With the release my debut single ‘Tu bataa de’ drawing ever so close, I want to share a few observations about how the way any song is arranged makes such a huge difference. I have for decades known that arrangers play an often-defining role in the way a song eventually sounds. Thousands of Hindi movie and other songs have achieved great heights of popularity on the backs of their arrangement.
While I composed the entire song nine years ago and had some broad idea about what kind of instrumentation I wanted—the santoor and the cello were a must—it was the involvement of the gifted Mumbai-based composer Anupam Mallik Mithun, who has several Bengali and Hindi songs to his credit, that has given ‘Tu bataa de’ a professional sheen. Anupam agreed quite generously to arrange and additionally compose the song. That made all the difference.
While the song sounds very much like what I had composed, the fact that it sounds so much better and sharply rendered it is hugely because of Anupam and, of course, the gifted singer, Suparna Chakravarty. Suparna gets into the essence of what I had in mind so effortlessly.
Some of you may know what an arranger does. They bring in overall instrumentation, tempo, harmony, beat and so on. Sometimes little hooks in a song, a mandolin here or an accordion there or tablas here and bongos there, that can give songs the edge they may have lacked otherwise.
Most great composers have a broad sense of how they want songs arranged but, equally, arrangers help them attain greater heights.
Think of an arranger as someone who drapes the bare body of a song with fineries, making them even more attractive. It is true that unless the essential composition is good, arrangers cannot always on their own make it work. However, I am sure there are many examples where even a sucky composition became tolerable because of the way it was arranged.
I have said this before but bears repeating. Just as one swallow does a summer make, one song does not a composer make. I am not a musician by any definition. So far ‘Tu bataa de’ seems like a fluke. Lately though, in the past few days, I have composed two more songs which are very different in their moods. Hopefully, I will be able to persuade Anupam again to join forces. Of the two one is a very male song while the other can be sung by both male and female. If the second song comes to be, I would request Suparna to sing again.