Singing a different tune

Dhruv Visvanath

There is no tap for your creative juices to flow that you can turn on and off at will. It's as natural for an artiste to run out of ideas and face a mental block as it is for a spendthrift to exhaust his money. So what does one do when faced with such a situation? For singer-songwriter Dhruv Visvanath, the answer was to face the problem head on. In order to overcome a writer's block, he embarked on a challenge in mid-July that saw him compose a short, one-minute tune for 27 straight days.

Visvanath tells us, "I have a principle that I live by when making music. It is that you have to get through the bad ideas in your mind to get to a good one. If you keep telling yourself that this idea doesn't work, or I don't want to finish that one, you kind of keep yourself lingering in a space where you never feel confident to finish any of them. But here I am saying, 'Okay, listen, instead of making full-fledged songs, let's make minute-long ones that are enough for Instagram, just to give a taste of what a track can be like. That's the challenging bit. How can I make sure that it feels like the beginning, middle and end of a full-course meal within a minute?"

The Delhi-based musician also says that while he wouldn't really give himself any marks for filmmaking, shooting DIY videos for the tracks has offered him a perspective on how to compose a visual story. And just like someone undergoing a fitness regimen keeps changing his routine to shock the system, Visvanath, too, kept altering the nature of his tracks to challenge himself further. The result, at the end of it all, is that he is less afraid to try out new things. He says, "You know, if I were to make a short piece for an advertisement or something, I now feel that I have the skill set to do that. I don't feel limited about my abilities anymore. And that's a great thing."

Log on to: The Instagram account titled mrdhruvv to check out the tracks composed for the challenge

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