Kohinoor Mukherjee’s Experience on Kaushiki’s Jamroom Web Series Essay

Back in 2019, on just an usual May evening, mixing and mastering engineer Kohinoor Mukherjee, and Indian classical vocalist, Kaushiki Chakraborty were having a friendly chat when inspiration struck!

Kaushiki wanted to do a project that would bring classical music more to the masses and increase its acceptance, too. And what better way to do it than create a web series, where classical music lives and breathes through every second of every episode! The idea also involved recording the entire episode (both the audio and video sections) in a single take, as an attempt to keep it as natural as possible.

“This goes to show that if you have knowledge of Indian classical music, creating a song and giving it the final shape isn’t a problem, at all,” shares Kohinoor, whose mother Raka Mukherjee, was a stalwart in the classical music genre.

The series, the episodes of which are available on YouTube, is hosted by Kaushiki, who jams with well-known or upcoming classical musicians in a studio setup, where they create the track instantly. Kohinoor Mukherjee has a rather challenging job to undertake, but he does so efficiently in the studio.

In his own words, he had to “oversee the recording done properly, and take decisions regarding where to put whom in the studio and how to mic them, to get the best sound out of them during the recording”. The jam room mix seems extra demanding because of the video and audio recordings of the shoot are done at the same time. In essence, it was different from the usual playback mixing that he is more accustomed to.

In the series, the tonal quality had to be perfect and the leakage minimum, to get the final output to a place where it was good enough to be published on YouTube. That was a particularly daunting task in a live setup for a mixing engineer, as there was no scope to overdub any of the tracks in the studio.

After its inception, Kaushiki and Kohinoor started the recording sessions from July, 2019, to give themselves a fair shot at releasing the episodes on YouTube from the start of the new decade!

And that they did! Their maiden web series experience began its journey on YouTube from January 1, 2020. Thus far, they have released 5 episodes of some surreal jamming on Indian classical music, from some of the brightest artists in the genre.

Kohinoor Mukherjee feels excited about what the future holds, given the countless positive responses he’s received with regards to his web series audio mixing and believes that once the series is over around August, they will have gotten one step closer to “bringing classical music to the masses”!