This beautiful sarod was made by late Kartar Chand in the 80’s. Pictures made by Luc De Gezelle.
His shop still exists and is now run by his brother Hari Chand. It is located in Paharganj, New Delhi.
Ananda
Gibson EB-3L
During my learning school at Centrum voor MuziekinstrumentenBouw, CMB, at Puurs, Belgium, in 2000 I made a Gibson EB-3L replica. I’ve choosen this electric bass because of the unique and original “slotted head” construction which I applied later to my new style sitars SAS-01 etc…
This guitar has a Honduras mahogany body and neck with Indian rosewood fretboard and head top plate.
Because the original instruments sound wasn’t very inspiring I decided to replace the pickups with some modern and better performing types made by Di Marzio. Their DP145 Will Power™ neck model is very deep-sounding with great low-end definition. Its dimensions are the same as the original replacement Model One™, but it’s a little louder and fatter-sounding, and pole piece spacing is slightly wider for better string alignment with long-scale basses.
neck
pictures made by Luc De Gezelle 2009
Shipment finally arrived…
During my last trip to India in march 2009, I collected some sitar bodies and other instruments.
Now they finally arrived, after more then 7 months…
Next to a variety of techno-organisatory problems which caused the delay, the packing service got worse as well.
This is the result: severely broken tumba on brand new gents vocal tanpura.
More SAS & SBS pictures
New page added with more semi-acoustic sitar & solidbody sitar pictures. These pictures (most of them) are made by Luc De Gezelle. The pictures are coming in autoviewer slideshow mode… Feel free to take a look here.
Specs and other info about these instruments can be found here.
Or download the new style sitars pdf brochure.
Travel Sitar Mods (2)
This modification I made to Mark B’s Travel sitar because he was unable to play the jora tar comfortably. The steel wire jora tar, although open correctly tuned, sounded too high while playing a note on the pardas.
I added a fibre intonation block to the jora tar, just as I did with my own made SAS and SBS sitars. Now he can play the jora tar up to the middle note Sa without any problem and accurately without meend.
Travel Sitar Mods (1)
I ‘ve made some simple and interesting technical modifications to Frederic T’s new travel sitar. He has bought it last year in New Delhi.
1) I have installed Schaller™ M6 mini machine heads. These run so much more smooth and accurate then the rather cheap and crappy original machines.
2) Also mounted a Kent Armstrong Slimbucker™ Jazz guitar pickup which brings it very close to the sound of a full scale Jazz Sitar.
Vishwakarma Puja
Today is the annual Vishwakarma puja.
Hari Om
SBS-03 & SBS-04 ready
The 2 bodies have undergone the finishing strokes : fine sanding, Danish oil treatment, parda making & setting, stringing and jiwari. And after assembling the hardware I could finally mount the pickups and electronics. A Kent Armstrong Slimbucker™ Jazz guitar pickup is on one of them, together with two black buttons : one for volume and one for tone control. The other sitar remains without a pickup. Thus leaving the option open to mount a customer’s desired type or combination.
CURRENTLY ONE FOR SALE @ SITAR FACTORY SHOP
New pardas on Hiren Roy
This old Hiren Roy sitar, brought to me by Arnoud E. needs new pardas and some small repair work. Arnoud provided a full set of new pardas made by Hiren Roy Company, but some of them were made too short. Thus I decided to reuse a selection of the old pardas and fitted them at the end (the last 4, nearest to jiwari).
Also some body cleaning has been performed and together with new strings and fresh jiwari this sitar is ready for another life… finally almost a complete restoration.
SBS-03 & SBS-04 coming…
Since the end of march 2009 I started constructing 2 new solid body sitars after the example of SBS-02. It is a tremendous improvement in time because plans are now available and I have a steady work experience.
Bodies and head are made from honduras mahogany leftovers. The neck is again made from african mahogany, but now stripped with two pieces of maple. And a piece of indian rosewood is glued on the head top.