Lessons and Konnakkol Schools

Lessons are grouped according to the schools of Konnakkol they belong to. Each group is complete in itself and is independent of others. The schools are listed in no special order. You can pick any school of konnakkol from the catalog. You are encouraged to study many konnakkol systems, but only one at a time.

Under each school of Konnakkol, we present the step-by-step sequence of lessons typically followed by a student of South Indian Percussion. As the lessons have a well designed progression, it is recommended that you learn the lessons in the given order.

The lessons are given in the form of an ASCII script aided by pronunciation guide and audio files.

Konnakkol ASCII Script

Our main tool is the ASCII representation or a script for the articulation used in Konnakkol. Basically we map characters from the (computer) keyboard to elements of konnakkol articulation. Characters (letters/symbols) stand for single syllables or combinations of syllables. Each capital letter or special character has a time value of a whole beat. Each small case letter stands for the same articulation as the corresponding capital letter but squeezed to a time value of half a beat.

Timing

Needless to say, getting the hang of timing is very important. Fortunately it is quite straight forward. The beat is the basic time unit typically chosen to be about half a second. The time structure of the whole Konnakkol is defined in terms of the beat.

Intonation and Emphasis

The ASCII script captures only the articulation and time structure of rhythm passages. The real art of Konnakkol lies in intonation and emphasis. These elements can be learnt best through listening to examples. A piece of konnakkol script can be interpreted in many way in terms of intonation and emphasis. This makes way for creativity and spontaneity. Lessons with audio support have been marked with the icon

Lesson Structure

The body of this script is fairly small and can be mastered quickly as you go through the lessons. But we will begin by formally defining it. Go through the script definition once and use it as a reference as and when you require it later. You will learn to do without it sooner than you expect.

Practice

The idea is not to learn a lot of lessons quickly, but to internalize what you have learnt. Typically, in every class, the teacher of south Indian percussion makes the student play (or recite) the sequence of lessons learnt during the last six months or so. Only after the student has demonstrated ease and mastery over the previous lessons, the teacher teaches a couple of new lines.

The typical pace of learning is about one to two new lines per day while being able to recite all the lessons you have on demand any time of the day.