Sitars, Ragas and Indian Classical Music

A Strange Yaman Gat

Well it's been a while but I'm back.

I'm guessing you know the basic rules of raga yaman. If you don't then head over to wikipedia.

Go here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaman_(raga)

It gives the pakad (characteristic phrase) as well as the aaroha (scale going up the frets) and the avroha (scale going down the neck). As you can see this raga uses tivra Ma (sharp) and all the rest of the notes are natural. You can also see that yaman usually skips Sa and Pa on the way up the scale.


When I first went to India I picked up a small book about playing sitar. It has loads of exercises in it, some of which I will post in the future, but also a gat for some of the more popular ragas.


This is the gat it gives for yaman:

Teen Taal
sthai
+      2      3     4     5     6     7     8     0    10     11     12     13     14     15     16
                                                       Ni    Dha   Pa     Ma    Ga     Re     Ga    Ma
Pa     -     Ga   Re  Ni    Re   Sa   -      Sa    Re    Ga     Re    Ga     Ma     Pa      -
Ga    Re   Ga   Re  Ni    Re   Sa
Antra                                                Pa   Ga    Pa     Dha   San     -     San     -
Ni    Ren Gan Ren San  Ni   Dha  Pa    Ga   Ren   San   Ni      Dha    Pa    Ma    Ga
Pa     -     Ga  Re   Ni    Re  Sa     -


While this is quite a pleasant gat to play, it seems to not agree with the general rules of yaman because there are phrases that start on Sa and move up to Re straight away and also the same with Pa to Dha.

I have heard discussions about there not really being any hard and fast rules with ragas. However, to me it sounds quite strange and uncharacteristic of the raga to make these jumps.

Having said that, this is a nice little gat to learn and does bring out some lovely shades of the raga. When I play though I alter it slightly so that instead of going from Sa to Re, I go from Ni to Re and likewise with Pa Ga Pa Dha line. This is a little trickier as the Pa Ga Pa sounds good but normally you would need to move down to a different note before ascending to Dha. I tend to play Pa Ga Pa but play the second Pa fretted at the Ma fret and meended (string bend) to Pa, then slide down to Ma. It can take a little practice to get it right but sounds quite good when you nail it. If you have the fingers for it you can meend up from Ma to Dha and then even high Sa, which makes the movement more fluid. This definitely takes some practice to get it accurately but it is a fairly common kind of phrase in yaman so it is worth spending the time getting it right.

4 comments:

Watchtower Corp. said...

I'd love to learn

BannedFromAdsense.NET said...

I am lost, lol

Alexis said...

haha I suppose if you don't know much about Indian music it could be mystifying! If you want to learn about though, try going to the first post and reading on from there. :)

Anonymous said...

I'm trying to learn this :)

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