The Tap-Guitar Indian style |
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Some interesting effects can be played on the tiptar in order to emulate the 'Indian style'.
One of the important features of Indian music is the ornamentation and particularly the 'portamento', the way of 'gliding smoothly' from one note to the other. You have all seen the sitarists pulling their strings in order to do that. But we can hardly pull our strings. Instead, we may glide. That is exactly what the Indian Hindustani guitar, sarod, mandoline, do. One of the easiest and most effective way to do that is the so-called murki. It is a glide which goes from on note, say C, to another, say D and back. So a rapid glide (CDC) is a murki. Suppose you have a longer scale to do, say CDEFG and back FEDC. Indian violin players practice for years a total glide on one string which plays CDEFGFEDC. They do that by combining glides and stops. You can sort of do that on the tiptar, but it will be limited, say to a fourth, because the sound will die quickly. Here is a better way: Do the scale in normal taps, and just the last three notes in a glide murki. See the example hereunder of the 'Va et vient' with glide on the three last notes.
Another characteristic of the Indian style is the rythmic given by accents, and specially on repeated notes. There is now and important new section of 'My Space' on 'Repeated Notes'. See the exercise below and practice it. Play the accents > where they are written.
Those are just two effects which you can use also for many types of music. It will add an interesting colour to your playing.
Notes by Daniel Schell
See also the books by Daniel Schell:
'My Space' (from release 3.7) Chapter 17 , 'Repeated notes'
'Practice of Indian Music'
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