Krsna Kirtana Songs est. 2001 www.kksongs.org
KKSongs Guitar Project: The Fusion Between Guitar and
Sitar
Ever since Indian music has become recognized and
integrated in Western culture, there have been attempts to simplify the
instrument or redesign it for convenience purposes. The success of such designs
depends on the ability to reproduce the sound while retaining the technique to
reproduce the sounds. An earlier article found on KKSongs discusses new
possible inventions of various instruments from the sarangi and sitar to the
tabla and pakhawaj. These are not meant to disrespect the original instruments,
but rather find ways to preserve them in a new light. One Western instrument
has been undergoing changes to achieve the Indian sound is the guitar.
The guitar has been incorporated in Indian music
many ways. For the most obvious Western uses, the guitar has been used to keep
chords in a musical system that is not originally meant to be played with
chords. Whether it was acoustic guitar strumming chords or a bass guitar
playing notes that are in good harmony with the measure, the guitar has found
its place in folk and popular music without any questions asked. Even some
light classical forms like thumris and bhajans have guitar chords used.
However, other good attempts at making the guitar bear Indian melodies have
become prevalent. For example, Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya’s slide guitar inventions
have been one of the starting trends. Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt took the
concept of the slide guitar and the Hawaiian guitar to modify it to become
known as the “Mohan Vina.” Each of these guitar inventions had their own style
and their own success.
My
experience with working with a guitar to make an Indian has been an incredible
one. Not being so familiar with plucked stringed instruments in September 2004,
I went to a music shop and found a small, cheap $30 guitar that sounded good. I
tuned the guitar to acceptable notes based on Indian sarangi tuning. I played
Raga Malkauns in a staccato fashion. Even though it wasn’t sounding like a
sitar or sarod, it had a good sound that I could possibly work with. The notes
resonated quite nicely. Without much of a second thought, I decided to purchase
this instrument to see what I can do. I tried to do perform glissandos to
replicate the sitar nature of the instrument. Sarod techniques would not apply
as this is a fretted instrument. Sarod techniques on the guitar make meends
sound like railroad tracks. Sitar techniques would require pulling the string
laterally. However, the main string equivalent (the highest pitched sound)
would not give me much room to perform a meend. Instrumental:
Raga Bhairavi (2004) is a recording of a half-hearted attempt of
playing Raga Bhairavi with a looped tabla cycle of dadra tala.
I
eventually found some basis to work with ornamentation. To do small meends, I
could pull or push the string upwards to get a pitch bend. My first real
experimentation of this took place in Matchless Gifts through Song: Ohe Vaisnava Thakura
Doyara Sagara (2005). The interlude before the final verse of the song
has the bass string with meends at one point. The main octave had its brief
moments in Song: Vrndavana Ramya Sthana
(2005). It has small meends but nothing truly noteworthy.
Besides ornamentation, one other aspect of this
guitar 
that was missing was the presence of drone strings,
or chikaris. In most plucked stringed instruments, a drone string would be
present in order to mark rhythm and emphasize the Sa and some other important
note. It wasn’t until March 2005 that I got rid of the bass string and added a
chikari string to give a Sa sound. One chikari string was certainly better than
no chikari at all. In addition to that, I developed better meends using a
lap-held position and pulling the main string. The result of this type of
playing can be heard in Matchless Gifts in this track Song: Govinda Kesava
Janardana Vasudeva (2005).
Until February 2006, I decided that guitar needed to
sound more than Indian that it is. Besides doing meends and adding chikaris,
the guitar still has the connotation of it having a Western tone and not much
of strong Indian tone desired. The buzz that was prevalent in sitar and vina
performances were absent in this guitar. Sitars have camel bone (once
ivory-made) bridges, while Sarasvati vinas from Carnatic music have a bronze
bridge. With sitar bridges specifically, when a string sits on a bone bridge
for a long time, the string’s weight and tension add groves on the bridge which
looses its special tone and makes it sound off-key. They need to perform a
process called jawari, or sanding the bridge in order to achieve its optimal
sitar tone. I had to do a similar jawari-job for the guitar and it had a degree
of difference. It was not a drastic change, but it had a different tone. Listen
to my sampled recording of Raga Madhyamad
Sarang I recorded in February 2006.
In
March 2006, the main string, after serving a great duration of plucked and
being subject to a great deal of meends and gamaks, broke. I tried playing all
of my main melodies on the second string and it did more justice than the first
string could ever do. Even though I have five strings, the first string allowed
me to more flexible meends since I had a bigger range to pull the string to.
After more jawari work and adding a second chikari string, the guitar sounded
quite unique. Here are two recordings to hear the magical sound that was given
by the evolution of the guitar to the upcoming guitar-vina “Instrumental: “Vandanam” (2006)”
from Ataraxis, “Instrumental: Ragamala Vina
(2006)” and from Sandhya Sadhana.
As we enter 2007, the guitar has evolved into
something else. I experimented the use of a penny in the chikari strings to see
if I could get a good buzz. It sounded like a vina buzz when I would play the
chikari strings. However, when I played Sa and Pa (given it was a Pa based
raga), the sympathetic resonating sounds of the chikaris made it sound like a
sitar’s resonance. I could clearly see more than ever that the guitar can be
redesigned as a sitar that can be played the same way but not as fragile to
carry around and not as difficult to tune. If I had a manufacturer to assist me
with this project, I would develop a guitar with is as big as an acoustic bass
guitar with a bigger neck with sitar frets (so that they may be moved according
to ragas as well as an ease of meends. I would have six main strings, four
chikari strings, and thirteen sympathetic strings. Unlike the original sitar,
these strings would be tuned with guitar machine pegs. The guitar sound-board
will be more spherical to allow the original sitar sitting position. As far as
a guitar-sound-hole is concerned, I would need more experiments and variables
to see if there will be a clear sound difference.
As Krsna allows me to record more, I will add more
updates as far as the KKSongs Guitar project comes along.