End To End Service— 100% Free
Every service on this page is offered free, as seva. Recording, digitisation, restoration, release — the same standard we hold for our own Catalog, offered to the Keertanis and studios who carry this Sikh Music.
From a live diwan to a cassette that has been sitting in a drawer for thirty years — end to end, at studio standard.
#1Live Multitrack Recording
We bring the studio to the diwan. Every voice and every instrument gets its own microphone and its own channel — the lead vocal, the second voice, the tabla close and the tabla in the room, the vaja, the taus or dilruba, and the sangat itself on its own pair. Eighteen channels means nothing is committed to a single stereo mix in the heat of the moment; the balance is decided afterwards, calmly, at the desk, with the whole recording in front of us.
32-bit float is the part that matters most in live Kirtan. A conventional recording has a ceiling: set the level too cautious and the quiet passages sink into the noise; set it too hot and one hard tabla strike clips and is destroyed forever. 32-bit float removes the ceiling — the format simply cannot clip. However loud the sangat gets, the transient is kept whole. And because the capture runs at 96kHz from the first note, the recording is already at the archival Hi-Res standard our own Catalog masters carry.
A full location rig — microphones, stands, an engineer and equipment capable of capturing up to 18 channels — set up and struck around the programme, not the other way round.
#2Mixing & Mastering
Raw multitracks from our own rig, stems from another studio, or a finished stereo bounce that just needs finishing — we work from whatever you have, at whatever stage it is in. The mix serves the Kirtan: the vocal carries the shabad and is never buried; the tabla keeps its attack without dominating; the room stays a room instead of being flattened into a studio product. Where a recording arrives with problems — a boomy hall, a distant vocal mic — the mix is where most of them are quietly solved.
Mastering is then done separately for each destination, because one file forced to do every job does none of them at its best: a streaming master tuned for platform loudness normalisation, a physical master that respects its medium, and an untouched full-resolution archive master — the version that will still be the source of truth in thirty years.
Studio-grade mixing and mastering, delivered per destination — and several years of experience delivering end to end.
#3Multicam 4K Film
Three cinema-line camera bodies, placed to cover the Keertani, the saaj and the sangat without intruding on any of them. No operators walking through the diwan, no lights in anyone's face — the positions are chosen before the programme starts and the cameras do their work quietly. Cinema-line sensors matter in a darbar hall: warm, low, mixed light is exactly where lesser cameras fall apart and where these hold colour and detail.
The edit is cut to the rhythm of the keertan itself — dwelling where the shabad dwells, moving when the Sikh Music moves — rather than switching angles on a timer. The grade brings all three cameras to one consistent picture, and the finished film carries the mixed master as its soundtrack, not the camera microphones. What you watch is what the desk heard.
Cameras, operators, edit and grade — a finished film alongside the finished audio, from the same session, cut to the Sikh Music rather than to a template.
#4Reel to Reel
Reel tape is where the oldest recordings live — diwans and private sittings from the sixties and seventies that exist nowhere else on earth. It is also the most fragile format we handle: every pass through a worn machine costs the tape something it can never give back. These tapes get one chance to be transferred properly, so the transfer has to be right the first time.
We transfer on fully serviced vintage decks, matched to the tape itself — the right speed, the right track format, the right equalisation standard for when and how it was recorded. Matched correctly, the transfer sounds like the original because, electrically, it is the original. Fragile tapes are assessed first — some need baking to stabilise the binder before they can safely be played at all. Each tape gets one careful, unhurried capture to lossless WAV at full resolution. After that, the reel can rest permanently.
The right machine for the format, serviced and aligned — and the judgement to know when a fragile tape needs stabilising or repair before it should ever be played.
#5Cassette
Most home Kirtan recordings from the eighties and nineties live on cassette — smagams taped from the front row, rehearsals in front rooms, programmes copied hand to hand. Almost all of them have far more on them than anyone has ever heard, because they were only ever played back on the machines of the time. The tape was rarely the limit. The playback was.
We transfer on an array of Nakamichi decks — the reference machines of the format — with the head azimuth aligned to each individual tape. Azimuth is the tiny angle of the playback head against the tape; every home recorder set it slightly differently, and even a fraction of a degree off smears the high frequencies into dullness. Aligned to the tape actually playing, the transfer recovers detail the original listeners never heard: the shimmer on the chimta, the consonants in the vocal, the room around the recording. Every side is captured to lossless WAV in full — including the moments before and after the Kirtan, which families are often most glad were kept.
Reference-grade decks, per-tape alignment, and a complete lossless capture of every side — the recording as the microphone heard it, not as a nineties boombox played it.
#6VHS & Video
Video tapes of smagams and diwans carry two things: a picture of the day, and — usually forgotten — a complete audio recording of the Kirtan. A VHS recorded in hi-fi mode holds audio of genuinely good quality, near-CD in the right conditions; it was simply never treated as a recording in its own right, because it was trapped inside a video.
We treat both halves properly. The picture is captured from a serviced deck with a time-base corrector to steady the image, then upscaled to 1080p — watchable on a modern screen without pretending to be something it isn't. The audio is pulled off losslessly as its own separate master, so the Kirtan on the tape can be listened to, restored, and even released, independent of the footage it arrived in.
A watchable film and a listenable audio master from the same tape — two deliverables, not a single flattened copy.
#7Digital Restoration
Age puts a layer between the listener and the recording. Tape hiss sits over everything like a veil; mains hum drones underneath; the highs dull with every copy; and generations of duplication flatten the dynamics until the quiet and the loud arrive at the same level. Restoration lifts that layer off, element by element — working directly in the audio, where the damage and the music can be told apart.
The discipline is knowing where to stop. Over-restored audio has a sound of its own — glassy, airless, scrubbed — arguably worse than the hiss it replaced. The character of the room, the air around the voice, the sound of the harmonium bellows — those are the recording, not the damage. We take off what time added and leave what the day gave. Every restoration is delivered with a before/after comparison, because the comparison is the proof.
Modern restoration applied with a light hand, a before/after you judge for yourself, and the restraint to leave the recording sounding like itself — only closer.
#8Universal Playback
A master that only holds together in a treated studio room has not really been finished. Most Kirtan is heard on a phone speaker in a kitchen, in a car on the way to the Gurdwara, through everyday earbuds on a commute — and a mix balanced only on studio monitors can fall apart on all three: the vocal vanishes on the phone, the tabla booms in the car, the sarangi turns harsh in the earbuds.
So every restored and remastered recording is checked on the systems people actually use — a phone speaker, a car, ordinary headphones, and a proper hi-fi — and adjusted until it carries on all of them without sacrificing the systems that can hear everything. The shabad should reach the listener wherever they are, not only where the equipment is kind.
A translation check across real-world systems, so the master you release is the master people actually hear — from a kitchen phone to a reference system.
#9Studio Partnerships
Already working with a studio you trust? Good — keep them. We come in at whatever stage helps the record: tracking support on location when a session needs more channels or more hands, a second pair of ears at mix when a project has been heard too many times by the same people, or mastering only, as the last honest check before release.
Stems, session files, reference mixes — we work to your studio's formats and hand everything back the same way. The recording belongs to the project, not to whichever studio touched it last, and the credit works the same way.
A specialist second studio that knows all genres of Sikh Music and how it should sound — joining your chain where it strengthens the record, and stepping back where it doesn't.
#10Keertani Collaboration
For independent Keertanis with something they want recorded properly — a set of shabads carried for years, a style of Kirtan that deserves a real record, a first release that should be done right rather than done quickly. Many Keertanis have the Sikh Music and not the machinery; this is the machinery, offered as seva.
We plan it with you from the first conversation: what to record, where it will sound best — a studio session, a hall, a live diwan — and how it should sound when it is finished. Then we stay with it through the session, the mix, the master, the artwork and the release itself. Not a booking with a start and end time, but a partner across the whole journey, with you at every decision.
A partner for the whole journey, not a booking — planning, recording, finishing and releasing, with the standard of the Catalog behind every step.
#11Audio & Video Distribution
A finished master is only half a release — it still has to reach the platforms where people actually listen. We deliver your release to every major streaming and download service, and your films to the video platforms, handling the parts that trip up independent releases: correct metadata so the release is findable, artwork to each platform's specification, delivery formats, and the timing of the release itself.
Audio and video travel together: the album to the streaming services, the films of the same sessions to the video platforms, presented as one release rather than scattered uploads. And like everything else on this page, it is offered free — the recording's job is to reach the sangat, not to earn its way onto the platforms.
Complete audio and video delivery to the major platforms — metadata, artwork specs, formats and release timing handled, worldwide from day one.
#12Royalties
Most of this page is about the recording. This last part is about what happens after release. Keertanis who release through Kirtan Fi keep a very generous share of the royalties from every distribution source the release earns on — the streaming platforms, the download stores, and YouTube included, which is often left out elsewhere.
We say this quietly, because it is not a sales pitch — it is simply how the label is set up. The recordings exist to serve the sangat, and the people who carry the Sikh Music should share properly in whatever it earns. Professional access to a studio's full resources and a royalty share like this rarely travel together; with Kirtan Fi, they do.
A clear and easy route to being supported in every aspect of digital production and revenue — one partner, from the recording session to the royalty statement.