From the epiglottis

From the epiglottis

Voctronica, an all-vocal ensemble that combines acapella, beatboxing and other innovative vocal tones to produce music, has been going places and winning hearts. The team comprises Avinash Tewari, Warsha Easwar, Arjun Nair, Clyde Rodrigues, Aditi Ramesh and Nagesh Reddy, who will perform live on VH1 Listen through Facebook Live today at 4.30 pm. They will perform a couple of their recently released originals like Car Jam and Why Not, along with some audience favourites like Fitzpleasure by Alt-J. “There’s also a surprise medley featuring songs by an earth-shattering band of the ’60s. No points for guessing,” they hint. 

The outfit collaborated with Amit Trivedi for his Sound of the Nation in 2017, where they performed with folk artists of our country. And now they are amongst the top eight teams to battle it out for the Asian Cup Acapella Competition at Vocal Asia music festival and have also raised Rs 8 lakh through crowdfunding for it. “The first thing we did after coming back from Russia was to send in our application for Vocal Asia. We had embraced our statistical chances of getting in, and obviously hoped for the best outcome. When we found out we got through, a sense of joy and pride came over us, and a focus towards this competition started developing. We hold ourselves to a high standard and hope to do exactly that when it comes to meeting people’s expectations, be it creating new music, performing in their hometowns, and in this case, doing our best in Japan,” they say.  Excerpts...

What kind of training did you go through individually to be able to form an acapella/beatboxing band? 
Avinash and Nagesh are self-taught beatboxers. Avinash continues to work on his singing and solo music programming/production. Nagesh honed his skills as he came through the beatbox battle circuit and made a name for himself as one of the best in the business.

Aditi has trained in Carnatic vocals and classical piano from a very young age. Her influences from playing with other acts as well as her knowledge of jazz come in handy. Clyde’s participation in the acapella and band circuit in college played a major role in building his music ability and skills. Warsha trained in and performed vocal Carnatic classical music for 12 years. Arjun has some Carnatic training, but is largely self-taught. For the last five years, he’s been professionally composing, arranging and writing lyrics, as a full time music director for ads and films, and nominated internationally for his web series scores.  

How important is it to have the knowledge of instruments to be able to do beatboxing/acapella?
An instrument helps keep a key and pitch reference. Sans instruments, we work hard on our internal pitching and timing to create the desired blend with each other. 

We’re also trying to sound like actual instruments, which means that you have to pay attention to the timbre and tone of an instrument to truly emulate it. Other than that, you don’t really need to know how to play an instrument, although it does come in handy at the arrangement stage of a song.

Tell us about the awareness of acapella in India. 
There are a few acapella bands out there doing great work in their respective tastes. The college circuit has been hosting acappella events, and the level of competition is pretty high. Recently, it has found its way into the movies and advertisements with more and more music directors using beatbox and acapella elements. It is safe to say that the future looks bright.

How do you decide upon a track? 
We pride ourselves in being a multi-genre band, but we’re hit with a limit when it comes to the number of layers that can be sung/beatboxed simultaneously. While we can pick between a lot of amazing music, heavily layered songs are usually a pass from us, unless we plan to strip the track down to make it simplistic. 

How challenging has it been to establish yourself as a band? 
To maintain that kind of decorum within a band is a challenge in itself. We’ve collectively faced and overcome hurdles and fought our own individual battles as well. But the biggest challenge of an all-vocal unit is the chemistry within, and functioning with a similar wavelength. We’ve learnt that the hard way. Discipline, professionalism, prioritisation, and drive — it’s a learning curve and sometimes an uphill task for a happy bunch of musicians. We have our days of failure, but we relish the opportunity to get better, every single time.

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