I made a narka out of Belgian stag horn. This is a tuning aid to comfortably and finely tune the taravs, the sympathetic strings on a sitar.
A deer antler hung on the wall. You can find them at old flea markets, or nailed to the wall at hunters’ homes: deer horn antlers as hunting trophies. You can’t do much with them, but for a sitar player you can make a beautiful and useful tool with them.
First choose in a nice and fitting piece, and cut the end generously. Then I make a tapered slot corresponding to the width of the taravs to be operated. A hole is then drilled into it to fit the ornamental tip of the tuning knob, and then I also make the tapered slot suitably concave so that it fits nicely over the tuning knob.
I’ve added an illustrated report about the repair of tarav mogaras. These are small, round ducts which lead the tarav strings through the neck towards the tarav kutis. They are usually made out of bone or horn. Sometimes plastic is used.
Due to a very high tension coming from the tarav string which is laying on the rim, these ducts get used sooner or later. Finally they will break, and then there is nothing left to prevent the string from cutting into the wood.
So, sometimes, these tiny fragile pipes need to be replaced. Or, if you are lucky and they didn’t break (yet), they can be re-used by rotating them over 90°.
Here is a worn tarav mogara. The string is deeply ingrained into the bone rim… this needs to be repaired.
Start with removing the bad piece with a tight-fitting metal pin. Pry it out gently by turning round and round with the metal pin. Clean up the hole…
Select a new one, make sure it is well-fitting!! Or, if you are lucky and it didn’t break, then it can be re-used by rotating it over p.ex. 90°, or 180°…. Glue it, and let it dry.
Apply shaping with a hand-made mill.
Clean it up, check the hole (it may be obstructed by dried up glue) and mount a new string…
Tools
Metal pins, hand drill & hand-made mills.
Improvements
Kartar Chand & Hari Chand add a special tiny tarav mogara bridge to support the string.
Hiren Roy & Barun Roy and many others install a differently shaped mogara.
On the SAS-01 I use ordinary mini steel nails (diam. 1mm / lenght 8mm) as tarav mogara. They sound very good at the moment but I think this can be improved one day. But how? By bone, or horn, or… ? Anybody a suggestion ?
Day 50: Mounted all 24 pardas on this SAS-01. It’s a very delicate and time-consuming job: first accurate bending and height adjustment followed by binding the pardas.
Day 51: After tuning the sitar properly, I put the pardas to their regular position. Then I draw a map, localizing the taravs to help me situating the best position for mounting the tarav’s machine heads. These will be mounted on a mahogany strip, just like the cikari machine heads on the SBS-02.
Meanwhile this sitar is disassembled again to be able to apply the finish.
I made a narka out of Belgian stag horn. This is a tuning aid to comfortably and finely tune the taravs, the sympathetic strings on a sitar.
