It took Vijay Anand’s son just one month to quit his drums class. “He was being taught the same syllabus and lessons that I was, 25 years ago, when I tried learning guitar,” he says. “But he wanted to play songs like ‘Believer’, by Imagine Dragons — songs that were popular among his friends. The theoretical form of teaching waned his interest in learning,” he says.

It was soon after, that Vijay began building a website that would teach young working professionals and college students music — in particular, movie songs that are currently popular. The result: musicmaster.in.

Vijay has collaborated with Shiva Moorthy, of the heavy metal band Moral Putrefaction, recording artiste Jude Mario, and bass guitarist Pascal Rabboni to act as tutors on this platform, that was started last month. “Right now, we only teach guitar. But as we scale up, we plan to include more music instruments,” he says.

The idea of musicmaster was dual — firstly, to make learning easier for amateur musicians. “What most schools don’t realise is that not everyone takes up music to be a serious musician. Some just want to pick up an instrument, play with their friends, college mates, and family. It’s only when they want to up their skills that they are interested in learning the exact theory,” he says.

Moreover, he adds, for working professionals, it becomes even more difficult to match with the tutor’s schedule. It was a problem that Vijay too faced three years ago, once he picked up guitar again after putting it on the backburner since college.

“I went online, hoping it would be easier to learn guitar lessons on YouTube. But most songs were either in English, or just some nursery rhymes,” he says.

So his second aim, was to make learning Tamil movie songs more accessible online. On musicmaster, there are songs such as ‘Ullaallaa’ from Petta, ‘Ennadi Maayavi Nee’ from Vada Chennai and ‘Ennai Maatrum Kadhalae’ and ‘Neeyum Naanum’ from Naanum Rowdy Dhaan.

The challenge here was to get the rights to use these songs. “Legally speaking, we are allowed to take songs for education purposes but these rules were made in the pre-digital era,” he says. So he now has to approach music labels to be allowed to use these songs. Most of Vijay’s clients come from cities such as Coimbatore, Tirupur, and Salem. “Some of them don’t have guitars when they start out. So we also help them with the technical knowledge needed to identify what kind of guitars they’ll need to buy,” he says. The company has tied up with city-based Sruthi Musicals to source and courier guitars to their customers.