sitar sound?

[nero1985]

ok i went to a music store and one of the guys there told me that if i wanted to build a sitar simulator it should be a sort of flager with a fast delay more than a octave up... wat u think??? wats a sitar sound in ur own words?

[tungngruv]

In Tim E's own words:

Jawari

Look in the layout gallery.

[nero1985]

i like the jawari

is it the same as the danelectro simulator?

[jmusser]

Every review I've read about the "Sitar Swammi", has said it was garbage. I have never heard one, but I'm guessing with how long they lasted it could be true. The thing is, the Jawari or Psychtar are going to "simulate" that sound. You're not going to get that bangy metallic sound of a sitar without a lot of hammer ons and pulloffs, because you're not deriving that tone the same way at all. The Swammi may have sounded close to the Jawari, I don't know, but people may have been dissapointed that it didn't sound like an exact duplicate of the Danelectro electric sitar. I built the Psychtar because I wanted the octave up option ( which is nice and fairly clean BTW). If you get everything adjusted correctly and work off the bridge pic up, you can get a very close approximation of  the "Paint it Black" type sound, but your left hand has some work to do, to get the most out of the effect. I don't know if this has been everyone else's experience, but that's how it works for me. If you just play it normally, it's just sort of like a thin octave up, and sounds sort of whimpy, because it has to, to get the sitar sound. I think Tim has done a bang up job on this effect myself, but you have to "play" the effect to be happy with it. I like the Psychtar, because you have the sitar part of the effect to fiddle with and if you never really get the playing style down to get the best out of the sitar effect, you've still have a nice octave up, which is about as clean as I have ever heard.

[Transmogrifox]

I have been finding that an envelope filter with a high-pass filter output set on high sensitivity and starting at a high "start frequency" does produce some sitar ish sounds.  I suspect it could be combined with other effects to more closely simulate a sitar.

[pooka]

If you run it through a spring-reverb or a very short delay it gets a lot better

[inverseroom]

It's true about the Sitar Swami...it's crap, unfortunately.

[Pimens]

The way that I found to get some sitar sounds is to tune the guitar like this:
D A D F# A D , put the middle and bridge pickups of my strat out of phase ( it gets very "trebley"), and use a phaser (I use the phase 45), make some melodic lines at the G string (actually F# string) and use the others as if they were the drone strings of a sitar.....
I Believe this is the closer you can get to a sitar with a guitar.........a hope it helps......

[Doug_H]

I have been able to get some pretty decent sitar sounds with some of my octave-up pedals. Keep the gain and/or guitar volume turned down, use the bridge pup, and pick very strongly real close to the bridge. Use a lot of bends and play in eastern-sounding keys too.

Doug

[Transmogrifox]

...And a tip I saw in a thread here a long time ago:  string a pipe cleaner through youre guitar strings.