From Guitarist To Sitarist

by Adam Duncan, June 2005

I have been playing the guitar for about sixteen years and a musician for almost twenty years. I am now twenty-five years old and I've recently completed three years of an honours bachelor degree in classical guitar and composition at Ottawa University and I'm a composer/ performer. I've been so fortunate to have been studying sitar under the guidance of Anwar Khurshid and Ustad Shahid Parvez. They've both changed music for me in numerous ways and I'm forever indebted to both of them. The following article presents my viewpoints on the sitar.

As a musician since the age of six, I've crossed a few different musical paths. I began with the saxaphone and later moved over to the guitar when I was eleven. I then began playing the sitar when I was twenty-three.

The purchase of my first (and only) sitar was the culmination of years of interest in Indian music. I had no teacher. I knew no one that played Indian music. Still, after hearing a radio-broadcasted sitar concert on a Sunday afternoon, I made the firm decision of purchasing a sitar (read the Buying a Sitar Article).

Guitar And Sitar

I thought that due to my previous experiences with stringed instruments (guitar, lute, bass guitar ) that playing the sitar would be very similar to playing a guitar. I was gravely mistaken. Strings and frets are the only common features that sitars and guitars have.

A big difference of the guitar and a sitar is the harmonic qualities of a guitar. There are huge chordal possibilities on a guitar. You can play in different keys and Indian music has a constant drone which is roughly a C# or D. On guitar you can use harmonics. Due to the fact that you have six strings on guitar, you can create washes of sund using harmonics. On sitar, you can't really use harmonics in the same way. I've figured out what notes are where with harmonics but it's different than guitar and impractical on the sitar. On the guitar, you play verticaly with all four fingers of the left hand where as on the sitar you play horizontally with your index and middle finger. While playing a sitar one has to sit very differently than while holding a guitar.

Some physical differences between the guitar and sitar are as follows. The sitar has six main strings and eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings which are underneath the main strings. These are tuned to the scale/mode/rag that you are playing in. The guitar has only six strings. You can actually have eighteen notes at a time on guitar so it's not a limited instrument either. The sitar is around four and a half feet long where the guitar is around two and a half to three feet long. there are many other diferences between the two but those are the main ones.

Material

As a classical/jazz guitarist I've always been used to the idea of working on repertoire. Learning about a piece of music, understanding the piece, working on phrasing, controling the voices, and eventually having a good presentation of the piece. Since Hindustani music is really an oral tradition, there were no catalogues similar to Bach or Charlie Parker Omnibooks to work on or practice. Luckily, there were some books in the library with some notated music that I could read. It was written in C so it's fairly easy to read. However, with practice and persistence, it's very possible to become fluent in Hindustani notation. The notation is as follows:

Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ni Sa

This is the same thing as the French solfege system of Do Re Mi. In the book that I was working on there were four-hundred and fifty Hindustani rags. Though sight reading is one of biggest strengths, the sitar is a differnt instrument and I had to learn how to read on sitar. One thing about reading music like that on sitar is that it's very much like a piano with regards to the fact that each note on the sitar has a direct co-relation to the printed note. The position of the note will not change on sitar. On guitar you can play the same note on all six strings. So there's that vertical versus horizontal playing factor. However the book did provide enough material to keep me motivated and practice.

Technique

There are many differences between sitar and guitar technique. First we'll look at the left hand. On guitar you use all four fingers of your left hand. The tips of your fingers eventually get callused. The position of your hand is similar to sitar. On guitar your hand is roughly in a "C" shape with your thumb behind the second finger. The inner part of your hand should'nt touch the neck and it should be a relaxed but controlled position. On sitar, you use the index and midlle fingers to play. These fingers get callused too but the callus is very different than a guitar callus. The sitar callus is a line in both fingers. This is caused by the fact that you're constantly playing on one string on the same spot on your finger. At times it can be quite painful, if that happens, just switch spots.

There are big differences between the use of the right hand on these instruments. On guitar you can use a pick or your fingers. I tend to use all five fingers of the right hand. On sitar you use a mezrab. This is a wire pick you wear on the end of your first finger. In theory you use all four fingers of your right hand to play sitar. You use the pinky finger to hit all of the symathetic strings at the begining of a rag. The annular finger is used to hit the sympathetic strings during a tihai or to emphasize certain parts of a phrase. The index finger is use to actually play the strings with the pick. The only use I've ever seen for the middle finger is when Ustad Shahid Parvez plays the sympathetic strings by picking them and playing rags or phrases on them. That is a very difficult thing to do. When playing sitar the thumb has to stay in the same position on the side of the neck to maintain control of your hand. On guitar, your hand floats freely in the air but generaly stays in one place.

Now the most painful difference is the sitting position. While playing guitar there's a proper way to sit. You sit on a chair, your left foot raised on a stool and the guitar sits on the left leg. No pain involved. Learning how to sit with the sitar was a painful process. Basically you sit cross-legged, then raise your right leg and rest it on your left leg and place the sitar on your left foot. It should sit comftorbly and be held in position by your right arm. My right leg felt so much pain. I had always sat wrong untill my teacher Anwar Khurshid showed me how to. That's when the pain started. My right leg hurt for months untill finally it just stopped hurting. Sometimes my left leg seizes up and it feels like somebody hammered a nail into my kneecap. But usually it's ok. I thought the left leg pain would go away much like the right leg pain, but I've seen people that've been playing for decades showing signs of pain in the left leg so maybe it just gets less frequent.

Practicing

Since I was young I was taught that with music you need to work. Music is fair to everybody and that with hard work, you get to play good music. I then of course took the same approach when I started playing the sitar.

In essence good practice is essentially the same in all of the practicing arts whether it be music or karate. First learn it, then go slow, then go fast. With Hindustani music, it is very important to be able to sing the material you're playing. If you sing it first, you internalize that music and it becomes a part of you. The instrument, for any music is always secondary. I can't even start to explain how hard it would be to sing a Bach Lute Suite but it's the same for that kind of music. You read through it and sing each voice seperately then play them all together. Jazz is the same. Scales are the most important thing to practice on any instrument. If fixes everything and on guitar and sitar. Material is just practice but the level of material all depends on how well you can play sargam.

However, when you play two instruments you have to work four times as hard as you do when you play one instrument. On both you have practice and playing, performance and preperation. Keeping up with daily practice on both instruments is a lage task to carry out.

Music

I've loved music ever since I can remember. My life without music would be very unimaginable. Just the thought of it scares me alot. I'm blessed to be able to play music and will never take it for granted. I've listened to all kinds of music but mainly jazz. The best thing to do is if you want to play like someone, then only listen to that person. I wanted to play guitar like lenny Breau so I only listened to him for almost two years. When you do that, the things that who you're listening to plays becomes a part of you through osmosis and then their music becomes internalized in you. This is the same thing for playing Hindustani music. My guru is Ustad Shahid Parvez and since first meeting him he is the only sitarist I listen to. Ustadji's music is the sweetest music I've heard in my life. I used to read in books about Indian music that listening to a great master of Hindusdtani music is like watching a locus petal floating down a river. Now that I've heard Ustadji, I understand what that means.