“Let me play something for you,” says Vishnu R, as he picks up his latest ‘innovation’, that he’s carefully placed nearby, and proceeds to deliver a neat rendition in Reetigowla raga.

The notes linger, the gamakas sound profound. He’s playing it in an instrument that he can truly call his own. He calls it the Navtar (“it’s been trademarked and is awaiting patent”) and believes that it allows him to play the best of microtonal Indian classical and harmonic Western music at the same time.

The prototype

The seed of this thought was planted in his mind three years back, when he got an opportunity to do a prototype — while working with guitar maker Erisa Neogy, who lives in Auroville. “I got an electric guitar made from him, in which he took the frets off,” he recalls, “The sound was quite different.”

It was at that point that he was travelling around and playing contemporary world music with an Indian classical outlook with Vishnu R Collective, his band. “At that stage, I had to travel with both guitars to play my music.”

One such day, when he was thinking about the direction in which his music was headed, Vishnu’s Eureka moment happened. “I wanted one instrument that could do it all, that could give me the best of both worlds.”

And so, he got in touch with his guitar maker again, and bounced off this idea. “He thought it was crazy,” laughs Vishnu, “But he was willing to work on it.” Together, they worked on ideas for this new instrument, drawing from what modern-day guitarists were up to across the globe. They added three strings. They extended the fretboard, making it look like a fan. “That way, each string gets its space to give its optimum sound.”

First song

Soon, he had a brand new hybrid fret and fretless instrument on hand, which he later named the Navtar. The first song he played in it was ‘Moksha’ — his own composition that draws from Carnatic and Western harmonic elements.

It took him time to get his head around it. But it helped that the feedback from his musician friends was overwhelmingly positive. “Everyone, especially from the Carnatic community, feels that it has a pathbreaking sound,” says Vishnu, whose parents TV Ramprasadh and Indira Kadambi are established names in the classical music and dance circuit respectively.

Vishnu has been associated with the film industry too — but it has been selective. He’s worked on films, including Sonna Puriyadhu and Maan Karate, and more recently, with singers Srinivas, Karthik on a concept celebrating 25 years of AR Rahman. Does he plan to unleash his innovation on filmdom? “If it has a place in the industry, why not,” asks the 21-year-old, who also plays the kanjira.