RE: Shruti Fruity, oh Rudy...

[Tim Nelson <tcn62@ici.net>]

There seems to be some confusion about the shruti boxes; there are
traditional, acoustic ones (which range drastically in quality and price)
and there are electronic ones. There are also shruti cassettes! I'm pretty
sure the word "shruti" literally just means "drone", so in a musical sense,
we could be talking about a tamboura or a harmonium as well as a shruti 
box.

Here are a few links with pictures and info:

<http://www.sapthaswara.com/electronic.htm>

<http://www.paganmusic.com/shruti.htm>

<http://chandrakantha.com/products_and_services/tanpura.html>

<http://web.inter.nl.net/users/wammes/oideion/RELEVANC.HTM>

<http://www.raganet.com/RagaNet/>

Bear in mind that the sites these'll link you to which happen to be
retailers may or may not have good prices or service; I haven't done
business with any of them, and haven't done an exhaustive shruti price
comparison analysis! They just happened to have pictures of the things on
their websites I thought some of you would like to look at! (Electronic
tablas and tambouras, too!) If any of these links don't work (I'm not a
typist!), just try a meta-search engine (I used Dogpile) on the word 
"shruti".

Tim