When I started off playing ragas on guitar, I went through the motions – pick up a raga name from somewhere, google it up, get the notes, jot it down on a piece of paper (Yep, that was the time when you had to make a pilgrimage to the computer center to find any information you need!) and then head back to my root to start experimenting on the guitar. Although it filled the basic need, there was never a one stop destination for getting all the info I needed about carnatic ragas. Neither could I find any tools/websites that provided direct assistance to learn them. And as years went by, ragas went to the back burner, I got out of college and life went on…
A year or so back, I was talking to the monk, and he mentioned that, when it comes to carnatic music, folks are going through pretty much the same approach that we adopted almost a decade back! Except, probably the fact they have the data right on their laptops or smart phones sitting next to them. His work at musicianself was geared towards making a difference in how people access information on music and he was also helping them explore the world of carnatic music in a simple, meaningful fashion. On the side, he mentioned that a few of his subscribers had expressed interest in tools that would let them view raga notes on guitar and keyboard. We caught on to that idea, and started discussing the details of what an app like that could do and how it could help the carnatically inclined guitar or keyboard player.
And to help matters a bit, I was getting bored to death sitting on some outdated software stacks and tweaking them bit by bit to earn a living. So within a couple of months of the above conversation, the idea turned to reality and we launched the first version of Raga App to a select audience!. As we started getting feedback from the users, we went on improving the features and tweaking the UI and finally a few more months later, we launched a pro version with an enhanced set of all the janya ragas.
A year or so after the initial launch, it was clear that the app had potential for more advanced features and also needed to be expanded to other platforms. This site was born as part of our long term goal to create a single place to showcase all the raga related applications that we have (and those that we plan to create in the future). And so here I am, finishing off the first post in ragalicious.com.
I hope you enjoy these apps as much as I have enjoyed creating them! Feel free to drop us a word on what you think about the site and the RagaApp