Re: Sitar Sounds out of a Guitar

[Tim Nelson <tcn62@ici.net>]

Hi Jim,

If you've got a beater electric you wouldn't mind turning into a project
guitar, you could go the Coral route and fashion yourself a buzzing
bridge... The idea is the opposite of a regular guitar bridge where you'd
normally want to minimize buzz and maximize intonation by having the string
contact the saddle at the smallest point possible; to make a sitar-sounding
bridge you want to maximize the string's point of contact with the bridge
by sanding a block of wood into a curve something like the cross-section of
an airplane's wing, so the string will continue to buzz without muting out
as you play up the neck. You'll have to play around a bit with the scale
length to get an approximation of intonation, so a separate stop tailpiece
really helps... I built a Coral copy many years ago (which I foolishly
sold) that used this sort of bridge, and it worked very well. I've been
building another one (teardrop-shaped; actually traced around my smaller
oud!) with sympathetic strings and a deeply scalloped fingerboard, but have
been too busy to finish it.

As far as quickly switching between the sitar sound and a regular guitar
sound, you could do the prog guy thing and mount one of these on a mic
stand; play your twangy/shruti part into your looper of choice, then step
back and let 'er rip on your normal instrument.

The compression/delay advice the others have given works particularly well
with such a bridge, and it really sounds good in modal tunings. 

Tim

At 12:53 PM 12/9/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi all.
>
>I was wondering if anyone out there knows a way to get a sitar-like sound
>out of a regular electric guitar.