Carnatic

Practising Carnatic music with Sadhana AI

Written for someone already learning Carnatic vocal or an instrument who wants their phone to do the dull jobs — hold the shruti, keep the tala, repeat the hard phrase — and then tell them honestly whether the swaras landed.

Who this suits

• A student between classes. Your teacher has set a varnam; you need a drone at the right kattai, a tala to keep you honest, and some way to hear that your nishadam keeps sliding flat.
• Someone returning after years away. You remember the kritis but not reliably where your Sa sits any more.
• A teacher. You want students practising the right thing between classes and submitting takes you can actually hear. See the teacher guide.

It suits you less well if you want a graded course that walks you from sarali varisai to kriti. The app does not have one, and the next section says so plainly rather than burying it.

What it can assess, and what it leaves to your teacher

A realistic practice session

This uses only features that are in the app today. None of it requires a subscription to try.

1. Set your shruti and start the drone

Open the tanpura and set it to your kattai. It keeps sounding while you move around the app, so you can leave it running for the whole session. If you are unsure of your pitch, the tuner will tell you what you are actually singing.

2. Put the tala on

The metronome has tala modes, so you are counting a cycle rather than undifferentiated clicks. Set the tempo slower than you think you need. Details in the tanpura, tala and tuning guide.

3. Loop the phrase that keeps failing

If one sangati is the problem, do not keep running the whole piece. Loop practice lets you mark a start and an end, slow the audio down, and shift its pitch to your kattai — pitch and speed move independently, so slowing it down does not drop the key. See looping a difficult passage.

4. Record a take and look at the pitch

Sing it through against the original and let the app compare the two. You get a note-by-note read of where you sat sharp or flat, which is usually more useful than a single score.

5. Keep the take

Takes stay in your history and sync across your devices, so next week you can hear whether the nishadam actually moved. You can add a note beside a take — typed, spoken or handwritten — and export a practice report as a PDF.

Identifying a raga or a shruti from a recording

Give the app a recording — something you sang, or a piece you want to understand — and it will estimate the Sa and the most likely raga, and lay the swaras out for you.

Treat the raga name as a strong suggestion rather than an authority. Identification from audio is genuinely hard — allied ragas share scales and differ in prayoga — and a short or noisy clip gives it less to work with. It is a useful second opinion, and it is often right; it is not a ruling.

Practising with other people

A Circle is a private group for your gurukulam, bhajan group or ensemble: chat, shared recordings and voice memos, with moderation and block controls. Separately, the concert planner builds a kutcheri line-up — item, type, raga, tala, shruti, edupu, composer, singer, with reference links — and shares it live with your accompanists.

Platforms and access

A daily puzzle, free and public

Three free puzzles a day in their Carnatic versions: Ragadle (guess the mystery raga in six tries — each guess lights up the swaras it shares with the answer), Swara Connections (sixteen tiles, four hidden groups of four) and Raga Ladder (turn one raga into another, one swara per rung, every rung a real raga). New at midnight IST, the same for everyone, no account needed.

They train recall — which swaras a raga carries, which ragas share a scale — not production. No amount of Ragadle improves your shruti. See the daily games guide, or play today's.

Questions people actually ask