From Hindustani Classical to Rock & Pop - Enakshi’s Grade 5 Merit
Enakshi Mookherjee learned to sing next to her mother, a trained Hindustani classical singer who kept telling her to hold on to music. At eighteen, three years into lessons at Trill Route, she has carried that into a different tradition altogether and passed her Trinity Rock & Pop Grade 5 vocal exam with a Merit.
Music has not stayed in one place for her. She sings at school and in both solo and band performances, she composes, and she plays the ukulele, and away from all of it she reads and learns languages. She puts it plainly: “I could never imagine my life without music, whether that’s singing, composing or playing ukulele.” What she says singing gives her is two things at once: a way of expressing herself through the songs she sings, and something that takes the stress off.
A goal to work towards
What she wanted from Grade 5 was a challenge - some goal to work towards. The effect she was after was on her practice, and she got it. Having something to aim at motivated her to work more consistently and to push her skills further than she had been pushing them.
Three songs, three different ways
The hard part was consistency across the whole programme. The exam asks for three songs, and hers had to be sung continuously, in three different ways, with the vocal technique holding up through all of them. She worked it out by breaking the material down: practising each part on its own, then putting the parts back together until she could sing the set end to end without falling short.
What the lessons did
Her teacher through this was Vishal. What she credits him with is specific. He pointed out the parts that needed more attention, and he stayed patient with her when she kept running into the same difficulty in the same places. Western vocal lessons here run one to one, which is what makes that kind of week-by-week correction possible.
Dynamics, belting, articulation
The result was a Merit, and her own account of it is more precise than the grade is. Most of what she had worked on had improved, and she names three things: vocal dynamics, vocal power and belting, and articulation. Those are the parts of her singing she can now point at and say what changed.
Grade 6 next
She is not finished with it either. Her own assessment is that there are parts she can still improve, and the place she intends to do that is Grade 6. Behind her is three years of lessons, a Merit at Grade 5, three named things that got better, and the practice habit that having a deadline turned out to produce.
Congratulations, Enakshi.
Western vocal lessons at Trill Route in Indiranagar, Bangalore run one to one, for complete beginners through to students preparing Trinity Rock & Pop and RSL grade exams. You can see how they work on our western vocals page.
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