Twenty strings, and you play seven of them
A sitar carries six or seven playing and drone strings over the frets and eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings — the taraf — running underneath them, through small holes in the neck, to their own row of pegs down the side. You never touch the taraf. They exist to ring in response to whatever you play, and they are most of the sound.
They are also the reason this page opens with a technique rather than a note chart, because they make an ordinary tuner useless until you deal with them.
Sa first, then everything else
Nothing on a sitar has an absolute pitch. Everything is an interval against Sa, the tonic, and Sa is yours. C♯ is the most common concert Sa and is what a lot of teaching material assumes, but it is a preference rather than a standard, and instruments and players sit elsewhere for perfectly ordinary reasons.
Which is why there are no target chips under the dial on this page. Choose Sa, and the instrument follows.
One common Sa-relative scheme, not the tuning: the exact arrangement of the playing and drone strings varies by gharana and by instrument. Check against your own teacher before treating any of it as settled.
Changing raga means retuning eleven strings
This is the fact that separates a sitar from every other instrument here. The taraf strings are tuned to the notes of the raga — that is what makes them resonate with the melody instead of muddying it. So a change of raga is not a change of fingering. It is a change of instrument setup.
A raga with a komal (flattened) second needs that taraf string moved down. One with a tivra (raised) fourth needs another moved up. Take Bhairav, which has both a komal second and a komal sixth:
| Swara | Cents above Sa | Hz, with Sa at C♯ (277.18) |
|---|---|---|
| Sa | 0¢ | 277.18 Hz |
| re (komal) | 100¢ | 293.66 Hz |
| Ga | 400¢ | 349.22 Hz |
| Ma | 500¢ | 369.99 Hz |
| Pa | 700¢ | 415.30 Hz |
| dha (komal) | 800¢ | 440.00 Hz |
| Ni | 1100¢ | 523.25 Hz |
| Sa | 1200¢ | 554.36 Hz |
Two honest caveats about that table. The cent values are equal-tempered, which is a simplification — a performer places these notes by ear against the drone, and the placement moves with the raga and with the phrase, which is exactly why the same swara does not sit in the same place in two different ragas. And it is one raga out of hundreds, given as a worked example of the procedure rather than as a chart to be copied.
Eleven pegs, each one a friction peg with no gearing, is a real job. It is why a sitarist does not switch raga casually mid-concert, and why the taraf are usually set before the performance rather than during it.
The frets move, and that is the point
Sitar frets are curved metal bars tied to the neck with thread. Two consequences follow.
The arch is what makes meendpossible: pulling the string sideways across a curved fret stretches it smoothly and raises the pitch continuously, by as much as a fifth on a good instrument. That long, vocal bend is the sitar’s defining gesture and a flat fret could not produce it.
The thread is what makes the frets movable — deliberately, so the instrument can be set for a raga, and accidentally, when a heavy pull or a journey nudges one. The diagnostic is worth memorising: if the open strings check out and one note of the raga sounds wrong wherever you play it, the fret has moved, not the string. Fret the note, read the cents, slide the fret.
Tuning routine
- Decide Sa and set the tuner’s concert pitch if you need to. If your instrument sits comfortably somewhere other than a standard pitch, follow it.
- Damp the taraf with the heel of your hand. Nothing below works without this.
- Main playing string first, then the other playing and drone strings against it.
- Chikari next — they are Sa an octave and two octaves up, and they are struck constantly, so an out-of-tune chikari is audible in every phrase.
- Then the taraf, to the raga. Undamp them, tune each one against the corresponding note on the main string, and use the sympathetic ring itself as the check: a correctly tuned taraf string will sing when you play its note and stay quiet when you do not.
- Round again. Twenty strings on one bridge is a lot of load and the first thing you tuned will have moved.
For the wider question of how Indian pitch is organised — the 22 shrutis, where the ratio tables come from, and why they are a reference frame rather than a tuning — see tuning systems. If you also play or own a drone, the tanpura tuner covers the pure-ratio problem that a twelve-tone dial gets wrong.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sitar tuned to?
To Sa, and you choose Sa. C♯ is the most common concert Sa for a sitar and is what a great deal of teaching material assumes, but it is a preference rather than a standard — plenty of instruments and players sit elsewhere. Once Sa is chosen, everything follows from it: the playing strings, the chikari drones and the eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings are all tuned as intervals against that tonic and against the notes of the raga you are about to play.
Why will my tuner not settle on a reading?
Because it is hearing more strings than you played. A sitar has eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings running under the frets, and they exist precisely to ring in response to whatever you sound — so the microphone receives your note plus a chorus of others, and the pitch detector reports a compromise. Damping is not optional on this instrument, it is the technique that makes a reading possible: rest the heel of your hand across the taraf strings near the bridge, sound one main string, and the dial will lock immediately.
Do I have to retune the sympathetic strings for every raga?
Yes, and that is the part beginners underestimate. The taraf strings are tuned to the notes of the raga — that is what makes them resonate with the melody rather than against it — so changing raga means changing which notes they are set to, not merely checking they have not drifted. A raga with a komal (flattened) third needs that string moved. It is eleven or more pegs, it takes real time, and it is why a sitarist does not switch raga casually mid-concert.
The frets keep moving.
They are meant to. Sitar frets are curved metal bars tied to the neck with thread, and they slide along it — the arch is what allows the meend, the long pitch-bending pulls across a fret that give the instrument its voice. The trade-off is that a fret can be nudged out of position by a heavy pull, by transport, or by the thread loosening. If one note of a raga sounds wrong wherever you play it while the open strings check out, the fret is the culprit, not the peg.
What is the jawari and does it affect tuning?
The jawari is the wide, curved bridge the strings pass over, and it produces the buzzing, overtone-saturated sound the sitar is known for by letting the vibrating string graze the bridge surface. It does not change the pitch, but it changes what a tuner hears: the spectrum is so rich in upper partials that a pitch detector can lock onto one of them instead of the fundamental and report an octave too high. Check the octave number and not just the letter, especially on the lower strings.
Can this dial handle the microtones?
It can measure them and it will not name them. The dial names the nearest of twelve notes and reports how far from it you are, which is exactly the tool you want when placing a fret or checking a bend. What it cannot do is judge you against a raga, because the placement of a swara is decided by the raga and by the phrase it sits in — the same note is not in the same place in two different ragas. Our tuning-systems page covers the 22-shruti framework and, more usefully, what it is and is not.