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Hari Chand Sharma

Hari Chand Sharma is one of the finest sitarmaker in New Delhi, India. He is stil running his late brother Kartar Chand’s cosey & modest sitar shop, situated at Paharganj.
I met Hari Chand & Kartar Chand for the first time in 1992 in Paharganj. Since then, we became friends and try to visit each other frequently.

Watch a video of Hari Chand & me doing jiwari on a sitar during one of his visits in Bierbeek, Belgium 1997.

Hari Chand’s infinite skills and almost lifelong experience in sitar making were of a determinating help for me to assemble this new kind of sitar.

My name is Klaas Janssens and I am an amateur luthier, interested in Indian musical instruments such as sitar and tanpura.

My main occupation is sound engineer, and as such I experienced difficulties about the amplification of this beautiful but acoustically not so efficient musical instrument in loud environments such as modern rock, techno & dance. That’s why I developed a new style of sitar to which I’m using pickups as the only means of capturing the sound. I have a prototype fully working with an EMG model 91 pickup. It is called “The Traditional Electric”, named after the metamorphosis.