Category: Hobby

Playing Karnatik music with Ukulele

Couple of months ago, I picked up an Ukulele and started learning it using Youtube videos. Started playing some easier tunes and practicing it. I am mostly interested in finger picking the lead notes than use ukulele for chords. Obviously, I still play quite bad, but I see improvement in the results and I am putting in consistent time daily to practice. Here is the playlist where I upload my ukulele recording, do check them out 🙂

I listened to few people playing karnatic music with Guitar on youtube and wanted to do the same with Ukulele. I am not a musician, so looked up some music theory and started understanding the basics on music. To start with, I started by converting Guitar notes to Ukulele to make myself familiar with notes and scale etc. This helped me a great deal. Later, I started playing Karnatic ragas with Ukulele, but they were not as polished as the ones I saw on youtube (with guitar). I have a lot to improve with my skill level. I made this fret board diagram (see image below) for Ukulele for Western and Karnatik notes and I feel it will help some people who are interested in playing Karnatic using Ukulele.

The Ukulele tuning is standard A, E, C, G and the fret board scale is C. There are limitations with Ukulele because you can only go one octave high but cannot go one octave low than the scale. I will post notes for each Karnatik (and also Hindustani) raagas and Movie songs over time. Follow this blog if you want to be updated when I post new notes sheet.

Objects in Space

As 2016 dawns upon me, I await for it with a child-like inquisitiveness and immense hope that it will be another interesting ride in my life. 2015 was special to me, because I have a feeling that I am back to my ‘best me’, the ‘me’ who is curious, confident and ready to take up the new challenge thrown at me. This year I make progress with my german, started learning mandarin. Read books which for me were the best of all I have read till now (though i did not reach my target). Did not run enough. Was mindful and practiced minimalism to the maximum. I have been more disciplined than I could have imagined to be, I am happy about it. I made some good friends though I could not keep in touch with my old ones. So this year has been a mix of ups and downs , like I want it to be. I made some progress with my interest in astronomy and astrophotography. With that note, I look forward to 2016! I leave you all with some pictures of ‘objects in space‘ that I took this month 🙂

All pictures are taken from a xperia Z smartphone and celestron Firstscope telescope.

Moon

17 Dec – My first ever image with Telescope
19 December 2015
22 December 2015
26 December 2015
29 December 2015

 

Planets – Jupiter and 4 of its moons and Mars. Mars does not look great with my telescope.

Jupiter and 4 of its moons
Mars – 27 December 2015

Pleiades open cluster (also called M45) in Taurus constellation.

Pleiades Cluster
Stars in the Cluster

Happy new year 2016!!

Ticks of Lord Time

I am a big Game of Thrones (GoT) fan, I think it is the most brilliant TV shows ever made. I like the GoT theme song which is awesome, but I like Rains of Castemere more than the theme song. I think Rains of Castemere is very powerful. I liked it so much, I kinda changed few words and wrote a new song about my upcoming exams, where I basically fight time to do well in my exams. So here is the song I wrote and here is the cover of original song and its lyrics.

And who are you, the proud lord said,
that I must work so hard?
Only a student of a masters course,
that’s all the truth I know.
I’m either clueless or I’m in fear,
but I still have the ability,
And I work so hard and study till its late,
just like you always do.
And so he ticked, and so he ticked,
that lord of time,
But now the ticks in my watch,
with no one there to fear.
Yes now the ticks weep in my watch,
coz the exams are already over
Hope I live up to what I have written and give a good exams 😀
– Check some covers of Rains of Castemere on soundcloud or listen here below
Image source – here