Sitar (mostly @Mark)

[Morocotopo]

Or... or... or...

Play a sitar!!!!!



Now we see the genius of Vinnie Bell, don´t we?

[pinkjimiphoton]

BUT, if you used electronic drones and had them tuned to a chromatic scale, wouldn't you have to excite the drone in the same way? like, as you said RG the e string will only work with the e drone or certain harmonic frequencys...  if they were just below the point where they oscillate (is that hysterisis?) i'd think only notes with related harmonic nodes would vibrate, kinda like on the real thing.

BUT i think you'd need to do a hex pickup probably with a circuit for each string.... just a boy that had a big hallucination, here... but it sure would be cool to do this electronically.

RG, that's i think what they call a "tuned reverb"... i have an old folk harp someone gave me i was gonna try doing that with... use one of them vibrating things that you can attach to stuff to make it vibrate like a speaker (back in the 70'd during breaks sometimes if we were goin over stuff between sets, our bass player used to push his bass against the fender of his beetle. thus reinventing the fender bass..)

anyways, i think a magnetic pickup would be better than a piezo. but get the thing vibrating with that transducer thingamajig and pick up the sympathetic drones resulting, and yah, you got it i think.

it's pretty much how the coral sitar worked, it was a guitat with autoharp style chromatic strings with what looked like a lipstick tube pickup to pick 'em up.

gonna try and shoot a quick video of what i mean with the delay.. but you can only tune one drone that way, but you can make it come and go pretty much... by no means perfect, but maybe something to think about.

peace

[Nasse]

My sitar project is still delayed. Got suitable nice cheapo neck and all I need for that is budget tuners. Goeldo sitarizer saddles have been waiting. Maybe this summer I can get it done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsMTlkLYxM

Short reverb spring (very short) plugged to my b-ringer cheapo mixer with multi fx was intresting cant remember if I used pitch sifter preset

[tca]

Hmmm. Just hit me. One might be able to build a drone-string box.

Imagine something like a rack of strings or an mbira on a sound board inside a box. A speaker under the sound board provides the necessary acoustic input to drive the sound board and hence the strings/leaves. A magnetic pickup across the strings grabs the string movement, which can then be amplified and mixed back to the straight guitar sound. It would be a tricky build, being a bit less complicated than building a guitar, as well as vibration sensitive (ever whack a reverb pan?) and requiring tuning.  But it could get a more-authentic emulation of sitar drones, being closer to the means of sound production.

It's been bothering me that while it's easy to get mechanical Q's of thousands without ever going into oscillation, it's difficult to do this with electronic means because of the ease of slipping over into a loop gain greater than unity with a powered drive.

You mean something like this?



Actually this is a thing  that I've been planning to build (we all been there), a palm speaker: a speaker enclosure with strings attached connected to a speaker, from the ondes Martenot synth! That strings are  high Q resonant oscillators.

Cheers.

[tca]

How about a chromatic scale's worth of single transistor twin-T filters?  With high gain transistors and matching you'd be right on the hairy edge of oscillation anyway, and you could intentionally mis-bias them to get your hard limiting.

Something like this: