Abhijit Vaghani: The man behind Tseries 'The Mix Tape'

The name Abhijit Vaghani is not unknown to the film and especially the music industry. Call him a music producer, composer, director or singer- he wears many hats in the Indian music industry.

On June 15, when T-series unveiled its biggest live music project 'The MixTape', one knew it was in the best hands when Abhijit was appointed as music director of the entire show.

He has put together a MixTape of 17 episodes, bringing together the best from the industry like Shreya Ghoshal, Shaan, Jubin Nautiyal, Neha Kakkar, Ayushmann Khurana, Armaan Malik, Aditi Singh, Salim Merchant and many more.

When he was asked, how the idea came about, Abhijit said, "Bushanji and Shivam Chanana had come up with idea of having one whole cover for hit Bollywood tracks and having a hit Bollywood singer sing it. I was very happy that they had chosen me for the project as the music director for the whole season. As soon as Shivam and I started to jam, we started to think about two songs, not like the mashups which are coming out one song after another, but realized that, the tempo, keys, like the scale of the track, notation wise and also lyrically - most of them were matching through. That's when we realized that we could merge the tunes as well along with the lyrics and actually create two blockbuster hits instead of having one huge hit, which is a little different to hear than what the original songs were."

Adding, "The thought process behind Mixtape was to give a refreshing new look to these old hits and to create new music for the same tunes so people could enjoy them again. And of course for the newness of two songs coming together and turning into one."

Further speaking about the challenges faced and the experience of bringing so many singers together, Abhijit said, "Challenges - wise we had tempo matching challenge, scale matching challenges, lyrical matching challenges, and tune matching challenges which are obviously from two different songs, taking parts of the song and mashing them up into one song was a bit difficult. But I guess being in Bollywood for so many years has given me the experience to do that."

He also added, "Besides this, we also had the tonality of the singers in consideration. That is how some of the tracks and even episodes would change. For instance, when Kanika Kapoor came in, we had to change it to a fun song instead of a love song. Although she can sing a love song, she is more into the picture for high energy pop tracks. The singer selection & combination required a lot of planning according to their tones obviously, because someone like Neeti Mohan was doing great in her love song sector so we thought she could do great in Savare with Salim.