|
 A recent post in Sangeetham Talk prompted me to write about this. Today the electronic Tambura is almost a permanent feature in Carnatic Music concerts. Pioneered and patented by Radel Systems and its founder Rajnarayan, the Electronic Tambura is very widely used everywhere.
How is the Electronic Tambura helping things? Firstly for musicians, especially on long foreign tours the Electronic Tambura is a real boon. It is compact and lightweight. It does not require a person to strum it. And remember even if a Tambura were available it is better to not use it if the person playing it does not do a good job. Advancing technology is also helping things. The same instrument is getting smaller and the sound quality has also improved very much. Other organizations are also developing newer and newer models that improve upon the earlier models. With digital precision the automatic tamburas also are tuned to perfection.
We also need to consider some circumstances that facilitated travel with a real Tambura in earlier times. Trains were not so crowded. They were also much more spacious and roomy in India. Musicians invariably traveled as a party of
at least five or six people which included a person to play the Tambura. And also because of the non-availability of alternatives the Tambura was available for almost every concert. If there was a festival or a series of concerts then the organizations hired someone specifically for this purpose in case musicians asked the organization to arrange for a Tambura.
 But all said and done the natural sound of the Tambura is unbeatable. Electronic versions can never substitute the real one. But practical considerations and easy availability of the electronic one is slowly pushing the Tambura out of the picture. But this is of course restricted to some situations only. Predominantly in Chennai the leading musicians do have only real tamburas. Some of them do supplement it with an Electronic one as well which personally I find not to my liking. But outside of Chennai unless organizations are able to arrange for a proper Tambura with a suitable person to play it, the audience will have to bear with the electronic version. The so-called Tambura professionals do not even know how to tune a Tambura. They can only play it and that too not properly. There is one professional Tambura player in Chennai who has almost 50 years of experience having played for all the masters and he never strums the second string!!!!
 Further for students it is very useful for practice. Considering these days there are hardly enough people who can actually tune the Tambura to perfection. For students this really is a boon and they need not struggle through the routine of learning to tune the instrument as well! In recent times we do find an attitude that is prevailing in some quarters that tends to ignore the Tambura completely. They fell that the electronic one is good enough. But sometimes "Good is not good enough when better is expected and possible!"
A recent addition to this is the usage of a recorded
CD of a real Tambura. This I personally find better than an Electronic Tambura. The reason is that the Tambura is recorded in a proper studio and mastered. The sound if played through a proper
CD player with speaker and amplified definitely is better than the artificial drone of the Electronic Tambura but it is still not the real thing!
Sanjay Subrahmanyan
|
