pradeep kumar

Biography:

Tamil language film composer and playback vocalist Pradeep Rangaswamy Kumar was born in India on May 12, 1986. He started out as a Carnatic musician in the 2010s and has since worked frequently with composers Sean Roldan and Santhosh Narayanan.

Raised in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, Pradeep Kumar was the son of a music teacher and a police inspector. Pradeep Kumar was raised surrounded by Carnatic music and frequently joined his mother in singing at home because his mother, Lalitha Vijayakumar, taught the genre in both private sessions and a local government school.

Later, he made his playback singing debut in Tamil cinema with Santhosh Narayanan’s Attakathi. Later on, he started taking lessons from J. Venkataraman of the Aalathur School of Music, who ended up becoming his first mentor.

Apart from music, Pradeep Kumar pursued his studies in physics, passed the engineering entrance exam, and enrolled in a Thanjavur engineering college with the goal of becoming a theoretical physicist.

But a week later, he made the decision not to attend college. He instead pursued a certificate program in audio engineering as a backup career plan, which also helped him learn more about sound composing. Pradeep Kumar traveled to Chennai in 2003 to take part in a competition held by the Carnatica music studio.

After hearing him sing, K. Shashikiran of Carnatica asked that he return to Chennai. As a result, Pradeep Kumar worked with Carnita in Chennai from 2003 to 2005. His parents then joined him.

In addition to continuing to give katcheris in Chennai and overseas, he briefly held the position of secretary for the Chennai-based Youth Association of Classical Music. After working as Augustin Paul’s apprentice, Pradeep Kumar gained subtlety in Western classical music and spent four years as an audio engineer.

He worked on a documentary in 2014 named Arunagiri Perumale, which was a live recording of a concert in Boston in 2014 with a 16-piece chamber symphony orchestra and a three-piece Indian band.

He referred to the endeavor as his “pet project” and depended on crowdsourcing to finish it by 2017. He wed Kalyani Nair, another vocalist, at the same time. In addition, he composed music for Maine Pyar Kiya (2014), his debut film album for the Telugu production.

Santhosh Narayanan, a composer, and Pradeep Kumar were acquainted through Pradeep’s musical career. When Pradeep Kumar was eighteen, the two met for the first time in Trichy. They went on to jam together while pursuing the same audio engineering degree. Pradeep Kumar was Santhosh Narayanan’s regular acoustic guitarist after he became become a film composer.

Later, he made a big impression as a singer, frequently working on albums by friends Sean Roldan and Santhosh Narayanan, including Jigarthanda (2014), Irudhi Suttru (2016), and Kabali (2016). He was a lyricist in Jigarthanda as well. The three were referred to as “the new-age musical trio of Tamil cinema” by a music critic from The Hindu in 2016.

After Meyaadha Maan’s producers were persuaded to let Pradeep Kumar work on the movie by Santhosh Narayanan, the composer made his debut in Tamil cinema in 2017. Later on, he was chosen as the music director for Amala Paul’s upcoming movie, Aadai, by Rathna Kumar, the director of Meyaadha Maan.