Behind The Notes

It was almost one year before, I chanced upon this theme tune when I was searching my keyboard for a short haunting tune that would have a sad, longing effect on the listeners. My main inspiration (just) was John William’s Schindler’s list theme and our own Illayaraja’s Nayagan theme. 

This little tune has been in mind for so long, but I couldn’t develop any further. The other themes that you hear are some of the pieces which I composed thinking of creating something as sad as the main theme and later found a connection between all this and that is when I decided to put all these together in a single track with the main theme repeating itself at various moments of the piece in connection with the others.

But I couldn’t do the piece for a long time, as I was short of resources. With the quality of sound fonts I had, when you stretch a note in any string instrument, a jarring sound kept creeping in and I thought that could kill the melody and I decided not to do this piece until I get some good quality sound fonts of Solo Violin and Cello. One day I got one solo violin sound font from one of my friends and that is when I started working on it.

Actually I thought of this track as an instrumental piece with minimum instruments, especially I didn’t want to introduce strings or beats or I didn’t want to have any big orchestral outbursts. But I have used the strings, wherever I have introduced strings in the track are supposed to be Cello pieces.

The most difficult thing in this piece for me was linking the themes. I thought the listeners may find the three highly disjointed and that is when the Sitar came to my rescue. Initially Sitar was not at all in my mind for this piece. I made the first two notes of the third violin melody to appear in parallel with the main tune, of course the piece starts with these two notes played on Sitar. So, I thought when this two notes start almost at the end of the piece, as starting of the third melody played on the violin, it may not sound so alien. I still doubt how this piece would sound to other listeners. Do let me know, what you feel.

And the most difficult thing after completing a piece is choosing an apt title for it. I thought of a dozen titles and finally decided the title ‘When tears Cry…’ best fits the piece.