March 3, 2020

Budhaditya Mukherjee: Soulful Melodies on Sitar Strings [Magnasound C4HI0067] a cassette recorded and released in India in 1989

Up next is a cassette from the ever-variable Magnasound label. Frequently these cassettes have one side which is distorted or otherwise unfortunate -- here we can hear that side A sounds much better than side B, although both are very listenable.

Mukherjee should need no introduction. He is certainly one of the very top sitarists alive today. He hasn't made a point in spending a lot of time seeking fame outside of India, which means that he doesn't have the name recognition he deserves.

YouTube has some great videos of this maestro as well.




Sitar: Budhaditya Mukherjee
Tabla: Vibhav Nageshkar

side A;
Raga Basant Mukhari with two compositions in teentaal

Side B:
Raga Bahar with a composition in teentaal
Raga Desh with a composition in ektaal


Transfer: Nakamichi ZX-9 cassette deck, extensively refurbished and rebuilt to "better than new" state by Willi Hermann
Pre-amplification: Vintage refurbished Pioneer SX-780.
Recorder: Sony PCM-M10 at 24bit/96kHz resolution
Software: Audacity and xAct.
Monitoring: Focal Spirit One headphones



downloads:


24bit, 96kHz FLAC files (1.2 GB)
highest resolution files I am capable of producing. These can be listened to on a computer using software.

after decoding to WAV files, these can be burned to CDR, or listened to with software such as Foobar2000 or Vox.

320 kbps mp3 files (129 MB)
highest quality mp3 files possible. Use responsibly. 






4 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot, greatly appreciated, and happy to see you still upload some gems!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,
    I have also embarked on a similar project today. I discovered an old pair of audio cassetes of Jaaved Akhtar's poetry. It is a title that I simply couldn't find on CD. But thanks to the state of tech, I cam think of digitising at home.
    In fact it is playing out as I type this :-)
    Your blog is a gold mine and looks like I'll keep coming back here.
    Warm Regards,
    Anand

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hope you are all safe and sound

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Richard, I hope you your family and friends are well in these complicated times. Thank you for this great Mukherjee post. A few people have contacted me about Tawfiq's shares now being unavailable, certainly as a result of the end of the his subscription. I tried to contact the host company ADrive to offer to pay for the subscription, but simply cannot contact them. Since you use the same provider perhaps you could try to contact them to see if an arrangement is possible. What do you think?

    ReplyDelete