A unique combination of ancient and modern know-how.

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This page is about a new style of sitar which is using pickups as the only means of capturing the sound. A prototype is fully working with an EMG model 91 accompanied by two hand made custom pickups. It is called “The Traditional Electric”, named after the metamorphosis.

Design & idea by Klaas Janssens @ Sitar Factory (August 2003)
Completion by Hari Chand & Klaas Janssens @ Sitar Factory (August 2003)

Specifications

Dimensions: 1060mm x 300mm x 130mm (L x W x H)
Neck width: 89mm
Scale: 831mm
String configuration: RS style
Pardas: 24
Taravs: 11
Body: Honduras mahogany on Dutch cedar
Main pickup: EMG model 91
Tarav pickup: custom made
Chikari pickup: custom made

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The making of

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, unfortunately has passed away on 15/02/2022.

We improvised a small sitar shop in the corner of the living room of my 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.

After some time I built a mini pickup for cikari strings only. The pickup is mounted on its own piece of wood and added to the pickup-rail. This way, it is also movable.

The cikari setup is completed with an extra knob for adjusting the cikari volume in accordance with the overall sitar-sound. But, because the EMG has built-in active circuitry an extra impedance compensating amp was added to the cikari circuit.

Finally, also for tarav amplification an extra miniature pickup has been made with a rosewood top and maple body.

This pickup is inserted in the solid body and is located under the pickup rail. It also got its own volume knob.

The output jack is replaced by a 5 pin-XLR. On this connector the three pickup signals have separate outputs and each of them has its own gain knob on the sitar. So they can be further individually processed if desired. An ordinary 5 pin-XLR to jack cable is available for basic one channel amplification just like a solid body guitar.

 

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The overall sound of the instrument is very good and you can play on it in exactly the same way as you play on a traditional acoustic sitar. But, you need a good amp.

A radical renovation is the solid body concept. No acoustical feedback (larsen) is occuring. You can play very loud and experiment with the full scala of electric guitar sounds & effects.

The instrument itself is less fragile because the very breakable tumba is removed and transportation is more efficient because the overall instrument volume decreases: it became equally flat.

Improvements have been made to suit the more detailed aspects of the sitar-sound. Although the EMG sounds good, cikari strings were not covered by the pickup’s surface and thus not being amplified. To achieve this, I designed separate smaller mini pickups for the cikari and tarav strings. They capture the sound only locally and thus the sound of these elements can be adjusted to the player’s desire.

Each of these signals are routed separately to the sitar’s 5 pin’s XLR output, so that they can be further individually processed if desired.

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Players

 

 

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