I was happily working away today when I got this IM from my friend Onkar, “Dude, listen to Dheemi Dheemi at 2:53″. (from the movie 1947-Earth)

By this time, I was pretty sure Rahman must have done something weird there, but I more curious as I seemed to have missed it in my few hundreds hearings of the song. When I finally discovered the hack he made, I was almost kicking myself for having missed this !

Anyway, here is the song. Hear for yourself at 2:53 :

Not all readers are musicians, so here’s a gist of what is going on :

The interlude by Hariharan that starts with “Yeh tera tan badan .. ” is compressed in terms of singing – the singer doesn’t take any beats to relax, which gives a running flow to the song. The lines are recited in immediate succession. Now it’s a 4 beat rhythm going on. After a few such compressed lines, the singer is about to begin with the verse, but now he is singing with the 3rd beat as the sam (first beat of the rhythm). The bass guitar gives this away immediately, because it has a continuous riff, and the singer’s main beat does not coincide with the bass guitar’s. So Rahman cuts the bass riff after 2 beats, and starts with it afresh at the 3rd beat. In effect, the whole rhythm has shifted by 2 beats.

Slyly done.

But here’s the catch. The piano riff is left as it is – I still can’t figure out why he didn’t adjust the piano track (my guess is the piano track just slipped away unnoticed. The effect being – the piano riff at the start of the song is reversed by the time it ends. This was how my friend discovered something had gone wrong somewhere in the song.

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Rahman is known to play around with beats, like the chorus part of Ghanan Ghanan in Lagaan, so this doesn’t come as a surprise.

But it was immense joy to discover this.

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