Sitars, Ragas and Indian Classical Music

Bhimpalasi Gat in Teental

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been playing with raga Bhimpalasi recently. I have to say that it currently my favourite raga and is so much fun to play in. It has a darker mood than Yaman which makes a nice change after playing that for so long.

Here is a gat that I have been learning, it is simple but sounds lovely. It is in teental:


I don't have much else to post at the moment, I haven't had a lot of time to practice really. I've spent quite when seems ages this week just learning to tune by ear. It's actually a lot easier than I thought and I don't know why I didn't start doing it ages ago.

All you have to do is tune the Sa string to whatever note you want to use (C, C# or D usually) and tune everything to that, listening to the dissonance in each string and adjusting until it stops fluttering. So simple.

I also managed to fix a small problem I was having with fret placement. They were looking uneven so I spent a while making sure they were all in the right place according to the perfectly tuned taraf string and now they're looking much better, much more even and where they should be.

This is Usted Shahid Parvez Khan playing raga Bhimpalasi (starts at about 18 seconds):




15 comments:

Alekseezy said...

nice post, following! What is raga tho?

Pool Fool said...

you got interesting stuff about sitars

Alexis said...

Alekseezy, that is a good question but not an easy one to answer. I will make my next post post about it.

Mikko said...

nice music :)

Tricia said...

I do really like this =D =D

Finding Cheap Homes said...

Dude, that thing is awesome!
Excellent post, keep it up!

Silk said...

:O strange instrument to play, it looks like a huge banjo!

Inside Journalism said...

Still love this blog, so interesting! Keep it up!

Dola said...

thats pretty cool =D

Sean said...

I need to read more about this

Rain said...

Very nice post.

Sprightly Shire said...

It looks like that would be challenging to learn.

Anonymous said...

I think you are better than most mmmm

Jesse Crows said...

such exquisite sounds!

Anonymous said...

nice music

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