Bollywood offers a great deal of job opportunities for budding musicians and boasts a range of options for singers particularly. With it increasingly becoming a competitive space, today it isn’t enough to just have a gifted voice. Recognising the need to train one to be not just a singer, but a performer too, Mumbai’s premier music school, True School of Music has collaborated with the feted Shankar Mahadevan Academy to provide amateur musicians as comprehensive a training as possible, to make them professional musicians.

The Pro Hindustani Playback Vocals course has an amalgamation of various aspects of music which are essential for training in the field of playback singing. While teaching fundamentals of Hindustani classical and semi classical vocal training, the course also focuses a great deal on performance, thus helping students to apply these techniques while performing film music.

The 11-month course that commences from mid-April 2015, aims at honing a singer’s classical fundamentals while also preparing him/her for the rigours of a competitive industry like Bollywood. “The world of playback singing has seen a major change in the past decade. Besides the legendary big names who have years of experience behind them, the industry today is constantly looking for new and different voices that have depth and versatility. Through our highly experienced faculty, we will provide the aspirant a strong base while helping them carve their own vocal identities,” says Ashutosh Phatak, co-founder, True School of Music.

Given his own classical training and extensive experience in playback singing and composing, Shankar Mahadevan and his academy is best suited to train aspiring singers. As someone who can provide a singer’s perspective as well as that of a composer’s, Shankar will use his own career lessons to equip a student for such a high performance industry. The course will cover fundamentals of ragas, vocal techniques as well as offer performance and studio experience.

Says Shankar, “Good voice is required to become a good singer. Yet, it takes many, many years to hone it, reign it and build many additional skills of presence, confidence and such to become a genuine performer both on stage as well as in a recording studio.  Classical music training helps a great deal in this journey.  It helps one to understand when and how to improvise. We would like to prepare every student by giving him/ her the tools of what they need to take the next steps to get on a bigger stage”.