Guitar

Updated to version 3 on Friday 4th September, additional kirtans added, some fixes applied. Still work in progress.

Here are some lavish chord charts for the 7 kirtans for harmonium, bass, and guitar that I published the other day.

• Kirtans 2009 Chord Charts PDF Version

Here are some photos:

I first did chord charts like this in 2005. You can see my (re)post of some basic kirtans arranged for harmonium here.

With this one I upgraded it to have color coding for the different chords. In this version I hid the line that goes under the mantra, which is a facility for putting in the notes of the vocal melody. Once that goes in, the book is basically complete in itself.

If you like it, feel free to send me something to encourage me to do more - it can be some feedback, a contribution in kind of chord charts for other kirtans, a video of you doing kirtan after learning from this, or whatever.

I will post the ods/xls source file for this when I get back from Sydney. About to catch a plane... laters!

Krishnapada and I are going down to Sydney this week to do kirtan for two days, on Janmastami and Prabhupada's Appearance.

This afternoon I finally got some time out from organising Krishna's Birthday and Gaura Vani's tour, and I recorded the kirtans part by part, for harmonium and guitar, and generated a chord chart.

You can download the recordings and the chord chart as a 64MB zip file here.

The kirtans are some of my faves: the "Springbrook Retreat" Tune; the "Madhava Two Part" Tune — the first Madhava tune I ever heard; the "Madhava E-D-C" Tune; the "Happy Day" Tune — which I haven't done since NZ, so about eight years; the "Aindra E-D" Tune — I remember the first time I heard that one, H.H. Bhaktisiddhanta Swami was playing it during a soundcheck at the first Loft in Wellington; the "Atma Anthem" Tune, from our 2006 album "Sacred Chant Vol 1" — always a crowd favorite; and the "Bangladeshi" Tune taught to me by Devaki, and available on the "Heart of Devotion" live album.

Also there is an arrangement for Prabhupada's song from the Jaladuta.

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