Talk:Sitar

Question

Where is the written playing range? The page should include that... if someone can find it, please may you put it in?

Kharaj Pancham v.s. Grandar Pancham

These are two very distinct styles of sitar. The Kharaj pancham style had seven main strings and is tuned in the style or ravi shankar, whereas the Grandar Pancham style is how Ustad Vilayat Khan tuned his sitar, and is the more traditional tuning. Does everyone approve?

Tuning the sitar

An artist will develop a particular tuning for a particular piece and it may be totally idiosyncratic. There is no guarantee that other musicians will choose the same tuning even if they perform the same raga.

This is not true, unless the musician is doing something incorrectly. There are right ways to tune to the raga that one is playing; thus while the komal rishab of a bhairav may be different from that of Marwa, competent musicians differentiate between the two correctly, and therefore tune consistently.

I want to give the original author a chance to respond before I edit.Rasputin98 20:47, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not the original author, but wouldn't positing a "correct" way to tune the sitar be a bit dogmatic and closed-minded? He has his way of tuning, and I'm sure others have theirs just as you have yours, from whichever gharana. Let's live and let live.

--Treeblock 22:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I did not change the quoted text because on subsequent rereading, it did not seem as egregious. However, I maintain that while there may be multiple ways of tuning for a raga, it can not be totally idiosyncratic. Tuning the chikaris to vivadi notes would lead to unpleasant overtones; moreover, the shrutis pertaining to the raga should be preserved; for instance, you cannot arbitrarily tune a string to the Tivra Ma that pertains to Yaman. As someone who is still grappling with shrutis, I only know too well the results.

Rasputin98 15:33, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Linking Of Sitar to Hindustani

It is incorrect to say that the sitar is hindustani, since firstly it was created (whichever account you think is correct) by a muslim in the subcontinent. Secondly there was no Hindustan back then there was the Indian Subcontinent. Thirdly the sitar is as much common in Pakistan as it is in India. So to say that the sitar is a Hindustani classical instrument is as incorrect as to say sufis were a part of the hindustani culture. No changes have been made as yet but i suggest that this is something that needs attention.

The above statement is absurd. It is not controversial to state that the sitar is a part of Hindustani music. Muslim musicians acknowledge this and have always acknowledged it. Furthermore there was indeed a Hindustan "back then". If I play a sitar in the UK and I'm a Jew, then does it make it any less a Hindustani instrument? Absurd. --Treeblock 22:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed with Treeblock. "Hindustani" refers to the mixed Indian-Muslim culture of the Northern subcontinent. In my mind this includes any Muslim contributions to such a culture, as well as more muslim parts of the subcontinent, such as Eastern Pakistan etc etc. 66.58.219.109 19:23, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Categorising Sitar as Hindustani Classical Instrument

It is incorrect to say that the sitar is hindustani, since firstly it was created (whichever account you think is correct) by a muslim in the subcontinent. Secondly there was no Hindustan back then there was the Indian Subcontinent. Thirdly the sitar is as much common in Pakistan as it is in India. So to say that the sitar is a Hindustani classical instrument is as incorrect as to say sufis were a part of the hindustani culture.

"The name sitar comes from the Persian sehtar; seh meaning three and tar means string". This sentence suggests lingual differences how can hindu instruments be named according to the persian language?? the hindu culture had its own language - sanskrit and hindi which are quite different from persian.

"Both the tembûr and sehtar were used in pre-Islamic Persia and are used in Iran today" which clearly indicates that the sitar had a persian orign and should be classified accordingly.

No changes have been made as yet but i suggest that this is something that needs attention.

As I understand it, "Hindustani" can also include the music of Pakistan and Bangladesh in addition to the of modern day India. (Check out the wikipedia article). Maxxo 14:42, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

it can but does it? to me it implies strictly Indian (as in the present day India) a better word would be, i suppose, subcontinental for the pre partition era and Indian/Hindustani, Pakistani and Bangladeshi for the post partition era. Besides doesnt the etymology state that a similar instrument the sehtar existed in Persia/Turkey before? N.B how would it sound if instead of saying Persia Iran was mentioned? ... misleading i'd say. Elaborating on your post would this be correct; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a Hindustani sufi qawwal? Husein —Preceding unsigned comment added by Husein Najmi (talk • contribs)

(Hussein, please sign you post with four tildes. It will be replaced automatically by your user name and date stamp by the Wiki software. Line this: ~~~~. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 16:57, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

"Hindusthan" is very general way of refering to the entire indian subcontinent and does not refer specifically to Hinduism as a religion. There are, of course, far more muslims (including sufis) living in India than in Pakisthan. The word Hind is related to Indus (the river that runs through both modern Pakisthan and India) - and some form of the word that refers to the entire Indian subcontinent has been in use in the West for many thousands of years. "Hindusthani" is a commonly accepted as way of refering to North Indian Classical music which encompasses the music of the entire region - it may not be the best word to use, but it has a widely accepted and long history of usage.

There is Hindustani music in Pakistan as well. It is not in prominense after independence for some reasons. There is no denying that it is predominantly used in India. Religions are irrelavant here and although name sounds similar its structure is similar to veena. ~rAGU

The term "Hindustan" or "Hindostan" does indeed represent what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Saare_Jahan_Se_Achcha is a Urdu poem written by Muhammad Iqbal, Pakistan's national poet. His use of the term "hindostan" did not refer to modern day India alone. [[Sverma (talk) 17:23, 4 September 2010 (UTC)]]

Hindustani music is the genre of music, let's not invent problems where none exists. —SpacemanSpiff 18:01, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Electric Sitars

• "It typically has a gourd acting as the resonating chamber."

Surely only on acousitc versions, what sort of pick-ups do electric sitars have? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.214.75.127 (talk • contribs)

Do electric sitars even exist? DaGizza ^{Chat (c)} 09:48, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I believe so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.139.85.44 (talk • contribs)

Yes. Deltabeignet 21:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

What is marketed as an "electric sitar" is just a type of electric guitar with extra strings. It does not look like a sitar, and it is in no way a sitar. Do real electric sitars even exist? I don't know, I haven't seen one. Bossk-Office

I've seen a proper electic sitar, made by Rikhi Ram in Delhi. The pickup didn't seem too special, but I didn't hear it through an amp and I guess it could have been specially selected for use on a sitar. The wiring was, frankly, a bit rubbish. The neat thing about this instrument was that you didn't have to worry about the gourd getting smashed. There was a smaller hollow box, like a sitar version of a semi acoustic electric guitar. It had electric guitar style machine heads for the main strings. Can remember how the sympathetics were tuned. The machine heads weren't great quality either. If I had the spare cash (I'd guess £800ish) I'd get one and then fix it up properly. You could practice relatively quietly in the middle of the night without annoying the neighbours and you could carry it around in a nondescript case and avoid all the clever 'perhaps its a gun of some sort' jokes on the tube/subway. Of course, the full size instrument does confer the benefit that interesting people will sometimes strike up conversations with you. econnor

Look at both the link above and search "electric sitar" on such music sites as www.musiciansfriend.com. They both have instruments that, in my opinion would fit any reasonable definition of an "electric sitar". If you try to extend the analogy from a guitar compared to an electric guitar, you can't judge from the method of resonation, if any. A guitar is amplified by resonation inside the body; an electric guitar (at least most models!) have no acoustic resonation. All amplification is electrical. I would posit that an electric sitar would merely have to have a similar string configuration as acoustic sitars, especially in respect to the drone strings. As long as this is met, I think it's safe to add one or two sentences about the availiability of electric sitars. I've gotta confess, when I first read the above section about "electric sitars", I though it was utter crap, but you can't argue with their presence at music stores :-). GuildNavigator84 13:56, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

There seemed to be some need for it, so I started a new wiki article called "Electric sitar". I know there are some electric sitars out there that actually bear a close resemblence to the "regular" (acoustic?) sitar, but most of the ones that I came across looked like, to quote the poster above, an "electric guitar with extra strings". If the article could be expanded on or improved in any way please do so. Maxxo 22:33, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Setar

Could anyone make clear which syllable of the Persian word 'setar' means three? If the former 'se' or 'set' does, it is so to speak a false cognate with the Korean adjective 'se' or noun 'ses'. Another one is between the Korean adjective 'du/tu' and Latin 'duo' or English 'two'. --kypark 01:52, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

Why would someone assume a Persian word is a false cognate of a Korean one?

/seh/ is three in Persian, /do/ is two and so the Central Asian instrument, the dotār, means 'two string' in the way se(h)tār meas 'three string'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.83.159.228 (talk) 21:41, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Notable sitar players

Of course George Harrison is notable, as an early rocker experimenting with the sitar, but how is James Pomerantz notable at all? He is not famous, and while I’m sure he may be a fine player there are dozens of fine players that don’t belong in a list of notables with Vilayat Khan, Ravi Shankar and Nikhil Banerjee. Is Mr Pomerantz a pioneer in any way? The first American sitar student? Anything?

I agree and judging from his Wikipedia article (which does need some cleaning up), there is nothing that makes him signifcant.

Sitar Tuning

I would like to see a helpful article on intervals in indian music - like the piano tuning article. Sure you can't provide step by step instructions as you have to have some sort of sense of what you are listening too, but I'm sure there is a way to provide better advice than 'learn to sing and then study hard for 10 years'. econnor

To an extent I share the same view but it's inevitable that the more accessible it becomes for people to take up the sitar on their own without a qualified teacher, the more the standard of this classical music form will suffer and be subjected to misappropriations and contortions. --Treeblock 22:33, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

There are books that one can refer to, and I highly recommend Alain Danielou's books on the subject (http://www.alaindanielou.org/Northern-Indian-Music-R.html for instance). It is important to note though, you really need a teacher or some other means of exposure to this music to have an acceptable sense for these intervals. Rasputin98 (talk) 13:15, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Lead

Why does the lead talk almost entirely of popularity in West. There are much more important things to put there. deeptrivia (talk) 04:14, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Abolutely agreed; the Beatles should just be an incidental. I'll work on that when I find the time. --Lenoxus 22:34, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

All right, I got around to it after I saw that a bunch of other people had gotten around to it anyway. I would now like to defend my recent action of moving the Beatles bit to the end of "history" by pointing out that no other sitar song or piece is mentioned in the intro except those of the Beatles. Hopefully, that's cool with everyone... --Lenoxus 01:40, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Use of Sitar in Popular Music

I think the The Kinks song See My Friends predates the release of Help! by one week, but I don't know when it was recorded or who played the sitar. Gnosticdogma 04:47, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

The Disturbed song "Ten-Thousand Fists" Their guitarist (Dan someone or another) doesn't actually use a sitar. It's just a guitar effects pedal.

List of Sitar Players

What happened to the list of sitar players? It seems to have been moved to another page, but following that link just leads one to the wikipedia definition of categories. Searching for "Sitar Players" doesn't yield anything useful either.Rasputin98 14:59, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

List of recognized classical teachers

Could someone kindly add a list? This would serve as a source of reference for people interested in further research with a view to becoming sitarists.

tuning

In the tuning section all of the notes names are listen in the Hindi terms. Westerners who are using this page to learn about the sitar for the first time will find this completely useless, and even some who are aware of sitars but who only know music in western terms will find this difficult to understand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.229.221.138 (talk • contribs)

I agree, I think that there should be something there so that people not familiar with Hindi terms can figure out what they mean. Writing the western notes in scientific notation (like C4, F5) or even in Hz. Jolb 02:34, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Be careful. The Indian scale does not have equal tempering, and therefore the HZ will differ slightly. also The startng pitch for Sa is usaly close to C# but it can vary.--Hacky 23:55, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

picture

I do not think that the picture of a lady holding a "sitar" reflects modern sitars. (ditto to the engraveing) 1: the "sitar" is much to small 2 there is no indicaton of sympathetic strings (no pegs, no holes in the top of the neck, only one brige ect.) While student sitars may not have resinating strings : 3. there are indications of holes in the soundbourd(someting not present in a sitar) 4. the neck is much too thin. (I cannot wrap my hand around one in such a manner) 5. the gourd is not round enough (it is shown as teardrop shaped). I hope to be able to provide a better open source image soon. I think that the image is closer to the persan settar. Thougts? --Hacky 00:30, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Since the image in question has been already deleted (fair-use rationale was not adequate since a free alternative can be found), I took the liberty of replacing it with Image:Setar.jpg, which already on the English Wikipedia as well as in Commons. Perhaps that could do (at least temporarily)? +A.0u 04:23, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

The image shown was not sitar at all. Tanpur and Veana resemble sitar more than Setar. Please write another article for SETAR. This article is on SItar and I saw that the image was not Sitar but something else. I reverted the image and then replaced it with a colour image of a sitar. Those who want to talk about Setar may do so here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setar_%28lute%29. The instrument which women holds in the photo is also not sitar and sitar resembles more with veena more than setar. Moreover sitar is sophesticated instrument with around 20 strings. Would somebody look in to all these and fix them.

~rAGU

Recent edits

Did half of this article disappear overnight? A section describing the instrument mechanics is gone, and in its place we have a reference to a video game character. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Maxxo (talk • contribs) 01:18, 2 May 2007 (UTC).

Sitar Makers?

Are the best sitar makers in the world all Westerners? Anyone else finding this really difficult to believe? Thats like saying the best guitar makers are all in South Asia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.177.215.177 (talk) 04:27, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Where did you see this assertion?Rasputin98 (talk) 13:17, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Sitar playing and salaries

The main article could be improved if it contained information on sitar playing as a trade, and the salaries associated with that trade. Is playing the sitar more lucrative than guitar playing?198.177.27.13 (talk) 05:13, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Sitar and SeTar

Setar = se(3) + Tar (string) (but now it has 4 strings)

Sitar = Si(30) + Tar (string) (20 ~25 strings)

i belive just pakistanis (becuse of thier accent ) are calling Sitar , Setar. but persian,Indian,turkish and even in english Setar and Sitar are seprate,

Metallica used an electical sitar instead of a traditional one

Hi all, hope everybody's doing fine!

I was reading this Sitar entry and found e reference to Metallica using it in their song "Wherever I may roam".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wherever_I_May_Roam

When reading the entry about this song, I found out that they used an electrical sitar instead of a traditional one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_sitar

And then when reading the entry about the electrical sitar I read "An electric sitar is in fact a kind of electric guitar designed to mimic the sound of the traditional Indian instrument, the sitar".

I think this info is appropriate to mention in the sitar entry.

Thanx & best wish

Robin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.169.122.30 (talk) 23:27, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Reassessment as Start

• Too few references
• famous players not covered
• undue promotion of Rain City Music site
• File:Sitar parts.jpg: What is the name of this sitar is it? Usually sitars do not the upper gourd. --Redtigerxyz ^Talk 14:04, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Performance Range?

I am curious as to what the frequency range of a sitar is. Also, I noticed that it was compared to a number of other string instruments (both Western and Indian); but not such western classical instruments as the bass, cello, violin, etc. I am also curious how the frequency range of a sitar compares to the aforementioned western classical instruments. I admit that my theoretical understanding of sound is a bit weak and that my knowledge of musical instruments minimal, so the question which I just asked may seem a bit "stupid" to those more knowledgeable; nonetheless I would appreciate a response. Thank You.JeepAssembler (talk) 20:51, 20 November 2009 (UTC)JeepAssemblerJeepAssembler (talk) 20:51, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

"It is redefined"?

At the end of the first section is the following paragraph:

It is redefined that pioneer of Sitar was NOT the famouse Persian poet Amir Khusro, but Khusro Khan, younger brother of Mian Tansen.(Ref: Research thesis by Dr. Rekha Nigam on the History of Sitar)

This makes only vague sense. I'm guessing that the writer meant

It has been established that the pioneer of Sitar was NOT the famouse Persian poet Amir Khusro, but rather Khusro Khan, the younger brother of Mian Tansen.[reference must be corrected]

Is this correct? If so, would someone fix this? --Dan Griscom (talk) 13:24, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Meand/Meend/Aghanistan??

35 years ago when I played the sitar, we spelled it 'meend.' Meend translates into Italian as glissando, into English as sliding or gliding. Yes it does allow microtonal adjustments, but its real beauty and purpose is to imitate the 'sliding' vocal ornamentations of Indian, and especially, Hindustani music. Will someone with access to authoritative sources please include this in the article? Thanks! What's Afghanistan doing here? Something to do with Afghan involvement in Muslim rule of India? I've got more than enough respect for Afghanistan and its people, but there's no direct link between Afghanistan and the creation and development of the sitar. I advocate removing Afghanistan fr/ this page and will do it, if there's no objection. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tapered (talk • contribs) 19:51, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Mechanics copypaste

The "Mechanics" section was evidently copied and pasted from another website, complete with references to non-existent images (see this edit). I'm a little surprised no one noticed this earlier: as written, it runs afoul of WP:MOS, WP:YOU etc. (and again, makes reference to inline images that aren't on Wikipedia). Anyway, I've removed the text and replaced it with the previous version of that section. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 20:09, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. The page needs a total rewrite. Hekerui (talk) 20:12, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

George Harrison

Re: "the sitar became known in the western world through the work of Pandit Ravi Shankar beginning in the late 1950s, particularly after George Harrison of The Beatles took lessons from Shankar and Shambhu Das[1] and played sitar in songs including "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". Shortly after, The Rolling Stones used a sitar in "Paint It Black" and a brief fad began for using the instrument in pop songs."

The section of the above I've emphasized (by rendering it without italics) is a bit misleading. Harrison actually recorded "Norwegian Wood" before he'd even met Shankar. I think the solution is to be less specific. We could say, "the sitar became known in the western world through the work of Pandit Ravi Shankar beginning in the late 1950s, and more widely known still after it became fashionable in pop music in the sixties with its espousal by the Beatles and other groups." TheScotch (talk) 06:16, 9 January 2011 (UTC)