Sitarpedia

The sitar in Western music

For many people outside India, the first sitar they ever heard was on a rock record. In the mid-1960s, a few pop musicians fell for the instrument's sound — that buzzing, singing, drone-backed tone — and within a couple of years it was on records by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and dozens of others. Here are the songs, the people, and what they borrowed.

The Beatles

"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" on Rubber Soul is usually named as the first Western pop recording to feature a sitar. George Harrison had come across one on the set of the film Help! and bought his own; on the song he doubles John Lennon's melody line. It's a simple part — Harrison was a beginner — but the sound made people stop.

Harrison then studied with Ravi Shankar, travelling to India to learn, and the Beatles' Indian-influenced songs grew more serious:

  • "Love You To" (Revolver) — sitar, tabla and a drone, built like a short Indian piece, with a slow opening before the rhythm enters.
  • "Within You Without You" (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) — recorded with Indian musicians from London, on dilruba, swarmandal and tabla as well as sitar, with no chord changes at all.
  • "The Inner Light" — a Harrison song recorded partly in Bombay (now Mumbai) with Indian musicians.

The melody of Norwegian Wood

Norwegian Wood's melody uses a major scale with a flattened seventh — the Western Mixolydian mode. In Hindustani terms that's the Khamaj thaat: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha komal-Ni. Played over a constant drone, it has a sound you'll recognise:

The second line is the raga Khamaj itself, and the difference is the point: Norwegian Wood borrowed a scale; a raga would also tell you which Ni to use going up and which coming down. The what is a raga guide explains the rest.

The Rolling Stones and others

  • "Paint It Black" — Brian Jones plays the sitar riff that opens the song and doubles the vocal. It became one of the best-known sitar sounds in rock.
  • Traffic, "Paper Sun" — Dave Mason on sitar.
  • The Byrds, Donovan and many others drew on Indian sounds in the same years — sometimes a sitar, sometimes a guitar imitating one, often a drone.

The electric sitar

The sitar is hard to play and hard to record, so session guitarist Vinnie Bell helped develop the electric sitar with Danelectro: a guitar body and guitar tuning with a special flat "buzz bridge" that imitates the jawari's buzz, plus a set of sympathetic strings. It was played like a guitar, which is why it turns up on so many pop records of the late 1960s and 1970s — the opening of "Hooked on a Feeling" and Steely Dan's "Do It Again" solo are two well-known examples.

It's a different instrument: no meend, no raga, no real sympathetic shimmer. But it shows how much the sitar's buzz had become a sound in its own right. The maintenance guide explains where that buzz comes from on the real instrument.

Ravi Shankar's role

None of this would have happened the same way without Ravi Shankar. Already a celebrated musician in India, he toured the West for years before the Beatles, recording with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin and influencing jazz musicians — John Coltrane admired his music. After Harrison became his student, Shankar's audience exploded: he played the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock, and joined Harrison for the Concert for Bangladesh.

He had mixed feelings about some of it. He wanted audiences to hear Indian classical music as a serious art with centuries of training behind it, not as a psychedelic sound effect, and he was openly uncomfortable with the drug culture around some of those festivals. The famous sitar players guide has more on him and others.

Classical crossovers

  • Ravi Shankar with Yehudi Menuhin — duets for violin and sitar.
  • Ravi Shankar with Philip Glass — the album Passages.
  • Anoushka Shankar, his daughter, has recorded with musicians from flamenco, electronic and Western classical backgrounds, and is one of the most-heard sitarists in the world today.

What Western music borrowed — and what it didn't

The 1960s songs mostly borrowed three things: the sitar's timbre, the drone, and modal melody that doesn't move through chords. What they rarely borrowed was the raga itself — the rules, the ornaments, the long improvised development — or the rhythmic cycles. That's not a criticism; they were pop songs. But if those songs are what drew you to the sitar, there's a much larger musical world behind them.

Hear the real thing

Pick a raga from Ragas and listen to it played on a sitar, then put on a full recording by a classical sitarist. If you come from guitar, the sitar for guitar players guide is the next step.