Restructuring Saregamapa for 2006

Dear All

Saregamapa Challenge 2005 had a completely new format from the earlier years and was watched by far more people than ever before. It was exciting, inspiring, emotional, yet often unjust, irritating and even downright funny.

Now, we should give ideas to the Saregamapa organisers to devise a new format whereby real talent gets rewarded and biases are reduced to a minimum. The winners of the challenge in 2006 should find the going even more tough and exacting. So let's give our ideas.

For starters, I would say:

1)A panel consisting of Shaan, Gajendra Singh and a few others should do the initial screening of candidates based on the cassette recordings sent by candidates. Let's say 50 are selected.

2) 5 gharanas should be set up and 10 candidates put in each gharana. My choices for the mentors would be Jatin-Lalit, Shankar Mahadevan, A.R. Rahman, Ismail Darbar and Shiv-Hari. Of course, it would be too much to expect all these people to agree to give their dates!

3) Out of the 50, we can filter the contestants based on public voting and bring down the number to 10.

4) Now a panel of distinguished judges from the musical world should come into focus. These judges should be given a good briefing about what judging is all about. A format should be made whereby a weighted ranking is given to various aspects of singing such as sur, taal, breathing, variation from original song, dance movements etc. The marks given by each judge should be shown on screen. Over several weeks of singing, the candidates can be eliminated until one girl and one boy are left standing. So there should be two 1st prize winners.

Would love to hear more ideas.

Also feel that we could make use of the meter that Anurag Harsh mentioned, which goes into red zone when someone sings off-key. The amount of time that each singer's voice stays in the red zone should also be used in the rating given by judges. I rather liked the way Daler Mehendi was giving his judgement based on the number of times the singers went off-key.

Another thought that comes to my mind is that when each singer comes and sings a song of a different genre, it becomes difficult to decide who is the best. That's why each singer must sing the SAME song in a certain round to enable the judges to make a good decision. Of course, even with this, the judges were going wrong (and there was all the drama about Aishwarya being eliminated). So, it is important to make use of that meter which lets judges know which singer went off-key and for how much time.

One of my friends made an interesting suggestion. He said that the instrumentalists/orchestra accompanying the singers should also be asked to judge the singers. That's because they can make out each time a singer is singing off-key and they have to make adjustments for that. There seems to be some merit in this because the accompanying musicians in SRGMP are one of the finest in the world!

Multiple voting should not be allowed. Also, I would like to see some more constructive criticism of the singers rather than just "isne mera dil ko nahi chhooa" or "inhone utna accha nahin gaya". The mentors/judges should be more specific and give the technicalities which led them to not like the song. In fact, they should sing and demonstrate exactly where the mistake lay.

I always felt that Jatin-Lalit were more specific while analysing how differently a singer sang a song as compared to the original.

In the current SRGMP format, too much importance was given to "performance". I think that moving or dancing at the same time as singing takes away some of the energy that the singers would have put into their singing. Nihira and Swananda, whom I rate as the best female singers in the show, were not good dancers but rather made their voice do all the acrobatics. Had there been a panel of judges instead of public voting, these two would not have got out from the show.

Seperate winners in male and female category.

Duet rounds!

Don't know how duet rounds can help. Since one male and one female singer will have to be finally chosen as the best, duet rounds will actually be confusing.

No to find out how confortable are they in duets. After all they are going to sing duets also in the industry. And it will also give us some beautiful duets to listen to.

Hmmm...I think duets are OK for listening pleasure. But if I were a judge and if I heard a Lata-Rafi duet followed by a Kishore-Asha duet, I wouldn't know how to give marks!