Laya

Laya (लय) is the speed of the beat. It is the steady pulse every stroke is counted against. It is not how hard or how fast you hit.

Come here once the strokes on Basics are clean and you can alternate Ghin and Taang without tension. Laya adds speed to a stroke that has to be relaxed already. The beat stays where it is, and you decide how many strokes to fit into each one.

Try it

1. Press Set the tempo to 60 BPM in the grid below, or type 60 in the practice bar.
2. Turn the practice-bar metronome on. Each click is one beat.
3. Play Ghin with the left hand on every click for a minute, saying it out loud. Keep it even: same height, same weight, same tone.

Three speeds

Teachers name three speeds of laya, and they are relative: vilambit is slow for the piece you are playing, drut is fast for it.

Try it

1. Set 50 BPM. Play Ghin on every click with the left hand. Listen to it ring out and stop before the next one.
2. Set 80 BPM. Same again. The hand rebounds lighter, and the gap is shorter.
3. Set 120 BPM. Same again. If the hand tightens or the tone changes, you have gone too fast. Drop 10 BPM.

One beat, more strokes

You can make a rhythm sound faster without moving the beat at all. Play the same phrase, but fit two strokes into each beat instead of one, then four. The old Indian names for these are thah (one to a beat), dugun (two), tigun (three) and chaugun (four). Practising a phrase this way is called layakari.

Below, the phrase is Ghin Taang Ghin Taang, left hand then right, with the hand marked under each stroke. Every row lasts the same four beats, and the hands go L R L R in all of them. Only the speed of the bounce changes.

Try it

1. Press ▶ on Thah. Play along: left on Ghin, right on Taang, one stroke to each click.
2. Press ▶ on Dugun. The click has not changed. Two strokes now share it, one from each hand.
3. Press ▶ on Chaugun. Four strokes to a click, L R L R inside every beat. The hands never change order. They just get quicker.
4. Now play each row yourself, with the click and without the sound, saying the bols out loud.

Three to a beat

Tigun fits three strokes into a beat. On a drum it does something two and four do not. Two and four are even, so every beat starts with the same hand. Three is odd, so the hand that starts the beat changes every time: left, right, left on the first beat, then right, left, right on the second.

Try it

1. Play Thah and play along: left on beat 1, right on beat 2, left on 3, right on 4.
2. Press ▶ on Tigun and watch the hand row. The first stroke of beat 2 is a right-hand Taang, not a Ghin.
3. Say it before you play it: Ghin-Taang-Ghin, Taang-Ghin-Taang. Then play it slowly, with the click.
4. Count it as “1-tri-pe-let, 2-tri-pe-let” while you play. The stress falls on the number, whichever hand is there.

On the madal

1. Bounce, do not lift. Sound comes from relaxed fingers rebounding off the head (see Basics). To go faster, let the finger rebound sooner. Do not lift it higher and do not hit harder. If your hand hurts, you are hitting too hard.
2. Open strokes ring, closed ones stop. Taang and Ghin are open and ring on. At speed the ring of one runs into the next. That is part of the sound, but if chaugun turns to mush, slow down before you change anything else. Taak and Kha are damped and stay clear.
3. Leave Dha out at first. Dha is two strokes at once, and the two hands have to land together. A flam is the commonest beginner mistake, and chaugun leaves no time to fix one. Learn the rows on single strokes, then add Dha at thah and dugun.
4. Say the bols. The tradition teaches by speaking them while you play. In chaugun your mouth is the check: if you cannot say it clearly at the speed you are playing, you are not playing it clearly.

Laya and taal

A taal is the cycle of beats. Laya is how fast you go round it. The same taal is played slowly for a song and fast for a dance, and on the madal the laya usually comes from the song or the dance, with the drum carrying it.

The Khyali theka on Beats is already layakari. It reads Ghin. Kha-Taang. Taak-Ghin. Ghin-Taang.: one stroke on beat 1, then two strokes to each of the next three beats. It is thah for one beat and dugun for three. Whatever the taal, a speed only fits if the phrase divides the cycle. Four beats divide Khyali's four, but Dadra and Sangini have six counts, and a four-beat phrase will not come back to count 1 with them. A three-beat phrase will.

Ten minutes

Add 5 BPM only when three passes in a row are clean and relaxed. If a row falls apart, go back one tempo, not one row.