SHIRREN VARGHESE
takes us through his association with Harman Professional, the products he endorses, his view on technology in music, changes he would like to see in the current scene and more.
You are part of India ' s first and only boy band. What were the challenges you faced at that point when you first started?
When we first started we were handpicked for the chalk & cheese nature of our voices, which also meant that all of us had a distinct rendition style for any song, so one of the first challenges was to imbibe all our collective styles positively and make that into a single layered unison sound which then went on to become the trademark ABOB, 5 piece harmony sound that we are famous for. The secondary challenge in this was maintaining the balance of a main versus harmony on stage when each one of us rotated for lead parts. That combined with the high octane, choreography with barely any space to breathe did not help either. Having said that, the dull Nadeem-Shravan sound in Bollywood then & the booming wave of fresh Indi-pop that we caught at the right time, helped us catapult to being India’ s first & still, the only boy band, singing & dancing into people’ s hearts. Everything else since then has been a mindblowing experience!
As a musician, how do you see technology playing an important role in making music?
In today’ s date, I thank God that we have technology. There is a huge evolve in the quality of recordings which was not there earlier. The lack of a super fine capture of that era lent a certain restricted quality to the texture, presentation, arrangement & the sound of music. So it forced musicians towards virtuosity & the emphasis was on performance & performance alone. In contrast to which higher fidelity, multi tracking, layering, fusion of arrangements & sounds etc, has made the music of today unbelievably flexible in terms of producing, so the emphasis is no more on a single take delivery but on a higher production value. This also is a double edged sword as now a bedroom producer with a nagging hook could produce a hit record as much as a veteran chopping it with serious session players, at Yash Raj. Technology has shrunk the whole process of making music professionally onto a laptop, which also means than any idiot with a decent sample bank can produce music which probably will have no shelf life due to the voracious consumption of music in the world today, but for serious musicians who take time out to understand & study how an audio wave form was processed in Analog then & Digital now technology is definitely a boon. 20 years down the line we probably might see only laptop musicians.
If there is something you would like to change in the current Indie scene, what would it be and why?
Music in our country unfortunately is only about Bollywood. The best of the Indie artists have had to bow down to this omnipresent devil, as Bollywood has created this
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