#DurgaPuja2020: Raja Narayan wraps up Mahalaya musical

Music director Raja Narayan Deb is almost done with the music for Mahalaya, by working from home. The music director said that it was not just one of the toughest projects he has worked for but also one of the most tedious ones. Interestingly, this is the same Mahalaya musical, in which Mimi Chakraborty is portraying Ma Durga.
Talking about the project, Raja said that even before the shoot of the musical began in mid-August, he started composing the music.In would have been a relatively easy job in the previous set up, when work from home was not mandatory, but in the present situation, he is working almost throughout the day to complete the project on time. During the initial phase of lockdown, he was managing from his home setup. Even though he could not record new songs, his personal home studio was enough to complete the pending projects. "The problem began when new projects started coming in. For a musical like Mahalaya, we need more than 15 instruments, multiple singers, elocutionists and chorus team. And we did everything from home," he added.
At first, he made the basic track and sent it to the instrument players. One by one they sent him the instrument tracks. Raja would then make corrections and send them back again. After he received the final tracks, he would mix them again. "The problem was the chorus. In an ideal situation, I would call the chorus team in the studio and record their parts. But now, I am sending them tracks individually and after receiving their parts I am mixing them again," he said, adding that this is not at all the correct way of producing chorus, but in the present situation this is the only option. Besides, Raja had to hire only the experienced singers to eliminate the room of mistakes.
"Initially I thought it was an impossible task, but doing everything in a proper system helped me a lot. Finally, I want to say that being a music producer and having Zinnia as my wife, who is also a singer, helped me a lot," Raja added.