The painful road of beginning sitar

Getting myself into this, I had no idea of how painful and physically demanding learning this instrument would be. First of all, lets talk about the fingers. Going in to this I had been playing guitar for quite some years. Sure, I never really practiced the guitar seriously. But I still felt that I had some decent calluses on my fingers. Well, turns out I was wrong. To begin with, the strings of the sitar are pretty thick. Next of, you'll find that you are mainly playing all the melodies on just one string. So what does this mean? Well, doing this is kind of similiar to trying to cut your fingers open with a dull knife. After about 5-10 minutes of playing for the first time you'll start to feel the pain, and you might find yourself a little demoralized. But that is nothing to the day after, the day after and the ones to follow are the absolute worst. Sticking through it is key, and after a couple of weeks you'll find that you've got some serious calluses built up! This is when playing starts to get fun as you are no longer limited by pain.

                            

 

The sitar can be held in many diffrent ways. The most common one, which also is the one I use when playing looks (somewhat) like this:

This position allows the sitar to be balanced between your left foot and your right elbow, while leaning on your knee for support. With a proper posture you should be able to hold it up without the help of your left hand which makes it easier to play up and down the neck. It does however require alot of flexibility, which most people starting to play at adult age don't have.

As a kid I used to do alot of martial arts, and later in my teens I was doing some parkour. Thanks to that I am more felxibel than you're average Joe, and I could kind of get in to the sitting position right of the bat. Although, it did take me about four months before I could feel fully comfortable in it.

Practicing the sitar requires (at least in my opinion) an hour a day, but preferably more. After spending several hour in this position everyday you will start to feel som serious pain in your legs. Putting the sitar aside to stretch your legs, or maybe even a five minute break every once in a while to walk around does help out alot. But there will nonetheless be pain. This is something I've had to struggle alot with and it wasn't until just recently, after about 8-9 months of playing, that my leg pain has gone away.

In my last post I did promise that my next post would be about everyday life in Varanasi and playing the sitar. I am currently writing it and it will probably be up in a few days or so. Stay tuned!