My Compelling Story

Shylu Ravindran is a professional guitarist based out of the capital city of Tamil Nadu, Chennai. He belongs to the exuberant Prapancham legacy and is the son of the mridangam virtuoso Prapancham Ravindran. He showed brilliant signs of musicianship right from the tender age of six, which made him win the prestigious Krishna Gana Sabha's Arupathi Natesa Iyer Award for excellence in mridangam. Fascinating the audiences throughout the world with his mridangam talent, his life took a new dimension when his fingers met the frets. The journey continued from there on. Guitar playing came naturally to him where the lighting fast gamakas, the ease of handling intricate ragas and the kalpana swaras came to him naturally. His debut guitar performance started with a bang where he was accompanied by stalwarts –Prapancham Ravindran, Madurai Balasubramanian, and Ghatam Karthick – in a three-hour Ragam Tanam Pallavi concert which is quite unimaginable by any amateurs. He was later moulded into a matured and skilled musician under the tutelage of the veena maestro, Sri Mudikondon SN Ramesh and violinist Smt Jayanthi Keshav. Shylu rose to popularity by performing traditional Carnatic solos at various sabhas and events across the country. He later was offered to join the mega-hit band, Heart Beat, by ghatam maestro, Ghatam Karthick, as the lead guitarist. He has collaborated with many driving musicians like Vl Kumar, mandolin UP Raju, Alex Pinto, Palladam Venkataramana Rao, Alex Krupsky, and MR Gopinath. He has been widely guided, supported and praised by his icon guitar wizard, Prasanna. Shylu has a deep respect and passion for the Carnatic music and the guitar. Due to his boundless passion for the Carnatic genre, he tries to bring out its purest form out of the European instrument. He aims strongly at the transformation in presenting Carnatic music and bringing it from a confined audience to the masses. He is, on the other hand, no hater of fusion and Bollywood music and has composed numerous fusion pieces and rhythmically calculative pieces which have given the root for his band, Yellow.