The Background
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| Rogue Electric Sitar |
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| Gotoh Buzz Bridge |
When I first was getting into rock music as a kid, I discovered
classic stuff from the 60’s and 70’s.
Bands like the Beatles blew me away because it was the first time I was
hearing rock bands use more exotic instruments.
This opened up many doors for me musically. The Sitar was at the forefront in my mind
because of how cool it sounded. I immediately
looked into buying one; however I was disheartened to find that sitars couldn’t
be found cheap. I then found out about old
Danelectro electric sitars from the 60’s.
By this point those were still a bit pricey, so I found other alternatives. A
cheap guitar company named Rogue was putting out a reasonably priced sitar, but
it was still money for something I could only use sparingly at times and it
still wasn’t a real sitar. I thought
there had to be an easier cheaper way to achieve the sound of a sitar without
buying a whole new instrument. This led
me to discover a company named Gotoh who makes a “buzz bridge”, which could be
installed on most guitars to achieve this sound. This however meant you needed to take off a
guitars original bridge and drill new holes in the guitar to install this
bridge. This would make the change more
or less permanent. I didn’t like the idea of hacking any of my
guitars into something that would be hard to undo. I thought there had to be a way to take the
buzz bridge concept and make it easily removable. From there I was basically looking for anchoring
points on my guitars. Areas I could
drill a buzz bridge onto. All my Les Paul
or Tune-o-matic styled guitars lacked the room for me to install anything on
them. Plus again, I would have had to
hack the guitars by drilling new holes.
I then looked at my knock off Stratocaster sitting in the corner. What
do you know, there is room behind the bridge pickup and the bridge and TWO
SCREWS right by the bridge holding the pickguard in place. At
this point a beginning tracing the area and looking for scraps of wood. I was off.
How a Sitar Works
At this point I had already researched and played a few
sitars to understand how the instrument gets its distinctive sound. So, let’s take a look at this more
closely. One of the main reasons the sitar has its distinct
timbre with loads of overtones in each note, is because of its bridge (jawari). The bridge on a sitar has a long sloped or
angled wood or bone right before the strings make contact with the bridge. This creates a buzzing sound, almost like
when a guitar has bad fret-buzz from strings being too low. This is key in a sitars sound and the concept
behind the Gotoh buzz bridge and all the other production line electric sitars. This was what I essentially had to make, an
angled buzzing bridge.
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| Sympathetic strings on the left side. |
Another big part of a sitar’s sound are the sympathetic
strings. These strings aren’t plucked,
but are rather droning on their own depending on which pitch is being resonated. These strings actually lay beneath the plucked
and fretted strings on a real sitar, and we see them off to one side of the
plucked strings on many electric sitars.
From my experience of playing solid body sitars, these strings don’t
vibrate so well, unless the guitar is an acoustic or both sets of strings share
a bridge. So for this project, I opted
out on the idea of sympathetic strings. Plus, adding those strings wouldn’t be very reversible.
How I Made the Jawari
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| These are the two anchor screws |
So, at this point the goal was to make a buzz bridge or
jawari. I traced the area that I had to
work with behind the Stratocaster’s bridge pickup and bridge and I also traced
and measured the distance of the two anchoring pickguard screws. A key to making this functional was to get
the wood I was going to carve out, as close to the guitars bridge saddles so
the guitar would stay properly intonated.
I got this prototype close to the bridge saddles, but really you want to
measure the position of the bridge relative to the anchor screws, and then measure
out the shape of each bridge saddle so the new buzz bridge will lay right up
next to each saddle as close as possible. The last measurement was for the height of the
wood I needed. The distance of the
guitars strings to its body was measured.
After all these measurements I
cut the wood I had to the proper dimensions.
I then sanded down a slope going downward away from where the wood was
going to meet the guitar’s bridge. After
the new wood buzz bridge was cut and shaped and then drilled the two anchor
holes the in the measured spots, unscrewed the pickguard screws, placed the new
buzz bridge in place and re-screwed the pickguard screws back in place. Now from here I just had to fine –tune the
buzzing on each string. Some strings
were a tad too high or low to get the optimal buzzing overtone effect. So I had to raise or lower each bridge saddle
until each string sounded just right. If
you got the correct height of the strings from the body of the guitar measured,
then you should be ok and the adjustments to each string saddle probably won’t
be too extreme. In the end I got a
pretty convincing electric sitar sound, as you can hear. Tuning Tips
The only other tips I found to getting a good sitar sound
would be string tunings and effects.
Because my Sitarcaster doesn’t have sympathetic drone strings, I found
alternate tunings like DADGAD or other
open-tunings work really well because you can drone so many strings in that
tuning, often times I play melodies only on the G string and drone the other
strings. I also found that some reverb
or delay effects on the Sitarcaster only add to the sitar sound.
Well hope my story helps some of you DIY musicians out
there. Send me photos of your projects or ideas and
questions.
