I started making the solid body sitar in August 2003, while my special friend and sitarmaker Hari Chand Sharma was here on a one month’s visit at my home. Hari Chand (aged 67 at that time…) still runs a modest but almost legendary sitar shop in New Delhi. We improvised a small sitar shop in the corner of the living room of our house and, when the weather was fine, we worked outside.

The prototype sitar consists of 2 parts. The complete neck comes from an old and broken sitar. We only had to replace the (broken) joint piece.

The body is made of two pieces of solid wood. The upper part is a leftover honduras mahogany and the bottom part is made of a piece of dutch cedar.

The first tests with the EMG were done with a mecano construction mounted on the solid body as a flexible pickup support. This made it possible to experiment on different pickup angles and locations.

After that I made a pickup-rail system out of parda (fret) wire, which kept the pickup being movable. From then onwards the sitar was perfectly playable.

Finally 1 year later proudly posing.