channel and both the channels(managed by same group) are shortly to begin its broadcast in U.S.A.

Credits:
Vocals : Nehru ,Shyam, Banumathi
Veenai : Chandrika
Music: Shyam Prasan Praveen
Song recorded and mixed at TSJ STUDIO, Chennai.



News


Music: Shyam Prasan Praveen
Song recorded and mixed at TSJ STUDIO, Chennai.

BLS V3

We are back with another song, after a long layoff, thanks to
Blogswara. Last August, we had no idea how we were going to work on a
new song as each of us had become part of different time zones. The
inspiration to work on songs from remote locations came from
Blogswara, where people from different places work together, compose
music and release those songs as an online album through their
website. We were keen to be part of such a venture and started
working on a new song for the release of Blogswara 3 (BLS v3). We
contacted the BLS team and they were kind enough to accept our
contribution for their album (BLS v3).

Initially, it was frustrating working from remote locations. Praveen
and Shyam met in Seattle at Praveen's brother's place and Prasan was
working from our studio in Chennai, India. Interacting through phone,
email, and remote servers, we came up with three different tunes. We
have uploaded scratches of all three songs here. Please don't mind
the poor clarity of these samples as they are very rough scratches and
we did this just to get a feel for how the final song would sound. We
zeroed in on the third option as we wanted to work on a fast song. Recording happened in Seattle, andlater in Logan and Houston. Bulk of the vocal recording was done at
our home studio in Chennai, and also at Sai Presto (thanks to Mujeeb's
sound engineering). Though it was quite difficult for first few days
to co-ordinate work, it was lot of fun after the initial struggle, and
we were excited to hear the final output of the song :).

After we recorded all the tracks we created a rough mix of our song.
Later, we contacted Barath Venkatesan who is a sound engineeer and
asked him if he could help us out with mixing our tracks. He was kind
enough to say Ok. Thanks Barath :).


You can listen to the final version of our song (Azhagae Azhagae) on
the Blogswara Website. It is the 5th track on the website. Please
listen to it and do post your comments. The song is also available
for download on the website.

Credits are as follows
Vocals: Nehru, Anusha and Shyam
Lyrics: Surya
Flute: Praveen
Mixing: Bharath Venkatesan
Additional Recording and Sound Engineering: Mujeeb (Sai Presto, Chennai)
Recorded and Mixed at TSJ Studio
Music: Shyam, Prasan and Praveen

Once again, many thanks to the Blogswara team for the opportunity, and
also to each and every person involved with our song. Big thanks to
Prabhu and Aarthi for the constant encouragement and support, space
and the wonderful time in Seattle! We loved every minute of our stay
there! You guys have been a great source of strength to us. Thanks
also to D. Srikanth, for the valuable feedback throughout the making
of this song.

Also, you can listen to the rough samples that we initially came up with here.


Melody_November(Option 1)

New Melody(Option 2)

New Intro(Option 3)


Listen to the final version that we submitted to Blogswara V3.




We would like to thank each and everyone who helped us in doing this song.

Final Song

This will be our last song for this season. We guys are taking an indefinite break from music as we have decided to devote more time to higher education!!

We started a song in Thodi but couldnt stick to the same raaga and changed it to include traces of Sindhu Bhairavi and Hindholam. Our sincere apologies if we have not done justice to these raagas!!

Our lyricist Rangan started writing the lyrics to this song (it goes "Vettaiyaduthey Vizhigal rendum Vettaiyaduthey") but unfortunately we couldn finish the work. Currently this song has the main melody track hum by Shyam. A big thanks to Ashok for improvising so much on the starting and interlude aalap.

This is the first time we tried recording some live accoustic guitar and accoustic percussion like mridangam and finger cymbals :) please do let us know how they sound. Accoustic guitar is by Sriam Ragunathan and Mridangam is by Harish Ramanathan. Many thanks to Harish and Sriram for taking the time off to work with us :)
Last but not the least, we should thank Arul Murugan for the violin parts. One of the most talanted musicians we have come across (the violin pieces kind of lifts the song up in our opinion).

So this should be our last song in quite a while. A big thanks to the blog world for listening to our songs and all those encouraging words. It really makes us work harder.

Credits
Vocals : Starting Alap By Ashok .. Melody by Shyam
Violin: Arul Murugan
Guitar:Sriram Ragunathan
Mridangam: Harish Ramanathan
Music: Shyam Prasan Praveen
Song recorded and mixed at TSJ STUDIO, Chennai.

So long!! Thanks once again. We hope to be back in action sometime sooner than we expect as of right now!!

Ragasiyam

Ragasiyam is our most recent track, a love duet. We wanted to do a
ballad, but not sure how close we came to one! Tones are primarily
from the Fantom rack, korg TR rack, xphraze,Kontakt and hypersonic. We still feel we could have programmed more interesting rhy :)
Credits
Female vocals : Anusha Pradeep
Male vocals : Shyam
Flute : Praveen
Lyrics : Rangan (a.k.a Barathi Maalu)
Music : shyam prasan and praveen
Song Recorded and Mixed at TSJ STUDIO ,Chennai


Anusha's voice on this song has come out very well, her husky tone
probably one of the best elements in the song.

Sapthaswarangal Third Demo ( Viralodu Uravadum)

This is the third demo that we did for sapthaswarangal. So far no reject / no approval from Sun TV people.. Dunno if they wil accept this one. We initially did a scratch for 2 mins.. They heard the track and asked us to do an One min version of the song. So this is wat we did. Song Sung by Ashok(ashok.gopi@gmail.com), VijayNarain (r_vijaynarain@yahoo.com) and Aruna. Vijay and Aruna are Praveen's Juniors in college. They both are very good singers. Ashok and Aruna are the lead singer and vijay and Shyam has backed them up.
We wanted to add some Veena to this in some places but we couldnt get hold of someone who could play a veena :( . We've used some accoustic kits from Roland-Fantom XR, the patches are good but still we are looking for some better accoustic kit patches so that it will sound more realistic in some places :) . Anyways lets see wat SUN TV ppl thinks about this one. We are still waiting for our results :))

Vocals:Ashok,Vijay Narain , Shyam and Aruna
Flute: Praveen
Lyrics : Rangan
Song Recorded and Mixed at TSJ STUDIO,Chennai