Laya

Laya (लय) is the speed of the beat. It is the steady pulse everything is counted against. It is not how fast you sing.

A voice has no frets, holes or bow to lean on, so the click is the only outside check. The rest of this page is small: the beat stays where it is, and you decide how many syllables 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. Sing Sa, one note to a click, for a minute. Keep it even: same volume, same length, same start.

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. Sing Sa on every click. Each note is long, so hold it for the whole beat and keep the tone steady until the next click.
2. Set 80 BPM. Same again. The notes are shorter, and the breath feels easier.
3. Set 120 BPM. Same again. The notes are short, and you hardly have time to breathe between them.

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, written as the syllables you sing. Every row lasts the same four beats. Only the number of notes changes.

Try it

1. Press ▶ on Thah. Sing along, on the names Sa Re Ga Ma: one note to each click.
2. Press ▶ on Dugun. The click has not changed. Two notes now share it.
3. Press ▶ on Chaugun. Four notes to a click. Notice that the last note still lands on the same beat as in thah.
4. Now sing 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.

Say it before you sing it: Sa-Re-Ga, Sa-Re-Ga, three even syllables to a click. The mouth finds the roll more easily than the pitch does, so get the words rolling first and add the notes after.

Try it

1. Play Thah and sing 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.

For the voice

1. Sing the names. Say Sa Re Ga Ma on the four notes. That is what the names are for: one clear syllable to a note.
2. No extra “h”. Sa-re-ga-ma, not ha-ha-ha-ha. In dugun and chaugun, make each syllable shorter but keep the air even.
3. Then drop the names. Sing the chaugun row on one open vowel, aa, moving only the pitch. This is aakar. With no consonant to mark each note, the beat has to come from the breath, and it is harder to keep even than the names were.
4. Speak it first. Chaugun is mostly the mouth. Say it in rhythm without pitch, then sing it.
5. Breathe on a beat. Take your breath where a pass ends, on the beat it ends, never in the middle of a group of four. If you run out of air before the pass ends, slow the tempo.

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.

Teentaal has sixteen beats. S R G m in thah takes four beats, so it goes round four times. In dugun it goes round eight times and in chaugun sixteen, so every row arrives back on sam (beat 1) together with the tabla. That is the habit to build: always end on sam. The three-note phrase does not divide sixteen. Try it over Dadra, which has six beats, and it comes round twice. Pick a cycle on Taals, press its ▶, and sing through a lap at a slow laya, then again at a faster one. The Rhythm room's Cycles shows the same cycles as grids.

Ten minutes

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