What is meend?
Meend (also spelled mind or meed) is a continuous glide from one note to another, played on a single pluck. On the sitar, the player pulls the string sideways across a fret, and the pitch rises smoothly — through every point between the two notes, not in steps. Let go of the pull and it slides back down. It's the ornament that makes the sitar sound like a voice.
Try it
Drag the string below. The further you pull, the higher the note — the same physics as a real sitar fret, where the pull adds tension.
Pull the meend
Seen from above. Press on the string at the Re fret and drag down — one pluck, and the pitch follows the pull.
Re+0.0 semitones
And here are the two motions side by side — a meend's single smooth curve, and a gamak's sharp repeated shake:
Meend vs gamak — see the difference
Seen from above: one fret, one string. Watch what the string — and the pitch — does.
Meend: one pluck, one long pull
One pluck, finger on one fret — the string is pulled aside and the pitch glides up. The Ga fret is never touched.
Gamak: forceful oscillation
Repeated forceful pulls around the note — not a gentle vibrato.
In Compose, > bends one pluck toward the next note (an approximation) and ~ marks gamak — the real thing needs a string under your finger.
How a sitar makes a meend
Two things about the sitar make meend possible.
- The frets are curved and tall. They stand high off the neck, tied on with cord, so there's space beneath the string to pull it a long way sideways. The parts of a sitar guide shows them.
- The main string is thin steel under high tension. Pulling it sideways stretches it, and more tension means a higher note.
The left-hand finger stops the string on a fret, then pulls it across the fret's curve toward the edge of the neck. A gentle pull raises the pitch by a semitone; a strong one, on a sitar set up for it, can raise it by a fourth or more. Players reach a note this way instead of moving up the neck because the note arrives from somewhere — it carries the shape of the journey with it.
A meend can go either way:
- Upward: fret the lower note, pluck, pull up to the higher one.
- Downward: pull the string up first, silently, then pluck, and release down to the lower note. The listener hears a descent, not a pull.
What a meend sounds like
The second version is Sitarpedia's player bending a recorded pluck — it shows the shape of a meend, one attack and a continuous slide, but it isn't a real pulled string. Listen to any recording of a sitarist playing an alap (the slow, unaccompanied opening of a raga) and you'll hear the real thing in nearly every phrase.
Why meend matters in a raga
In Western music, a slide is usually decoration; the melody would still be complete without it. In Hindustani music, the way you travel between two notes is often part of the raga itself. Some ragas approach a note only by gliding up to it; some touch a note only in passing on the way to another. Play the same notes with clean, separate attacks and a trained listener hears the right notes and the wrong raga.
That's why sitar teachers spend so long on meend, and why the sitar's frets are built the way they are. An instrument designed to stop a note cleanly, like the piano, can't do it at all. The what is a raga guide goes into why a raga is more than its scale.
Meend, gamak, and the other ornaments
- Meend — a smooth glide between two notes. One direction, one continuous movement.
- Gamak — a forceful, repeated oscillation on or between notes. Energy and weight rather than smoothness. See the what is gamak guide.
- Andolan — a slow, gentle sway on a single note, as on the komal Ga of Darbari Kanada.
- Kan — a grace note: a quick touch of a neighbouring note just before the main one.
Meend vs a guitar bend
A guitarist pushes a string across the fretboard to bend it, and a sitar player pulls it across the fret — the same mechanism. The differences are of degree. A sitar's tall curved frets let the bend go much further, often several notes rather than one or two semitones, and a sitar phrase may string many slides together on a single pluck. The sitar for guitar players guide covers what carries over.
How it's written
There's no single universal symbol for meend. Printed notation often draws
a curved line over the notes it joins, and many transcriptions leave it
out. In Sitarpedia's Compose and Songs, a > after a note glides it into
the next: R> G means "pluck Re, slide to Ga."
Practising meend
Meend is physical: you build it in the left hand over months. Start small — a one-semitone pull, landing exactly in tune — and check it against a drone so you can hear when you arrive. The slide tracker listens to your sitar through the microphone and draws the pitch curve of your meend against the target, so you can see whether you overshot, arrived late, or wobbled on the way.