Hi, my name is Kuljit Bhamra and in this presentation
I'll be talking about Indian drumming and in particular the Indian tabla drum.
I'm also, very very excited and thrilled to announce the launch of a product that my team and I have been working for the past
five years at Keda Music, which is the name of our company, and it is this
which is the world's first electronic tabla drum. I want to make
Indian drumming
accessible to all musicians from all over the world
It dawned on me very early on when I was starting to play tabla
that all the tabla players that I knew or saw were Indian
And even now having been in the business for over 40 years
I can only name maybe a handful of tabla players that are
not Indian
So I think there are
limitations and the limitations are posed by the method of learning and teaching and also by the
instrument itself
So, let's take a closer look at
the acoustic drum and the electronic drum and then I'll hand over to Laurel Pardue and she'll speak more about the
electronics of this particular product
This is the Indians tabla drum which is always a two piece drum. There's a larger one and a smaller one
they are identifiable by these very unique black spots in the middle of the drum head and
the black spots allow the drum heads to sing
and so there's a sort of
melodic or tonal character to the sound
[Title] Practical challenges of traditional tablas – especially within educational contexts
So first of all, these black spots which I did mention earlier on, they are made of a carbon paste which is water-soluble
So if you have sweaty hands or if you play in the rain, which you shouldn't do
these will just dissolve and the whole drum will be ruined
Secondly, the paste is very fragile
So in a classroom environment, I've seen with my own eyes young students pick off,
and it's just it's just tempting to do that, they pick off the paste and that ruins the drum heads
Tuning of the drums is very...
it's a skilled process and it's done using a hammer
Now you can imagine
When you purchase a set of tablas and you get a tuning hammer with it
If you were to leave these drums unsupervised in the classroom
the first thing a young student would do would be that, which I'm not going to do right now
And that would puncture the skin and the whole drum is rendered useless
The heads which are made of skin or guts,
and the tensioning ropes as well are all gut, they are affected drastically by humidity and temperature
So once you tune your drum with your hammer
It will go out of tune once they lighting on stage changes or the
humidity or temperature changes so that again is another challenge
for tablas especially in a classroom setting
Finally another challenge I would say myself that I've noticed in playing
for many years on stage is
many people, especially in the Western world,
assume these drums to be
spiritual in some way and there's a mystique that
surrounds the drums. I will speak a bit more about that later on when we come to the learning of it
[Title] Practical challenges to learning table – especially for non-Indians
So traditionally the tablas are taught face-to-face in a guru-disciple setting
Your teacher would teach you patterns and
sounds
verbally that you are then required to memorize. For example "na", "te-te",
"tu-na"
"ti-ri-gu-ru-da"
These are quite easy to say if you come from an Indian culture. In the Western world a lot of the
consonants are at the front of the mouth. So
if you were to write...
write those words down in Roman English and then try to pronounce them, it'd be very difficult and it would take longer. So
"te-ta-te-ta-te-ta-cu-te-da"
in English could be "teter teter teter teter cutter da"
And it takes a lot longer because it's the front of your mouth and you need time to breathe
So that
excludes a lot of people.
Also there is no universally accepted way of writing the patterns down and these are books written by table maestros
and I'll go through them one by one very quickly just to show you what they offer.
This is "The Art of Tabla Rhythms – Essential Tradition and Creativity" by Sudhir Kumar Saxena.
It is interesting that the text is written in English, the actual description, but then the patterns were in Hindi and
for me personally that would put me off straight away because it really...
it's like learning a language and what I want to do is get playing straight away. I don't want to learn any language
I want to learn how to play these drums
Anyway, nevertheless that's one real popular book
Another sort of bible of tabla repertory is this, which is called "Drum Compositions of North Indian Classical Music"
That, again, would put me off. Again, it's just too
complicated. I don't know
where to start and,
you know, the other thing also, once you've learnt these patterns
the question arises. What's the application?
What do you do with it? So if I was learning a 16 beat cycle, for example,
and I was only halfway through it, it's not the sort of thing that I could play for my grandmother at her birthday party
There is no application for it apart from
eventually the
dream of playing on stage with a soloist. So that's
another thing and, again, the emphasis in the guru-disciple relationship is on improvising and
playing complex paradiddles and patterns
So those are some of the limitations and challenges which are immediately presented to a potential student of tabla
And it's no surprise to me that
There are very few non-Indians playing tabla
Despite the fact that their sounds are so beautiful and sought-after
in the Western world in theatre and in film.
I mentioned earlier on when talking about the physical nature of the drums that there is a spiritual shroud
durrounding the drums and I think that's exacerbated by the fact that a teacher in India is called a "guru"
"Guru" means "teacher" and
we have become in the West
accustomed to the idea of a guru being not just the simple teacher, but to be someone who is an expert on life and divinity
and I think again that
shrouds the whole learning of Indian instruments and the tabla with this spiritual veil that
somehow keeps people away
[Title] Introduction of Universal Indian Drum Notation
We've also created the world's first
universal tabla notation system and it basically is a very
simple two line stave, a glorified Bongo stave. Someone who's familiar with playing Western percussion
will recognize it straight away and it will look immediately familiar to you.
That also then opens up a whole new world of
composer and player, which is something that we don't have currently in Indian classical music
There are many musicians who don't want to improvise
that just want to play something that's written for them
And therefore in this case a composer
can write, a third party composer can write for a tabla player who just is happy to play that music
rather than have the pressure or the burden of having to
think of what to play at the same time as learning the instrument
[Title] The Electronic Talba
The first thing I'd like to say about electronic tabla is that there is no intention whatsoever that this
replaces the acoustic tabla
I think that would be a foolish thing to assume and it's certainly not my intention
However, I have a strong feeling that this may be a more accessible gateway
to find out more about
tabla playing and Indian drumming
Lead engineer Laurel Pardue here, now in an effort to address some of the challenges related to learning the tabla
Particularly maintenance in the classroom, difficulty tuning, the physical bulk of the tabla and also the ease with which tabla may lose its tuning,
all things that Kuljit has previously explained, we have built the electronic table
There are existing electronic drum and hand drum options, such as the Roland Hand Sonic and the Korg Wave Drum
However, as a Ajay Kapur found when developing his E-Tabla,
none of them are appropriate for capturing the feel and the technique of the tabla
Tabla technique features a
relatively unique and complex playing style
that involves damping the head and striking in specific location as to select from a range of tones
The electronic tabla detects the position and pressure of both strikes and damp concurrently
including the strike force our
Our sensing approach allows us to successfully capture primary tabla technique, as demonstrated by Kuljit starting with the reproduction of the tabla's
characteristic glissando
As you can hear in that clip, another characteristic sound of the table are the rapid fire strikes
Our current prototype uses a Bella Mini to deliver the high resolution and low latency essential for such accurate and responsive performance
The current audio output is sample based, which allows easy and stable retuning, as Kuljit will also demonstrate
And I can also tune the left-hand drum if I wanted to, they can be tuned independently
The strike classification for sample selection also makes it easy to generate MIDI or OSC for controlling other instruments or producing notation,
which is of particular importance in the case of Keda's
wider goal to make tabla more accessible and easier to notate and to spread that notation
The sample bank approach also means it's easy to expand the in-built sound libraries and also
reconfigure the strike surface to match other hand percussive instruments
While we do hope to explore more expressive sound generation techniques
like convolutional filtering and physical models in the future right now
we already support a wide range of sounds from other traditional Indian drums like the dholak
and non-Indian percussion, as Kuljit will demonstrate
If I go to a hang drum
and you will notice now that the zones have been reconfigured for this particular
instrument
We were really excited to share the electronic tabla with you in person
However, as you can guess it looks like that might have to wait for another day
Thanks for watching our presentation and for more information on Indian drumming and how to teach yourself table, please check out our website keda.co.uk