An hour of practice, in order

Tune the tanpura before you tune yourself

Sound the drone first and sit with it for a minute before making any sound of your own. You are not warming up; you are deciding where Sa is. Everything after this is measured against that decision, and a Sa chosen carelessly makes the whole hour approximate.

Set it where your voice already lives, not where you wish it lived. A Sa pitched too high to sustain a low octave is the commonest mistake a beginner makes, and it is usually vanity.

Kharaj: one note, held

Fifteen minutes, longer if you have it. One note in the octave below where you are comfortable, held against the drone until the breath runs out, then again.

There is nothing else to it and it is the practice almost everyone skips. It is where the voice learns to sit still, and a voice that cannot sit still in the low octave will wobble everywhere else, in a way that no amount of fast work will hide.

Listen for the beating between your voice and the drone. When it slows and stops, you are on the note. The ear will tell you before any needle does; the needle is only there to tell you that your ear was right.

Alankars: the figures

Twenty minutes. Take a figure — Sa Re Ga Ma, then Re Ga Ma Pa, then Ga Ma Pa Dha, up the raag and back down — and run it slowly enough that every swara is reached rather than approximated.

Slower than you want. The point is evenness, and evenness is destroyed by speed long before it is destroyed by difficulty. When the figure is secure, take one that turns: Sa Ga Re Ma. Most students fall over the first direction change and discover that what they had was momentum rather than control.

Practise them in the raag you are about to sing, not on a generic scale. The hand learns where the raag's swaras actually are, and the absences arrive in the fingers rather than as a rule to remember.

Then the raag

What is left of the hour. Start in the low octave and stay there longer than feels interesting — the lower half is where a raag is established, and the upper half is where students go to avoid establishing it.

Take the pakad until it is automatic. Then the ascent and descent, slowly, with the drone under everything. Phrases, not scales: a raag is made of movements, and a run played straight up and down is a scale wearing the raag's notes.

How long, and how often

An hour a day beats four hours on Sunday, by a distance that is not close. The voice is a muscle with a long memory and a short attention span.

And practise the hour you are in. The raag of your prahar is the one the tradition has already tuned to this light; you are joining an argument that has been running for three hundred years, rather than starting one.