Anish Nadh’s Blog

I took a week for some self reflection, spending a lot of time reading, making notes, playing music and mostly I was quiet, speaking only when necessary to family and students. I cut off a lot of people this time, I really needed this space to quiet down. It was getting a little too overwhelming to just talk to anyone. We all have our battles. Just talking about it and whining and being a victim and pushing it under a rug waiting for another convenient day is not the solution. Face your demons and take action.  I woke up quite early today 4:30 ish. I was wondering how life would’ve turned out for me with a family, a wife, cuddling with her in the early hours, cooking with her, getting kids ready for school. Then I realized, this needs to be done with the right person to make life joyful. No relationship is perfect a 100%, but you really need two people to invest time on each other to make it happen. Moreover, you need to be blessed for a life like that.   Anyway, decisions are...

 I am working real hard on my music. I enrolled myself for Piano, Guitar and music production lessons. I want to release an album this year! Looking forward to working with some friends as well in this. Though I don’t have a destination in mind, the journey is just epic! God bless me! 

 I finally decided to make a lot of changes in my lifestyle. I was aging and my body did not agree with lack of sleep, long bike rides, band practices, substances, alcohol! I wanted to call it quits. This was January 2019, right before Covid  was announced. I exercised, watched my diet, said no to alcohol and any substance that dimmed my senses. I still am a work in progress, planning, executing and failing most times but with a few successes! Tomorrow I turn 39! I think I did pretty well with the cards of this life delt to me!  

 Shalini got in touch with me and asked if I would be interested in joining her band, Ginny and the Bottle. We did a few covers and mashups with Sudhakar on drums, soon replaced him with Ralston and Chetan and Ashwanth joined on sax. We did play a lot of gigs together but I found it quite tedious to take classes and do the band, I chose to call it quits. 

 This was the first band where I contributed significantly, music wise. I got really creative with the electric guitar, working on compositions. My experience with the other bands helped. I found it really challenging when the band was getting carried away with odd time meters, I was the melody guy. I committed to playing singable tunes. My favorites were the songs Blank, Kill Me and Ordinary love. I was going through a break up and I channeled all my dark energy into this band. We split after Mahesh saw opportunity with another band. 

Mahesh was also writing songs and we thought instead a if being a cover band we must focus on originals and be a band. Ravi joined in to play bass and introduced us to Ashwin. We jammed and played a lot of shows and took every opportunity we got to play our own music. Johansson also joined the band as the sound tech. I felt this band was all about front man and his songs. The band was named Mahesh and the mix. 

 I started a duo act with my friend Mahesh, called Acoustic Remedy. We played our first gig comprising of a lot of cover songs for a wedding planning company Knotty Zeit run by a student of mine Leonard. We charged 20k for the event and we did a lot of shows together, playing JW Marriott brunch shows and more. 

Saahas left to the USA to study music at MI, Hollywood. So, now the band was without a vocalist and Jason did not want to continue as a band. We even played a few gigs when Saahas came back to India for holidays with Alok on bass, replacing Shalini, who got busy with Lagori. I decided to form a band with my friends, Ravi, Mahesh and gang. 

Allegro Fudge also gave me a chance to be on some magazine covers and articles. I also did an exclusive with Bangalore Mirror. To someone who was just beginning a music career, it was something great! I leveraged my popularity here with my classes and I made great progress building my school.  

 Allegro Fudge gave me a lot big opportunity to travel. We played shows in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kerala! The most memorable ones for my will be the ones at Chennai! The audience were great! They weren’t talking over the show, instead they were great listeners! I’m so grateful that I could travel and start at some of the big hotels in the process. 

Jason, who I was working with, spoke to another friend of mine, Vinay after watching the Klimblim video I posted that it would be nice if I played with Allegro Fudge. This was an acoustic folk rock band.   I learnt 3 of their songs and nailed the auditions. We just played along, there was Shalini and Saahas as the auditions. We never really had a drummer. It was sometimes Kishan or otherwise it was Shreyas. But I enjoyed playing in this band! We did a lot of originals and a few covers.  

 I was now with two jobs, one with Jason’s school and the other my own. Travelling to Indiranagar everyday was tedious. So I called it quits and it was not paying me well. I was now with about 20 students earning a normal living and I was quite happy with this. I must say my relationship back then took a toll on my lessons. It was quite an expensive mistake, but god guides you through it all. 

 The common problem that parents had was to bring their kids home for lessons, so I set out to target home tuitions. The first call for home Tuitions I got was from Mrs Valli, she enquired if I can teach Emma, Priyanka and Anishka! 3 students! I was elated, this meant I had more students and I also charged a little extra as my travel allowance! I knew if I was a good teacher, I would get more students. But then group lessons couldn’t work, as I felt I was not giving my best, so I decided to take individual classes! 

 I collected about ₹10000 giving out lessons and this gave me enough money to start my music school website. I got in touch with Shreyas and he put me through his sister Shilpa, she helped register. Then I made the website, I coded it all by myself by taking a template from online and tweaking the html. Mahesh also helped me to code the Java script at certain sections. Now I was ready to reach out and grow my business. 

 I was playing my guitar one day and two boys from my neighborhood enquired if I can teach them. I agreed to teach them for free. We had a few classes. I just wanted some students to kickstart the lessons. After much thought I named it Exodus.  These students asked me if I can teach another guy who stayed next lane. This was Ashwin! I asked him to pay 1000 bucks and the other students began paying me 500 each, so that was ₹2000. I was elated to watch my school grow. 

 I now wrote to Derek Sivers, founder of CD baby, because I was considering going abroad to study music, but Derek told me that all that I wanted to study was online for free. So I felt it was wise to skip the expensive college, and self teach music.  I got in touch with Jason Zac, for lessons, but, I ended up teaching and playing in his band, Allegro Fudge. Now, I had two jobs as a music teacher. I learnt about the business of organizing lessons, maintaining records etc from Jason. I learnt all I could.  My piano playing was bad, I figured it was because I didn’t have the attention to read music. So, I decided to teach little kids to read. I knew I would learn while teaching. Derek who was mentoring me through his emails and blogs also agreed that this was an amazing idea! 

I figured I was an ok teacher, having worked with some of the music schools. So, I decided to teach music. I spoke to Ranjit, who ran a school called Total accuracy. He said there was no vacancy, so I started a school all by myself. I wrote down lesson plans, the name of the school, logo etc. I even got a website made, because I felt people searched for lessons online and I was right! The music school picked up! I had a lot of time to learn and teach music. So I made it my life motto to, learn, teach and play music. 

 I was working with yahoo but now and suddenly I feel ill. I had swelling on my joints and couldn’t play the guitar! I felt really helpless and decided to quit work. I moved to Kerala and decided that if I get up again, I will only do music and never a stalk job and I looked for options that I had to make a living out of music. 

 BSM increased their fee and I couldn’t afford it all of a sudden. They had changed their location as well, it got a lot more difficult to continue lessons.  But my guitar teacher Kenny agreed to teach me for free at the new BSM. Later, the management had some problems with this arrangement so we shifted our lessons to Arul’s guitar shop. We continued this for about a year, then we had to stop lessons as the shop was not available as he had to shift. 

 I started listening to a lot of Thermal and a quarter, I loved the band as they were musical, groovy and the lyrics were thought provoking. I heard this at work on repeat! They had this streaming on their website. I also started listening to Tommy Emmanuel! This was all I listened to for about 2 years straight. I know little nuances of the songs that I heard repeatedly, this even helped me learn to play these songs or atleast parts of what I heard.