Cigar Box Sitar

Sep 25

2 min read

I got interested in Indian music back in the heyday of the Beatles and Stones. George Harrison and Brian Jones both took trips to India in the 60s to study transcendental meditation and came back really influenced by the music they heard. Ravi Shankar was the master of the sitar at the time and it highly influenced Harrison and Jones. Harrison's composition of Within You Without You featured sitar and he played it on John Lennon's Norwegian Wood. Jones' sitar work was absolutely fantastic on Jagger & Richards Paint it Black.

A real sitar is big, heavy and really hard to tune and play. Here's Ravi with his.

I wanted to create a Cigar Box Guitar version that would be more portable and accessible, but yet have the sound of a sitar. I started with finding something I could use for a body and settled on a hand drum from Amazon that looked like it would have good resonance and had a mandala pattern on the top.

It already has sound holes on the top and bottom, which was good. What needed changing was it had two chambers inside so you could get two sounds out of the drum. I put a small saw through the bigger hole and also used a chisel to remove the partition between the chambers. I was worried that the top would not be stiff enough to handle the pressure of 6 strings on the bridge, so I glued in a bridge post under the bridge for extra support.

The key tonal characteristics of a sitar are:

A buzzing sound as you play. Whereas a normal musical instrument bridge has a sharp edge to give a clean and clear sound, the sitar has a "buzz bridge" with a very short sharp edge the strings go over so they are in tune, but then they vibrate against the 1" of bone saddle to create the buzz.
Sympathetic strings that vibrate along with the strings you actually play to create a droning sound. To simulate this, I added a second course of strings tuned in octaves to the 3 primary strings, similar to how a 12 string guitar works to create a very "chorus-like" sound.
Easily bent strings so the player can create microtonal vibrato effects. An actual sitar does this via huge curved frets that do not sit on a fingerboard, so there's nothing but air below the strings and you can push down a lot to create the vibrato tones. I simulated this by "scalloping" my MGB bolt on neck using a file to remove a lot of the fretboard wood so the strings can be pressed down as you play.

I put a cool mandala sticker on the headstock. I also glued in an MGB "ghost pickup" on the inside of the top so I can plug it into an amplifier. I tuned it up to a typical 3 string guitar tuning, but using E-B-E (with octave strings) instead of the typical G-D-G. The E tuning is because it is the key that I usually play Paint It Black and Norwegian Wood in. It sounds great and I'm really rocking those songs!