The bowl, which had been made of glued lathes of wood was now made of gourd, with metal frets and a bone nut on the neck.

By practicing the sitar every day and looking up the notes online as you go, you can start memorizing them and playing faster!

In the early Mughal Empire (1526–1707), tanbur-style instruments continued to be used in court [ citation needed]. The thing to remember is to have different types of tuning beads on each string so that you can recognize the string being tuned by the touch of your fingers. This then keeps the students mind on practice and gradually, as you start getting used to the instrument and gain practice with the upper strings, you can start delving into the sympathetic tuning. Another type of sitar which was quite in vogue till the 1950s was the Kachhap sitar or Kachhua sitar. Although the basics aren’t particularly back-breaking, there’s a lot of interesting “rules” players must follow.

It has 20 strings, three of which are drone strings, four melody strings, and 13 sympathetic strings. They are strings you primarily strum, which is why their string gauge is thinner than the primary strings. The shape of the bridge, the material of frets, the positions of the tuning pegs, the width of the neck, the position and tuning of the strings and the right hand position help us in determining sitar types and in tracing the progress of change. The advent of Psychedelic culture during the mid- to late 1960s created a trend for the use of the sitar in Western popular music, with the instrument appearing on tracks by bands such as the Beatles, the Doors, the Rolling Stones and others.Among them, Jaipur Seniyas, starting from Maseet Khan, Rahim Sen, Amrit Sen and Dulhe Khan, were the trendsetters. The sitar is a modal instrument – meaning that depending on the key you are playing in you may need to re-tune the instrument. The sitar’s history can be traced back to ancient India, with its origins possibly dating as far back as the 13th century.

Indian scholars claim it’s of Indian origins, but Western scholars believe it’s more likely to have originated from West Asia. There are also popular songs featuring the sitar that you can practice, like "Love You To" and "Within You Without You" by the Beatles and "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones.Perhaps the legend that the instrument was "invented" by Ameer Khusarau, was started by Captain Willard and Karam Imam. Lal Mani Misra proposes that when the Muslims came to India, they saw the tritantri veena and found it hard to pronounce tri.