Carnatic Basics: Mayamalavagowla Notes

Carnatic music pedagogy formulated by Purandara Dasa (1484-1564) is still in use more or less unchanged. Almost all teachers will start off new students with a standard set of exercises and there are several books available on the subject. Much of the information in these "basics" posts are covered in such books. For these exercises I used an old book titled "Ganamrutha Bodhini" by Shri A. S. Panchapakesa Iyer  and only made small modifications that I felt would suit playing on guitar.

The first set of basic exercises are called swaravali varisaigal and are usually taught in ragam Mayamalavagowla - the 15th melakartha ragam.

Arohanam : S R1 G3 M1 P D1 N1 S'
Avarohanam : S' N1 D1 P M1 G3 R1 S

The intervals of notes in this ragam are:

S	R1	G3	M1	P	D1	N3	S'
1	2b	3	4	5	6b	7	8

The first swaravali varisai exercise is to just play the plain notes of the ragam in all three sthyai. On guitar the same note can be played in multiple places on the neck and it would be useful to know how to play the ragam across the neck as well. The exercises in this post show how to play the notes of  Mayamalavagowla in different octaves and different positions. The suggested strategy is to start with a metronome at 60 b.p.m. for each exercise and increase tempo gradually.

Examples in these posts will use either D or G# as the root note (adhara shadja). This post uses Sa = D (kattai 2) which is ok for an instrument but vocalists will learn at a higher pitch.

Tuning: For these exercises detune the 6th string of the guitar from E to D (i.e. dropped D tuning). This is done to get Sa at the low octave.



Exercise 1 - Middle octave 4th string

Exercise 2 - Middle octave 4th and 5th string

Exercise 3 - High octave 3rd string

 
Exercise 4 - High octave 2nd string

Exercise 5 - High octave 3rd and 2nd strings

Exercise 6 - High octave 2nd and 1st strings

Exercise 7 - Low octave 1st string. Remember you should have tuned your guitar to dropped-D

Exercise 8 - Low Octave 1st and 2nd strings

Exercise 9 - Playing across 3 strings

Exercise 10 - Playing with slides. Middle octave 4th string shown. Practice all octaves and all positions with slides

Also practice playing the ragam from the lowest octave to the highest (all ascending swaras then all descending). Always play with a metronome and increase the tempo gradually. Playing cleanly at 240 b.p.m is a reasonable goal to target. Once you are able to play this cleanly without errors (even at 60) you will be a lot more comfortable playing the rest of the exercises in swaravali varisai.

How it should sound: