A few days ago, I published a notation of the famous Hindi song, Dum Maro Dum. The notation is simple and short. One can easily play in harmonica. Those of you who have tried to play the Dum Maro Dum in a diatonic harmonica must have gotten frustrated. The song starts with Dha in the lower octave, but there is no lower octave Dha in a C major tuned diatonic harmonica. Agreed, it is possible to get the missing note by bending. But bending notes coupled with quick change require some level of skill.
If you remember our discussion in the Indian system of notation where we said that in Indian notation Sa can start from any frequency. Our problem happens if we select middle C as Sa. If we shift our Sa to some other hole then it would be possible to get all the notes in harmonica.
We will use a systematic approach to find the perfect place for our Sa. For this, we shall make a small slider, or use an Excel worksheet and write down all the tone and semitone successively. On the top line, we shall write the Western note and on the lower line, we shall write the Indian swars.
Next, we shall highlight the notes available in our harmonica. I use yellow and pink to indicate blow and draw notes. Here is what I have for my C major tuned Hohner silver star. We can preserve this highlighted slider strip for future use.
Now, we shall highlight the notes that we have in our notation. Let us use a green highlighter for clarity.
We can see the notation uses rather limited notes from the available 20 notes in the diatonic harmonica. We can take advantage of this and shift the lower line to find a place where all notes will be available. Here we need to bend A to get the A# note. But that note comes for a longer duration where bending is comparatively easy.
Now, if we have to mentally adjust the playing position of different swars for every song then it becomes a bit confusing. We can instead rewrite the notation to suit the diatonic harmonica. For this let us put the original layout where C is the same as Sa below this changed scale.
We can rewrite the notation by replacing
| Original | P | D | N | S | R | G | M | P | D | N | S |
| Modified | S | R | G | M | P | D | n | S | R | G | M |