stupid pedal trick,,,,faking sitar sounds

[pinkjimiphoton]

i wounder if it would still work at stage volumes? cuz that would be insane...have you gigged with it?

the never ending quest for weird ways to get cool sounds... sometimes i think the sounds themselves are beckoning like silenced sirens waiting
to again unleash some godforsaken banshee's wail...



i have gotta get one of those things and try it. i have a telephone speaker i was thinking about playing with in a similar manner, but putting the driver on the detuned squire is
true genius. well done!!

i bet would work well with the 12 string on my double.

then when i play my les paul guitar with my detuned violin, i can get the drone without kicking my strat. bloody genius.

i think i just channelled nigel. if only they could do something about these tiny slices of bread..


bad humor for a saturday morning.

you need some of them chips? i can send ya some if ya need 'em. that sounds too cool to not be able to play with.

[DougH]

Nothing about this sustainer is gig-worthy.;-) It's just a home experiment. Probably need to get a mechanical designer like Paul to come up with a cool enclosure and a slick way of attaching it to the guitar and keeping the cables organized.

But the way a sitar drone works is it is acoustic and mechanical resonance. Outside of DSP, like EHX did, I don't think an all electronic approach is going to sound that great, esp for generating the drone sound.

[Gus]

Maybe make something like a small lap steel with a pickup and device to vibrate it and put it in an isolation box

[pinkjimiphoton]

dudes, do a small box with an octave of chromatically tuned strings, over a single dano lipstick tube and maybe the springs from a couple of them toy "reverb" microphones too for extra ringy drony goodness?

[amptramp]

Since the sitar has a bunch of tuned strings that are activated by sympathetic vibration of the strings that are plucked, you could generate a box with gyrators for the inductors and capacitors to tune the sympathetic strings.  Gyrators are used in graphic equalizers, so the design exists - you just have to apply it by hitting it with the string input and adding the extra tuned circuit outputs to the picked string output.  The picked output may need a heavy fuzz to give it the true sitar sound.

[Gurner]

Since the sitar has a bunch of tuned strings that are activated by sympathetic vibration of the strings that are plucked, you could generate a box with gyrators for the inductors and capacitors to tune the sympathetic strings.  Gyrators are used in graphic equalizers, so the design exists - you just have to apply it by hitting it with the string input and adding the extra tuned circuit outputs to the picked string output.  The picked output may need a heavy fuzz to give it the true sitar sound.

Sounds like a lot of effort, if I was that keen for a sitar sound, surely it'd be easier to buy a sitar...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sitar-/281135933553?pt=UK_Musical_Instruments_Sting_Instruments&hash=item417501e871

I never quite 'got' the quest for a sitar sound (other than for a novelty/quirky bit of fun, my Variax had one - & the novelty got old unfeasibly quick), I really can't think of one occasion in my life where I thought to myself..."Hmm, what this song really needs is a sitar."

Perhaps it's akin to a mountaineering thing i.e. .....  "cos it's there"

It's like that moog sustainer guitar that kills/dampens the strings & makes the guitar play/feel a bit like a banjo..... nope, I don't get it! (sure it's clever, but a feature no guitarist has ever yearned for)

[armdnrdy]

Or.......

Throw down the money for one of these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GZGDYJ77xA

Listen about two minutes in.

[mistahead]

I love The Tea Party (band, not astro-turfing wankers pretending to be something positively political) and as such have had a decent amount of time fiddling around looking for eastern, mid eastern, etc sounds.

The shortest path to GOOD results is an odd one (IMNSHO) - short delay (doubling) and reverb, even better if you can split the doubling off and square it right up, but ultimately TUNINGS.

DGDGGD (low to high) is the most accessible and least horrendous on the strings - crack out the open tunings based on eastern/mideastern/indian scales and you will get something the audiences' minds will associate much more with a sitar or similar than these (albeit VERY awesome) tricks in this thread.

[pinkjimiphoton]

[DougH]

I already had the sustainer so it was a small matter of hooking it up differently to do the droning thing. For me, there's a wide panorama of stuff you can do with it, beyond just emulating a sitar. I'm not interested in emulating sitar on a guitar per se. I'm more interested in exploring some of the concepts of the sounds created by a sitar, and applying them to guitar for whatever purposes.

Edit: The tuning suggestion is correct. If you really want to make your guitar "sound like a sitar" and you want to play music that sounds like ragas and so forth, start with the open tuning first.

[pinkjimiphoton]

i figured rg may be interested, as he'd just posted "sitars...mostly @mark" like a week or so ago.
i don't really care to sound like a sitar, tho it's an interesting flavor to add sometimes. depends on what you're into.

the more sounds one can get out of an electric geetar, the better imnvho.... from mating buffalo being tased to sitars to the sounds of heavy metal flying and beyond, it's all good..

especially if ya can emulate something without synthesis, or with something easy and cheap to build. while i doubt most of the folks out there are gonna be playing "siberian khatru" any time soon, well, if'n they need to, here's one way to fake it (except this really only works on single notes, diads and more complex sound more like a ring mod)

so i'm with doug on this one. if i REALLY wanted a sitar, i'd either buy one, or buy one of them ravish sitar pedals mike mathews came up with.

[mistahead]

I do love making guitars sound like sitars... sometimes...

I've got an old Hondo with dual humbuckers (lawsuit *cough* era I'm told) in my shed, I'm considering brass top nut and scalloped fretboard on a new neck. The guitar is the heaviest (incl. the "studio" models from the big fellas) I've ever held and has a decent binding so sustain in the instrument is not a big issue. Going to recon the pickups (oxidized and pretty bad condition) to try to get some "non-traditional" sound out of them and use opend tunings torn straight out the middle east.

When going for those really extreme open tunings its a big step at times, strings and attenuation need attention to make it work.

[Tony Forestiere]

When going for those really extreme open tunings its a big step at times, strings and attenuation need attention to make it work.

Drastic tension changes on the neck (changing tuning or heavier/lighter gauge strings) will affect your neck relief, and truss rod adjustments take a while to move and settle.
Then, you will next want to adjust your intonation.   

[mistahead]

Attenuation - not the word I was looking for... INTONATION was.... thank you Tony.

(Guess who's been arguing about whether or not running a single span - 98m of Cat5 between two ends of a warehouse... it COULD work sure... but a repeater is so cheap...)