Sitar
A North Indian long-necked lute with movable frets and sympathetic strings.
What it means
The sitar is a North Indian long-necked lute with a long, broad neck, a large gourd or wooden resonating body, and movable, curved metal frets. It has some melody and drone strings that are plucked, and beneath them a set of sympathetic strings that are not played but resonate along.
The movable frets allow notes to be bent, that is, the string is pulled sideways to raise the pitch in a glide.
Musical use
In classical Hindustani music the sitar carries ragas, melodic models unfolded over a constant drone, usually accompanied by the tabla. A performance usually begins with a free, unmetered introduction and gradually builds to rhythmically defined sections.
In the West the sitar became widely known in the 1960s through Ravi Shankar and through pop musicians who used it on their recordings.
The sitar should be distinguished from the sarod, another North Indian lute without frets and with a metal fingerboard, and from the tanpura, which supplies only the drone and plays no melody.
Performance practice
As a learner, begin with simple scale exercises and the clean bending of single notes. Listen to a lot of classical music, since performance rests on ragas whose character and note sequence you must absorb by ear.