Laya

Laya (लय) is the speed of the beat. It is the steady pulse everything is counted against. It is not how fast your bow and fingers move.

On a bowed instrument the right hand owns the beat and the left hand fills it. The strokes stay where the beat is, and you decide how many notes 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. Bow Sa, one stroke to a click, for a minute. Keep it even: same weight, same speed, same length of stroke.

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. Bow Sa once to a click. Each stroke is long and slow now, so keep the volume level from one end of the bow to the other.
2. Set 80 BPM. Same again. The strokes are shorter. Notice that the sound should not change.
3. Set 120 BPM. Same again. The strokes are quick, and the bow has little time to travel.

One beat, more notes

You can also make music sound faster without moving the beat at all. Play the same phrase, but fit two notes 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 S R G m, with the bow stroke marked under each beat. Every row lasts the same four beats, and every row has the same four strokes. Only the number of notes inside a stroke changes.

Try it

1. Press ▶ on Thah. Bow along: one note and one stroke to each click.
2. Press ▶ on Dugun. The click has not changed, and neither has the stroke. Two notes now share it.
3. Press ▶ on Chaugun. Four notes to a stroke. Notice that the last note still lands on the same beat as in thah.
4. Now play each row yourself, with the click and without the sound.

Three to a beat

Tigun fits three notes into a beat, so a three-note phrase fits into a single click. It feels different from two and four: it rolls instead of marching. The phrase here is S R G, so the pass is three beats long.

Three notes in one stroke spaces the left hand into thirds. The bow does exactly what it did in thah, one stroke to a click. Only the fingers change.

Try it

1. Play Thah and play along: S on beat 1, R on beat 2, G on beat 3.
2. Play Tigun. The whole phrase now fits inside one beat, and it comes round three times.
3. Count it out loud as “1-tri-pe-let, 2-tri-pe-let, 3-tri-pe-let”. One syllable per note.

With the bow

1. The bow follows the beat, not the notes. Take one stroke to each click in all three rows. In thah that is one note to a stroke. In dugun two notes share a stroke, and in chaugun four do. The left hand changes the notes inside the stroke while the bow keeps moving.
2. Add notes, not strokes. Bowing every note at chaugun means reversing direction four times a click, which scrapes and loses the tone. One stroke to a click keeps it singing.
3. Let go at speed. If the sound turns harsh, the answer is almost always less weight, not more. See Bowing.
4. Land the beat. The first note of each click should arrive with the click. If your left hand is late, slow the tempo until it lands, then speed up.

Laya and tāl

A tāl is the cycle of beats (sixteen, ten, eight, six…). Laya is how fast you go round it. The same tāl can be played slowly or fast, and a slow lap leaves room for a lot more notes to a beat than a fast one.

On the sarangi the laya often belongs to the dance. The six-beat jhyaure cycle is played slow for a song and faster for a dance, with the same accents. Jhyaure has six beats, so S R G m (four) never lands back on beat 1 with it, but S R G (three) does, twice a lap. That is the phrase to practise over a jhyaure. Read how the bow carries it on Jhyaure & the madal, or see the Rhythm room's Cycles.

Ten minutes

Add 5 BPM only when three passes in a row are clean and the sound does not change from stroke to stroke. If a row falls apart, go back one tempo, not one row.