Anatomy of the Sitar: Gourds, Frets, and Sympathetic Strings

The sitar looks complicated because it is — a full-size instrument can carry close to twenty strings, only a handful of which the player's right hand ever actually plucks. Understanding what each part does makes the instrument far less mysterious, and it explains a lot about why the sitar sounds the way it does.

The resonating body

Most sitars are built around a large gourd, the tumba, which forms the main resonating chamber, paired with a long hollowed neck (the dandi) that carries the frets up toward the tuning pegs. Many sitars — especially those built for a fuller, more sustained tone — add a second, smaller gourd near the top of the neck, mostly for balance and resonance rather than as a second primary sound source. The body is typically capped with a thin wooden soundboard, and it's the shape and material of this whole resonating system that gives each individual instrument its character, the same way the body of a guitar or violin shapes its tone.

Two very different sets of strings

This is the part that trips up most newcomers: a sitar has playing strings (the baaj strings, which include the melody strings and a handful of drone/rhythm strings called chikari) and a much larger set of sympathetic strings (taraf) that run underneath the frets and are never plucked directly at all. A typical concert sitar carries around six or seven playing strings and eleven to thirteen taraf strings beneath them — the exact count varies by style and maker, but the taraf strings consistently outnumber the playing strings by roughly two to one, which is part of why the instrument looks far more complicated than it is to actually play. The sympathetic strings are tuned to the notes of whichever raga is being played and simply resonate in response to the main strings — they're what gives the sitar its shimmering, almost reverberant halo of sound. It's a genuinely different design philosophy from most Western string instruments, closer in spirit to how a piano's un-struck strings can resonate sympathetically when the sustain pedal is held.

Frets that move

Sitar frets (parda) are curved metal bars tied onto the neck with string rather than fixed in place like a guitar's. That's not a shortcut — it's a feature. Because they're tied on, frets can be shifted slightly to adjust intonation for a particular raga, and the curved shape lets a player pull a string sideways across the fret to bend pitch smoothly between notes. That bending technique, called meend, is central to how Hindustani classical melody moves — we cover it in more depth in our piece on meend and gamak.

The bridge that makes the buzz

The main bridge (jawari) is flat and gently curved rather than sharply grooved, which lets the string touch the bridge surface across a small area instead of a single point. That's the source of the sitar's signature buzzing sustain — a deliberately "imperfect" contact that's tuned by ear and by hand, often over years of a technician's experience, not by a fixed spec. We go much deeper on what that setup process actually involves, and how to tell a good buzz from a bad one, in our piece on jawari and sitar setup.

Hearing it, not just reading about it

Anatomy only gets you so far — the fastest way to actually connect these parts to what you hear is to play a few notes yourself. Our Virtual Sitar streams a real sampled sitar tone straight to your browser and maps it to your computer keyboard.

Practice this: pluck a single low note on the Virtual Sitar and listen specifically for the shimmering resonance that follows a second or two after the pluck — that's the taraf strings responding.