Bagging laurels

City-based music composer and singer, Sajida Khan bagged the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi Excellence Award recently. Sajida, who showed singing talents from school-going days, blossomed into a multi-skilled professional and ventured into roles like a sound engineer, dubbing engineer, producer and composer.

Excerpts:

What inspired you to take audio engineering as a profession? 
When I first saw the audio set and the mixing in the studio I was fascinated, and I wanted to learn it. I did a multimedia course in my intermediate and before plunging into the field, I checked out 2-3 studios as each studio has a different setup. 

At one of the studios, the management responded to my queries with zeal and told me that if I really want to learn then I can come down daily and their engineers will teach me the tricks of the trade. I was elated with their response and I went to that studio regularly for six months. One of the engineers at the studio guided me well and gave me books related to audio works. After that, I did a lot of research online and slowly gained experience in the field.

Later, I worked with 2-3 production houses as a freelancer because at that time I was doing my piano grades from Trinity Guildhall University, London, which has a branch Hyderabad. Now I am ‘Grade III Solo Pianist’ and ‘Grade IV Theorist. 

What was the idea behind learning piano?
I learnt piano because sound engineers should have a music experience too, they should have the basic knowledge of music and with that, it becomes easy to judge music better. Most of the audio engineers in Hollywood have fair knowledge of music and they play musical instruments too as that help in identifying the notations et al. 

Since childhood, I was very passionate about music and art, so my parents have taught me music after that I have learned Kuchipudi and after two years, our sir taught us Indian folk music, later he started teaching us songs which were from small villages. For that, we had won a national award when I was in 10th standard. 

Tell us about your works.
After working on the subject continuously, I have got many offers from studios and music directors. I have done audio mixing in movies like ‘Guri’, ‘Slokam’, ‘Lav Kusa’ among others. I dubbed almost 60 to 70 Tamil and Malayalam films into Telugu. We did ads, jingles, documentaries; etc and now short films have a unique platform. We have made albums, devotional songs; we had to do patchwork in serials. We did many works for various federations and students.

 How did you feel when you heard that you won this award?
I was on the cloud nine. In 2015, I got the first award after that I have got many awards and each award is precious. When I went to receive the award in the New Delhi we had to stay there for three days and I met a lot of people and learned so much from them. Apart from winning the award, meeting people, there was a unique experience.