Playing Raag Bhoopali on Piano + Harmonium



Learning the sargam: To play an Indian classical piece, I had to first understand the notes and the Sargam in that style, for that my teacher gave me a sheet of paper with the Sargam and another printed sheet with the notes for raag Bhoopali.

Even though this took me around an hour and a half to fully understand because I wasn’t used to such types of music notations, when I got the hang of it I was able to play the raag easily on the piano as I am familiar with that instrument. The only challenging part was the first phase of understanding and getting used to such notations.


First time playing the harmonium:

On the other hand, while playing the same on the harmonium would sound easy, it wasn’t. I started off by re-doing the sargam once again on the harmonium so that my hand was used to the keys, but around 5-7 minutes of playing later my left hand, which is supposed to pump air into the instrument from the back started to hurt and I took a break for some time and played the piano. This taught me that I shouldn’t take any instrument for granted and that playing the piano is not the same as playing a harmonium. 



After doing this, I was able to play raag bhoopali on the piano as well as the harmonium. So after a few days of practicing the same thing, I was ready to record the final video on the harmonium. But I had around three weeks until the Annual day.

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