Welcome to Sitarpedia
Sitarpedia is a home for sitar players — from the first mizrab stroke to advanced meend and gamak technique. The goal is simple: put clear writing on technique and raga theory next to practice tools you can actually use in the browser, so reading about an idea and trying it out are never more than a click apart.
New to sitar? Start with the FAQ — cost, timelines, whether you need a teacher, what size instrument to get, and the rest of what people ask before their first lesson. Come back here once you're ready to actually start.
Learn
Learn is organized as an actual step-by-step path, not a plain list of posts sorted by date — read it top to bottom if you're new. It moves through six stages: the instrument and note-system fundamentals every player needs first; how a raga is actually built and read; how a full performance unfolds, from free-form improvisation into a fixed composition and the rhythmic cadences that punctuate it; the practice habits and ornamentation that build real technique; caring for a physical instrument, from buying one to keeping it in shape; and, last, the history and teaching lineages that shaped how the sitar is taught and heard today — deliberately last, because none of it is required to start playing. Already know what you're looking for? Every article also stands on its own, so feel free to jump straight in.
Virtual Sitar
The Virtual Sitar is a playable instrument right in your browser — no downloads, no plugins. It uses real sampled sitar tone and maps your computer keyboard to pitches the way many browser synths do, so you can pick a tonic (Sa), play up and down the octave, and hear how different swara choices actually sound rather than just reading about them. Below the sitar itself is a tabla companion: pick a taal (it defaults to the sixteen-beat Teentaal, with a couple of other common cycles available), set a tempo, and start a looping beat to practice playing in time — the same way you'd practice with a tabla player or a metronome, just built into the page.
Compose
Compose is a lightweight notation tool for writing out short
phrases and hearing them back. You type swara notation — S R G M and so
on for shuddha (natural) notes, lowercase for komal (flat) ones — into a
grid of boxes, sixteen to a row, and the grid grows as you fill it in. Set
a tonic, set a tempo per row, and hit play to hear your phrase performed
on the same sitar tone used elsewhere on the site. It's meant for quickly
testing a phrase you're working out by ear or transcribing something
you've learned, without needing separate notation software.
Songs
Songs pairs a reference recording with time-coded swara notation — the video plays, the matching line highlights as you follow along, and you can click any line to jump the video straight there. It's meant for learning from a real performance rather than an abstraction, and any song's notation can be opened directly in Compose if you want to play with it yourself.
Ragas
Ragas is the site's core raga reference: aroha, avaroha, vadi, samvadi, and a short description for each, grouped by thaat. Open any raga in Compose to hear its scale, and once you're composing something of your own there, Compose can check your phrase against that raga's rules and flag any notes that fall outside it.
Glossary
Hindustani classical music comes with a lot of vocabulary, and it piles up fast. The Glossary collects every key term used across this site — swara, raga, taal, and everything in between — in one alphabetical list, each linked back to the lesson that actually explains it.
Where to go next
The Learn path is built to be worked top to bottom, not read all at once: the "Start here" section covers the instrument, the note system, and the basic mechanics of getting a sound out of it, each post short enough to finish in one sitting. Read Understanding Swaras next, then keep moving down that first section before jumping ahead. If you've got a more immediate question instead — cost, timelines, whether you need a teacher — the FAQ has short, honest answers.
Practice this: open the Virtual Sitar right now and play five notes. No pressure to get anything right — just get a sound out before you read anything else. Thanks for reading, and for playing along.