Basic

In mrdanga playing power is good, endurance is great, but precision is king.

If you have power and endurance people will notice you. If you have precision you can become invisible - the kirtan will rock so hard that people will forget you're there.

And that's the goal.

To develop precision you need to practice with a metronome. It's a form of hasta-sadhana ("finger practice") that involves subordinating yourself to Krishna in His form of time (kalo 'smi). It can be hard on the mind, but that's what it's all about - conquering the mind and becoming a faithful and useful servant of the kirtan.

After I shot this video I had a realisation about muscle fibres. You see, I've been practicing with a metronome for 30 - 60 minutes a day, and my precision is pretty high. However, I've been noticing that while my power and endurance have been going up with my new physical training program, my precision has been disappearing.

Here's my theory as to why: the precision is not simply in the brain, it's also in the muscle fibres. High speed mrdanga playing uses reflex actions. These reflexes are stored in the muscle memory. As you add new muscle you need to retrain it to make it precise in mrdanga playing. So it's back to the metronome and hasta-sadhana for me, otherwise all this power and endurance is just for show.

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!