Category: Music
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New Feature to Extract MySwar Data
A significant number of MySwar users are not just music lovers but also data/analytical geeks. While they enjoy MySwar for the level of detail it provides and the many ways in which it allows them to explore Hindi film music, many have expressed an interest in extracting information from our database so that they can…
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Text Search Feature – Now On MySwar
Films, songs and artists are the most important elements in the MySwar database and so these are the elements that drive the existing search functionality on MySwar. This search feature, along with the powerful Advanced Search and Browse features, serves the needs of most users on MySwar. However, other data elements on MySwar have remained relatively inaccessible to users. Among…
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Madan Mohan’s Story In 5 Songs
You may think it odd, but when I think of Madan Mohan, I can’t help but think about the parallels between his career and R.D. Burman’s. Both Madan Mohan and R.D. Burman had to work hard to grow out of their fathers’ shadows. R.D. Burman’s lineage is well known. What isn’t known well is the…
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Music Directors Who Sang For Other Music Directors
This post documents the work of music directors who have sung Hindi film songs for other music directors. I’ve limited the scope of this exercise by considering only those music directors who meet the following criteria: As a result, I’m not including artists like Shankar Mahadevan, Hemant Kumar and Vishal Dadlani who are music directors…
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Relatives Collaborating In Hindi Film Songs
This blog post started as a Twitter thread. The idea was to create a list of Hindi film music artists who are related in real life and share credits in a song. There were many artists who were related but didn’t share credits in any Hindi film song. These artists were not included in the…
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Rise Of Recreated Songs
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “2011 – 2020: Review of a Decade of Hindi Film Music” from the e-book BollySwar: 2011 – 2020.] The Hindi film industry had tried to come up with new ways of mass-producing hit songs ever since the 1990s. In the 1990s, they experimented with Jhankaar Beats and in…
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BollySwar: 2011 – 2020 is now available
As you may be aware, four volumes of the BollySwar e-book have been released so far – BollySwar: 1971 – 1980 (Volume 5), BollySwar: 1981 – 1990 (Volume 6), BollySwar: 1991 – 2000 (Volume 7), and BollySwar: 2001 – 2010 (Volume 8). I am happy to inform you that the new volume – BollySwar: 2011…
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Film Music’s Shift from Melody to Sound Design
Music composer Kaushal Inamdar recently posted an insightful Twitter thread about how film music had changed in recent decades. The crux of the point he made was that technological advances in music production had shifted the focus of music directors from music composition to sound design. He argued that creating interesting sounds was becoming more important than…
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Change in MySwar domain – Again
About two years ago, we had had to shift the domain of MySwar from .com to .in due to ISP-level blocks on our website, which was most likely the result of a court order secured by an entity citing copyright infringement. We’re dismayed that our .in domain has also been blocked now and we have now shifted…
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The Pick Of Composer Nashad’s Songs
Shaukat Hussain Dehelvi, known commonly as Nashad, was a music director who composed music for 29 Hindi films from 1947 to 1963. He moved to Pakistan in 1964 and continued to make music for Pakistani films till the 1970s. He passed away in 1981. For his work in India, Nashad is best remembered for his…