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The SwarPlug synth plugin includes Shehnai and over 100 other perfectly sampled
virtual Indian instruments. It can be loaded in most VST, Audio Units and AAX compatible DAWs
(Digital Audio Workstations) like Cubase, Logic, Ableton Live, Protools, FL Studio etc... It also
comes with lots of ready-made MIDI loops for each instrument.
The Shehnai is a reed instrument similar to the western oboe. Its sound is powerful and has a distinctive nasal quality. It is delivered by blowing the reeds, bound together and held with a specific pressure between the lips. The pitch can be modified by changing the tension of lips and air.
Shehnai is a fourfold reed woodwind, with four reeds bound together more than each other. The reeds are placed on top of a metal cylinder, and the lower end of the cylinder leads into the wooden Shehnai body. The wooden body has straightforward finger holes, no instrument, and finishes into a metal sound channel.
The name Shehnai comes from the Persian word, shah, meaning ruler, while nai or ney is the nonexclusive term for any wind-blown woodwind-like instrument. It is an undeniably challenging instrument to play, requiring enormous breath control, especially for long supported melodic sections, which can be in an extraordinarily quick rhythm. The Shehnai is typically joined by percussion (tabla or any of the society drums of North India); however, there is no tanpura, as a second Shehnai generally gives the robot.
The Shehnai is a society instrument in North India and has an exceptionally solid wedding relationship. Until around the early twentieth century, a gathering of performers playing Shehnai relentlessly on a level rooftop top was a public declaration of an approaching wedding or different celebrations soon to happen at that house. This interaction would initiate days ahead of a wedding, with the music proceeding all through the functions.
As a result of its especially distressed sound, the Shehnai additionally generally played a traditional requiem (or heartfelt regret) when it was the ideal opportunity for the sorrowful lady of the hour to withdraw from her parental home after the wedding functions. All things being equal, live Shehnai at weddings is becoming something of an extraordinariness, for the most part, because recorded music has supplanted live performers in numerous areas of Indian (and diasporic) melodic life.
During the twentieth century, the Shehnai made its mark under the order of the unbelievable maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan (1916-2006), whose name became inseparable from the instrument, effectively taking it from its society and wedding-music roots to tremendously famous film music as well with regards to the traditional music field.