EDITOR SHRIHARI INTERVIEW

Shrihari: GV and I have been friends for more than 15 years. We had a band back then, called Samarpan. He played Keyboard and I, drums. We would’ve played for a thousand marriages together (laughs). Music brought us together and it still keeps us together. GV has always had plans of venturing into cinema and he used to ask me to join him. I wasn’t very keen about coming into the industry. But we continued to do a lot of live gigs and concerts.

Later GV did his sound engineering and started working on jingles. By that time I had moved onto a completely different stream. I was doing my mechanical engineering in VIT. But nothing worked out. My heart was here.

That’s when GV got his opening in movies and he asked me if I can be his sound engineer. That’s how the journey began.

After Veyyil, I took a break and went to Canada to do my studies on Sound Designing for Visual Media. After that I came back and rejoined GV. We’ve been working together since.

JO: I’ve been working since I was 18. My brother was a musician and I used to assist him. Later I got an opportunity in Mumbai, to work with Ranjit Barot. I was never away from my family until then. I was home sick and had to return. GV and I worked as a programmer and sound engineer respectively in an album long back. That’s how we met. When I came to know that he has started to work on films, I joined him.

Shrihari: Basically I take care of the structure of the song. GV prepares a scratch tune. Then we get the lyricist to work on the lines. The following processes are orchestration and music arrangement. This is the work of a music producer, which is me.

GV appreciates our inputs while making a song and he gives us the freedom to express our views and ideas. At the same time he is very particular about the quality of the songs. If he isn’t happy with something, he doesn’t think twice about rejecting it. Since we’ve been working together for so long, we know how each one of us think and we do think alike, I’ve to say. That’s what long associations can do.  
 

Once the production of the song is complete, we proceed with the final mixing. Then I separately lay out the song and do the stereo mixing.
 

We do not work on deadlines and directors don’t have a problem with that. But the same doesn’t happen in Jo’s case. He works on the background scores and since it is the process that happens close to the release of the movie, he always has deadlines to meet.

Shrihari: We prefer doing all our work. No one understands our music better than us. Hence we don’t hire. Personally, although I’ve been into music for a long time, sound designing has been my area of specialization.
 

Now with Pencil, Jo and I are trying to allocate some time and engage into audiography full time. We have a bigger team now and all we have to do is to supervise them. So we believe we are ready to work on bigger projects.
 

JO: Also, we weren’t very good with managing our time. We used to keep working continuously for days. Now, we’ve learnt the knack of it and we can allot time to anything we want. That in fact is the idea behind taking up Pencil.