Practice routine
Twenty-five minutes, most days, in this order: bow, then tuning, then pitch, then music. Skipping straight to tunes is the usual way to get stuck.
Why this order
The sarangi asks two hard things of you at once — the right hand has to make a steady tone and the left hand has to find pitches that are not marked. Practising both at once means neither improves. So the routine separates them: bowing on open strings where pitch cannot go wrong, then pitch-finding against a drone where tone barely matters, then both together.
The 25 minutes
1 · Tune — 4 min
Middle pair to Sa, then the outer two. Two passes. How.
2 · Long bows — 5 min
Open strings only, no left hand. Four seconds each way, full length of the bow, even volume from frog to tip. Then the drone pair, both strings speaking. How.
3 · Find Sa — 4 min
Drone on. Land on Sa from the open thick string, lift, land again. Then Pa on the thin string. You are training the hand to arrive in the right place without hunting. How.
4 · Paltas — 7 min
Drone on. One pattern, slowly, up and down. Stop the moment the pitch goes vague — playing a palta out of tune trains it out of tune. Patterns.
5 · Music — 5 min
A tune, or a phrase of one. This is the part you came for, and it is last so that it is the part you leave on. Tunes.
The first three months
| Weeks | What you are working on | You can tell it is working when |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Posture, bow grip, one clean open string | The instrument stands without your left hand and a stroke sounds the same at both ends |
| 3–4 | Tuning unaided; the drone pair under one bow | You can hear beats slow down and use them |
| 5–8 | Sa and Pa found reliably; the scale on the thick string | You land on Sa without sliding around to find it |
| 9–12 | Paltas across both melody strings; a first meend; one whole tune | A phrase sounds like a phrase, not like separate notes |
If you are stuck
- Tone is rough. Go back to open strings. Nine times out of ten it is bow speed and pressure, not the left hand.
- Notes are out of tune. Slow down until each note has time to be checked against the drone. Speed hides pitch problems from you but not from anyone listening.
- It sounds like exercises, not music. Try singing the phrase first, then playing exactly what you sang. Most sarangi players learn to sing before they play, and the instrument is built to imitate a voice.
- You are bored. Put the metronome on six beats and play the same palta as jhyaure. How.