A resurgence of interest is attested by the phenomenon of great sarangi players such as Ustad Abdul Latif Khan and Ustad Ghulam Sabir Qadri who did not teach their sons - now teaching their grandsons. It is heartening to see that a large number of players are now teaching their sons. Sarangi music is vocal music. It is quite impossible to find a sarangi player who does not know the words of many classical songs. The words are usually mentally present during performance, and performance almost always adheres to the conventions of vocal performance including the organisational structure, the types of elaboration, the tempo, the relationship between sound and silence, and the presentation of khyal and thumri compositions.
Most sarangi players learn to sing before they begin to play.
Sarangi players sing with their fingers. Rather than as an appendage to or as a shadow of vocal music, sarangi must be viewed as a semi-independent tradition of vocal music, still respected at the end of the nineteenth century, which has fallen drastically in prestige largely as a result of social factors. The sarangi tradition is integral to the vocal tradition, and has sustained and nourished it. If sarangi players were all poorly grounded in vocal music, it would not be possible, as is the case, that a large number of the most famous male singers of the twentieth century have come from sarangi families or been sarangi players themselves. The Kirana and Patiala Gharanas, important vocal traditions, owe their heritage largely to sarangi playing.