High strung

Ehsaan Noorani, the first Indian with his own Fender line, tells Priyanka Joshi about his passion

Ehsaan Noorani, one-third of the successful music trio of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, can talk guitars and music over breakfast, lunch or dinner. “It’s what I wanted to do ever since I knew what I wanted to do,” he says, sitting in a small room full of guitars and music instruments in his Bandra pad. Noorani, who became the first Indian to endorse a signature line of guitars by Fender, one of the largest guitar manufacturers in the world, recently renewed the contract for the second time. The brand, which has been endorsed by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton Mark Knopfler and Stevie Ray Vaughn, was incidentally Noorani’s first music instrument buy. “I couldn’t have afforded a guitar back in 1981 when I was just starting out. My parents thought it would be nice to indulge me,” he says. They spent Rs 5,000 on the Fender guitar.

Naturally, he is excited about the association. “At the recently-held NAMM, where my signature line of guitars was on display, the amount of respect that I got from the Fender brass was just amazing,” says he. “There were the biggest names in music like Eric Johnson, Sting and Robert Cray and then there was me from Mumbai parading his own signature line of Stratocasters. This was an indescribable moment for me.”

Talking about the Fender Squier electric guitar that Noorani endorses, the 47-year old guitarist gets technical. “At least 19 to 25 different prototypes were made by the company before the final product was actually rolled out. This guitar, made as per my specifications, consists of an alder body with a maple veneer on top and has a slim C shape maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard giving amazing playability and comfort.” Noorani customised the guitar’s size to suit Indian hands, which he believes are smaller than Western musicians’.

Jasbir Singh of On Stage India, a close friend of Noorani and Fender’s sole distributor in India, got the musician to meet the Fender executives. Another college friend of Noorani’s, Chris Gill, heads Fender Squier. “They [Chris and Jasbir] knew what I thought about Fenders. It was our passion for guitars that bonded Chris and me in college. It was my love for Fenders that got Jasbir to talk to the company about my accomplishments back in India,” he discloses. It took two years for the company to finalise the details and start the production of the Ehsaan Noorani Signature Squier Stratocaster in China. “We chose China because we could control the cost of the guitar to make it affordable, while maintaining all standards of what a Fender is all about. What good would a Rs 80,000 guitar be in India?” says he.

Adding some personal zing to the guitars, Noorani got the company to produce Stratocasters in green and purple, his favourite colours, besides the signature red and blue. The 250 or so Ehsaan Noorani Fender Squier guitars in the country have been priced at Rs 22,000 apiece. “I wanted to make sure Fenders are not overpriced, which would prohibit their uptake among the youth,” he reasons. Noorani has gifted a couple of Fenders to his friends in Bollywood like Farhan Akhtar and Saif Ali Khan.

And how involved is Noorani in getting the right service for his signature line to the users? “Hands-on. On my Facebook page, a user posted that the guitar did not produce the right notes; on checking, I realised that the distributor there was stringing the guitar all wrong,” he says. Noorani got in touch with the distributor and ensured that all guitars were done up as per his specifications. “I even posted a How-To on my Facebook page,” says Noorani, an active social media user.