Inside Nescafe Basement: Amal Nadeem's first love is the violin, but it may not be her calling

How much does money factor into a musician's decision to pursue it full-time? A lot, unsurprisingly.

We talk to Amal Nadeem, the violinist of the all-girl band of Nescafe Basement Season 4, about how getting exposure at Nescafe Basement has triggered a conversation about whether taking the plunge into music is worth the financial risk.

Amal Nadeem

Amal is a 19-year-old second year student of economics at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). And she also loves music, which has been a big part of her life since she was only four.

It was at that age that she first picked up the violin. Learning the instrument at school in the UK, “she liked the instrument, how elegant it looked and how good it sounded and the music composed on it,” tells her mother.

Since this first brush with music, Amal has learnt multiple instruments: the keyboard when she was 12, the guitar at 13, and ukulele a year ago.

“Music is neither my Plan B nor my true calling. It’s always going to be a part of my life but I’m not sure if I want to depend on it for a salary. I don’t want to have music-based deadlines, do something completely different than what I want to do, play different sorts of music I'd rather not play. I like the fact that I can take some weeks off, not really playing a lot of music and then go into it full-on playing hours and hours of music everyday for another month. I want to do it on my own terms, but then I never thought I’d do something this big (Basement), and when the opportunity came I couldn’t refuse.”

Amal doesn’t remember her first public performance but she guesses it was probably when she played with a big orchestra in front of a roughly 3000-strong audience when she was six or seven years old in the UK.

Music is neither my Plan B nor my true calling. It’s always going to be a part of my life but I’m not sure if I want to depend on it for a salary... But then I never thought I’d do something as big as Nescafe Basement, and when the opportunity came I couldn’t refuse.

Her musical training switched gears when her family moved to Pakistan when she was 10. When she came to Pakistan, nobody in her class knew what it was and she had to show them pictures. Then they would ask her questions like ‘This looks like a guitar, what’s a stick doing with it?’

Amal found a violin tutor a year or so later, but stopped training at the age of 14. She then drifted away to other instruments: keyboard, piano and ukulele that she completely learnt herself off of Youtube.

Amal says she wanted to learn piano and guitar because people were more familiar with them and as a teenager one can identify their sounds in songs.

She took out her violin once again last year because she thought she understood the instrument better than most and could experiment with its sound. Western classical was Amal’s choice of music to play on the violin because it played the most at her house. Having played western classical helped her understand structure and reading music. She can now mesh it with the rest of her music.

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