Your first visit to our workshop
What happens when you book an hour to play, who you will meet, and what you can bring with you.
Buying an instrument before the December season
The Margazhi concerts begin in December. Our order book fills in August. A month-by-month guide to timing.
Every December, Chennai’s sabhas fill with concerts for the Margazhi season, and every year families ask us in November for a veena or a newly skinned mridangam in time. Some years we can help; often the queue is already full.
Here is how the year runs in our workshop. From June to August we work through made-to-order veenas and the slower repairs. By the end of August the carving bench is booked for the rest of the year, because an ekanda veena takes about four months from wood to polish.
September and October are for mridangam skins and violin set-ups. A re-skinning takes ten days, but the skins need time to settle, so a mridangam re-skinned in late November may still be moving in pitch during the season. We suggest booking by 15 October.
Tamburas and student veenas in stock can go out within a week, so these are safe to buy as late as early December. We still advise a fortnight’s margin for courier delays when the trains are full. If you are performing this season, bring the instrument in early anyway for a check: fret wax, jivari, strings. It costs less to set a buzzing jivari in October than to find it on stage in December.
