Guitar

This is a repost of an offering I made two years ago. Thirteen basic kirtan melodies with chord charts. I only got round to annotating the first 6, and no-one ever asked for more, so I didn't do them. If I get some feedback asking me to annotate the other 7 I'll do it. Even better, why don't you do it and contribute the annotations? :-) I might make small videos showing how to play them as well.

At the moment the basic chords are there so you can play along with bass, guitar, harmonium, accordion, or whatever. Eventually we'll put the melody notes in as well (they go on the bottom line, under the mantra).

I originally devised this system to be used with the sa-ga-re-ma (sargam) Indian system of musical notation, because it's key agnostic, which means that with one song sheet you can do the kirtan in any key. However, in the interests of a shallower learning curve we've released this one using the Western C-D-E type system of notation.

These kirtans are simple three chord melodies ala Harer Nama Volume 1 by Sri Prahlad.

Here are the tracks from the Basic Kirtans 1 CD:

Track 1: Tuning notes
Track 2: Intro 1
Track 3: Mantra 1
Track 4: Mantra 2
Track 5: Mantra 3
Track 6: Mantra 4
Track 7: Mantra 5
Track 8: Mantra 6 (double time)
Track 9: Mantra 7 (double time)
Track 10: Mantra 8
Track 11: Intro 2
Track 12: Mantra 9
Track 13: Mantra 10

And here is the accompanying booklet, in .xls form:

Basic Kirtans 1 Tracks 1-6 (.xls)

and in pdf form:

Basic Kirtans 1 Tracks 1-6 (.pdf)

You'll also want these chord diagrams for harmonium:

Chord Diagrams

Enjoy!

The main thing with guitar really is getting the time signature - 3/4 feels different from 4/4, which is the time signature for a lot of popular music.

The simple chord structure is just alternating between:

Dminor Cmajor

For the complex version the chord structure is the following (potential chord substitutions are in brackets - in other words, you can play the bracketed chord in place of the plain vanilla chord):

Dminor (Dm7) Cmajor (Csus9) Gmajor
Dmin Cmaj Gmaj
Dmin Cmaj Amin D#maj (D#sus9)
Dmin Cmaj
Dmin Cmaj Amin D#maj

In the key of E, when we change up:

Emin (Em7) Dmaj (Dsus9) Amaj
Emin Dmaj Amaj
Emin Dmaj Bmin Fmaj
Emin Dmaj
Emin Dmaj Bmin Fmaj