Hindustani

Riyaz with Sadhana AI

Written for someone doing daily riyaz in the Hindustani tradition. The app is not a Carnatic app with Hindustani labels pasted over it — the swara naming, the drone and the rhythm model are configured for this tradition — but there is one place where support is genuinely thinner, and it is named below rather than buried.

Bhatkhande sargam, properly spelled

Notation follows Bhatkhande convention rather than Carnatic convention. The distinction is not cosmetic: it is how you read a bandish at a glance.

• Komal swaras are written lowercase — re, ga, dha, ni as r, g, d, n.
• Shuddha swaras are uppercase — S R G m P D N.
• Tivra Ma is uppercase M, against shuddha ma as lowercase m. Kalyan and Yaman read correctly instead of needing a mental translation.
• Octave marks distinguish mandra, madhya and taar saptak.

The full twelve, by pitch class from Sa: S r R g G m M P d D n N.

The tanpura: Sa and Pa

The drone for melodic Hindustani practice sounds Sa and Pa, which is the pairing most raags assume. Set it to your Sa and leave it running — it keeps sounding while you move to other screens, so one tap covers a whole riyaz session.

For raags that want Ma rather than Pa, treat the drone as a reference rather than an accompanist and use your ear for the rest; the app does not currently offer a Sa–Ma tanpura preset.

Taal, not a bare click

Rhythm is modelled as taal — a cycle with a structure — rather than as a time signature. The metronome shows where you are in the cycle, which is the information that matters when a bandish starts off the sam.

Start slower than feels necessary. The common failure in riyaz is not a wrong swara, it is arriving at the sam a fraction early for weeks without noticing.

What the app hears, and what it cannot judge

Raag identification — the honest caveat

You can hand the app a recording and it will estimate the Sa and suggest the most likely raag. It is useful. It is also the one feature where Hindustani support is thinner than Carnatic: the raga engine was developed and tuned primarily on Carnatic material.

Expect it to be less sure-footed on Hindustani recordings, and more so where a raag shares its scale with others and is distinguished by chalan, vadi–samvadi emphasis and characteristic phrases rather than by its note set. Treat a suggestion as a second opinion worth checking, never as a ruling. Everything else on this page — the drone, the taal, the sargam, the pitch comparison, the notation, the ear training — carries across without that asterisk.

Instruments, not only voice

Hindustani instrument modes ship alongside vocal, each with its own notation and reference setup:

Tabla is deliberately different: a bol grid writes strokes rather than pitches, because notating tabla as melody would be nonsense. Note that percussion transcription is a harder problem than monophonic melody, so expect more correction there.

A riyaz session

1. Tanpura on, set to your Sa. Leave it.
2. Taal on, slower than you want it.
3. If one phrase of the bandish keeps collapsing, isolate it with loop practice — slow it down without the pitch dropping, and shift it to your Sa if the recording is in someone else's.
4. Record the phrase and look at where the pitch actually went. Ignore the flags on ornamented swaras; attend to the plain ones that drifted.
5. Keep the take. Next week you can hear whether it moved.

A daily puzzle, free and public

Three free puzzles a day in their Hindustani versions: Ragadle (guess the mystery raag in six tries, each guess lighting up the swaras it shares with the answer), Sur Connections (sixteen tiles, four hidden groups of four) and Raag Ladder (turn one raag into another, one swara per rung, every rung a real raag). The Hindustani versions draw on Hindustani raags, so you are not asked to place Carnatic melakartas. New at midnight IST, no account needed.

Useful for recall and recognition; it does nothing for your sur. See the daily games guide, or play today's.

Questions