Indian music is generally filled with a lot of rich melodies and overlays.
For the most part, when the band practices and arranges cover music - the melody, lyric, beats, tones and other musical aspects of the song already exist. The song has already been written, composed, and sung.
So arranging cover music is more fine-tuning and bringing the Kadak Chai flavor to the song. It’s about bringing our own unique styles and ideas, while staying true to the original essence of the song. Maybe a bit of an oversimplification but generally, we pick a song, arrange the music in a practice session, and then practice until everyone feels good about how it sounds. It’s a relatively simple and straightforward process when learning to perform a new cover song.
Creating original music has been quite a different experience from arranging cover music. An original song requires original melodies, original lyrics and an entirely new way of thinking & planning out the overall arrangements. OG music is taking us a lot more time and a whole lot more collaboration.
The creative process is a lot more involved. We are collaborating and discussing lyrics, ideas, tunes, beats, and other components of the song - all this before we even come together. We originally used BandLab to put together the various melodies of the song, set up a metronome, and merge the tracks. We recorded and shared clips with each other via WhatsApp. Then as the main melodies and lyrics were ready, we all came together as a band to collaborate and arrange each layer of the song. Many new ideas come up as part of the collaborative process which then we try out and decide to either incorporate, tweak or discard. In all, it makes for a very positive, fun, creative, and dynamic birthing process. We are all certainly enjoying it as a band! More about this in a future blog.
Until then, have a great rocking day with lots of Kadak Chai!