Black Gayaki Sitar From Yousef Mirajkar

by Paul Barrette, August 2005, updated January 2007

Ustad Shahid Parvez style gayaki sitar:

Since my sitar has matured and has its full sound now, I thought I would update my review and give some more specific details about the sound.

Appearence

This is a black sitar, not dark brown, but painted black and covered with shellac. The pegs are typical swirl pattern pegs. The peg shaft is slightly thinner than I would have hoped but they are very well fitted. I have not put chalk on this sitar yet.

The head stock trim is a kind of circle-with-a-dot-in-the-middle pattern, while the neck decoration is the shiny pattern commonly seen on sitars (and western drum sets).

The frets are heavy gauged nickel plated brass and tied fairly well. I have only had to retie 3 of them due to knot breakage. The neck thickness is slightly thicker than most sitars. I have found this to be a feature on gayaki style sitars. It is hard to get used to at first due to the fact that you have to strengthen your hand for the new grip. The sound channel inside is slightly broader in turn. The tarab eyelets are not the typical "cheerio" style, but rather a slotted style. I prefer this slotted style to the "cheerio" style, there is more strength for string support. However, these are the slotted type as seen on karaseksound.com sitars. Those are far superior. There is no "dog leg" tarab pegs for facilitating the tarab "pinky flick" that USP is so fond of doing. The tarab pegs are simple black pegs with partially painted shafts, tipped with bone.

The mizrab guard is simple and matches the rest of the decor. The florettes on the face of the table, just outside the peacocks, is more elegant than on VK style sitars, just not as cleanly carved as I would have liked.

The jawari is mediocre at best. The original jawari was bone, but there were some grey patches which were softer than the rest. This led to some sound deadening at times. I have since replaced this with a proper ebony set of jawaris. The tuning swan bead is cheap plastic which was replaced by an ebony one.

I replaced the often dull sounding bone jawari with an ebony one. Note the angle of the top with the back cut shape. This is done in the style of Ustad Shahid Parvez. The cheapo plastic bird tuner was replaced by an ebony one. The difference in sound is literally night and day (nice metaphor!)

The upper cone shaped macaroni tuning beads are excellent. I am surprised that they are not used commonly on sitars. I find them far superior to the common "egg" shaped tuners. For asthetic reasons, I changed these tuners for ebony ones. The langot is bone and solidly built. It is slightly smaller than some other ones.

The tomba is large and tastefully decorated with some geometric shapes in black and trimmed with more of the circle and dot pattern in white. There is far less ornamentation on the rear tumba than on a typical Ravi Shankar style sitar.

Meend Range

Meend on this sitar is 7 notes from Re to Dha. That is 2 more than my RS style sitar and it is easier to meend. I think the big beefy frets have something to do with it. The extra meend is possible because the Ma string is shifted towards the chickaris more so than with Karaj Pancham string set up. There is just more "room" to meend. This sitar is lighter than the srishti. This is possible with gayaki sitars because there is not as much stress on the instrument since it doesn't have all the heavy gauge bass strings.

Sound

The tone of this sitar is incredible. I think it is partly due to the large tabli, but also to the aged wood in the tabli. Mostly it is due to the jawari made with old ebony. It is very responsive. This is my main sitar. Over the past 2 years I have played it every day. It is well broken in . The jure string has a wonderful tone. If this were a KP sitar the bass response would be fantastic. The tarabs all respond to each note, in either octave. Dha is a little boomy. I have spent a lot of time fiddling with the jawari to remedy this and I am almost there. I shall provide a sound clip to back this up shortly.

History About The Acquisition

This sitar was hand delivered from India in 2005. The most remarkable thing is that it arrived with no case! Yes, no case at all!! Someone carried it over on the plane with great care. I cannot imagine how it got here without a case in one piece. I have heard from other sitar players how a sitar was broken eventhough it was in a heavy duty fiberglass case.

Sitar Predestination (ya right)

Sitars with fiberglass cases break, yet this one arrived unscathed, it must have been destined for me right? Here was a sitar that was deemed too big to be gayaki and too large for most cases. This is probably why it did not come with a case in the first place. The sitar found me. Interesting reversal. BTW I ordered a fiberglass case immediately from sitarsetc.com.