I have been asked by many that “How to produce SARGAM or notations of a song?”
Well, I will be answering this question purely based on my own experience of “trial and errors”. Since I am not a trained musician, I may be technically wrong while letting you know how do I produce SARGAMs, but the way I do it has so far helped me in understanding how one may find out the SARGAM of any song or tune on flute. I will not call it a technique, but a ‘Trick’.
So, the first thing first. You will have to have a good understanding of Sa Re Ga Ma…, that is, how to produce notes correctly. Proper posture and good blowing technique are most important in this aspect. Then, your ears must be trained to differentiate between notes. So much so that you should be able to tell a komal Dha from a Shudh Dha instantly. (I have reached this stage only after about 3 years of practice on my own).
Now, coming to the point. Let’s learn it by an example of producing notes/sargam for the song “Bheege Honth Tere” from the movie ‘Murder’. I will explain below how I’d do it.
Step 1. We must listen to this song carefully untill we are able to hum or sing it fluently.
Then, the next step of producing Sargam of any song is to find out the very first note of it. In this example I have to find out how to produce “Bhee” on flute. So, singing or humming at a scale that matches the original song I hold on to “Bhee” and then try and match that sound by blowing on my flute. I may have to try out several times by opening or closing the flute holes in different combinations before my ears can finally certify that yes, this sound is the right match for “Bhee“.
I find “Ga” on my flute to be the exact match for “Bhee“. That’s it. Now that I have found the very first note of the song, the rest of the song will not be difficult for me to convert into Sargam on my flute.
Then I have to find the sound on my flute that matches “ge”, then “Ho”, then “nth”, then “Te”, and then “re”
I do it by blowing GG for Bhee-ge | RS for Hon-th | SS for Te-re
This way I have now produced the sargam of the first line of the song. With similar technique, oops! trick, I can produce sargam for rest of the song.
Hope this trick will be useful for you to understand how to produce Sargam or notations of a song. Give it a try and enjoy!
Also read this case study, which will give you another insight on how to experiment while producing notations.