odibrom
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Sounds awesome.
How about photos of the thing as is at the moment? Fully detailed, obviously...
How about photos of the thing as is at the moment? Fully detailed, obviously...
Well, despite taking two years so far, this thing is still not at all photogenic.
That's it there on the right, looking no better than before. I had meant to, by now, have stripped off the finish and stained it yellow and red, but I lent out the dyes I bought and never got them back, and, rather than buy more, I just got busy with other things.
It needs a bath.
The bridge is still in decent shape, but now everything is dirty, and you can see a bit of wear on the saddles' javari pieces (white). The pickups are still all rusty as before, maybe a little worse. This closeup shows the hack job I did drilling the holes for the chikari strings.
I've purposely left the old studs in the body and the empty holes in the headstock in case it ever needs to be converted back into a seven string guitar.
The jack I had wired up for the piezo got disconnected a while ago, so now I just have dangling wires out the back that I connect with crocodile clips to an audio cable. I do plan on fixing this fairly soon, though.
It's tuned in standard "western" 12edo A=440 Hz cgCGCF tuning. A traditional sitar is strung with three chikari strings instead of just two with an extra root tone, which fills out the sound of the drone much better. These are spaced more closely, almost like the spacing between string pairs on a 12 string guitar or mandolin or whatever, so my original plan was to double the strings up, but I deleted the lowest of the high drone strings due to the practical limitations of hitting the same tiny javari pad with two strings at once. I had asked EYB if they could provide some modification to accommodate a wider pad, but they said no. At some point, he seemed to indicate that a seven string bridge would be possible, but eventually, communication just sort of stopped, it might have been more or less my fault for not pressing the conversation to go further. I then changed my plan to run the chikari strings over a bridge I fashioned myself, and then through the channel made by removing the lowest saddle, but I chickened out and just went for a six string design without the lowest high drone.
I love this bridge, since it's easily the best of its kind, but there are a ton of improvements that could be made - IMO, the biggest improvement begging to be made is to have the javari pieces slope gradually away from the strings.
Here's my homemade tampura bridge:
It's made of delrin plastic that I shaped by hand with just sandpaper. I wanted as much surface area as possible to get a good buzz, and I also wanted the taper to be slightly curved away, giving the string a little more room to breathe, so that it doesn't choke the notes from ringing out. The thread is used to fine-adjust the string height, and the four TOM posts allow the bridge to be adjusted both in height and angle (although this is not a fretted instrument, so the height really doesn't matter). This thing buzzes like mad. It's actually fun to pluck the low string and just listen to how the harmonics swell up as the note rings out.
On a guitar, you are much more limited with space, since you don't want the bridge pickup to be 6" away from the actual clamping point on the bridge. So that's why EYB uses such a small javari, but I think that's why the sweet spot offers so little buzzing effect versus the more traditional gotoh buzz bridges. But the gotoh bridge pisses me off, because they want $70+ USD for $5-8 worth of plastic, and it's not even adjustable!
To really do this right, someone would have to come up with a bridge that incorporated the bridge pickup inside of it to get the best range of adjustment...
With a piezo pickup, this is 100% trivial. I'm serious. All I did here was buy some super cheap piezo pickups from amazon. They were like $10 for half a dozen disks, and then all you have to do glue the disk to the bottom of the bridge and wire the leads to your output jack. With a magnetic pickup, though, the whole thing would have to be drawn out in CAD, probably, and then machined a certain novel way.
I had had the thought about replacing the saddle with a piece of delrin so that the whole saddle would be the javari, which would gain you about 50% more length, maybe more if you could oversize the pieces, but I wasn't able to drill the holes for the set screws without breaking the pieces, so those pieces would have to be cast, and that's not really a reasonable cost for a hobbyist. Then again, I'm being overly picky- this bridge gets the job done of being half-guitar-half-sitar.
Overall, the design functions 90% as well as I had hoped to make a sitar/guitar that is a little closer to sitar than to guitar, but still allows the modern convenience of ball end strings, electronic output, easily adjustable tuning and intonation, etc. I've played real sitar off and on for many years, and it's truly a pain compared to this - friction peg tuners with beads for fine tuning are for the birds, moveable frets are great except for the fact that they often move when you don't want them to do so, an instrument that is ~4" long is not really portable, and restringing is an absolute nightmare with bulk strings made of materials that aren't the easiest to source here in the western world.
If I had an infinite budget cheat for this, I'd want a proper luthier to make me a neck with an interchangeable fretboard system and fretboards for 12edo, traditional hindustani just intonation, and maybe one with my own interpretation of just intonation, I'd want the extra chikari string, and I'd prefer magnetic AND piezo pickups that split the output of the jod string (the first string where most of the fretting occurs), the bass strings, and the chikari strings, but 6 outputs on one instrument would require a mixer.
odibrom
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Love your effort, but pics aren't showing... 
🤷♂️
... about the outputs, throw them into an audio interface directly and process them independently... you can then add synth FXs and go nuts...?
... I would love to see the pics. I've been wondering about a contraption to add between the bridge and the bridge pickup (or eventually just after it) that could turn ON/OFF some adjustable buzzing on the strings. The principle of the idea is solid, but making it happen not so much. It would be a small rod perpendicular to the strings with set screws to adjust the buzzing. The rod would turn within its axis in 90º to make the set screws get in contact with the strings, making them buzz. Like the screws that set a saddle's height, these could adjust the amount of buzz per string. Rotating the rod would turn the buzz ON or OFF. To fix each ON or OFF position there should be some sort of spring/pressure design and the movement would be controlled by a thumb wheel or small lever.
🤷♂️... about the outputs, throw them into an audio interface directly and process them independently... you can then add synth FXs and go nuts...?
... I would love to see the pics. I've been wondering about a contraption to add between the bridge and the bridge pickup (or eventually just after it) that could turn ON/OFF some adjustable buzzing on the strings. The principle of the idea is solid, but making it happen not so much. It would be a small rod perpendicular to the strings with set screws to adjust the buzzing. The rod would turn within its axis in 90º to make the set screws get in contact with the strings, making them buzz. Like the screws that set a saddle's height, these could adjust the amount of buzz per string. Rotating the rod would turn the buzz ON or OFF. To fix each ON or OFF position there should be some sort of spring/pressure design and the movement would be controlled by a thumb wheel or small lever.
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Hmm, weird. I can see them on my end, and I just logged in from a European server, and I can still see them.Love your effort, but pics aren't showing...
Here's a "webpage" with just a dump of all the photos: https://sites.google.com/view/sguitar/home until I can figure out why the photos are not showing up. Maybe google is blocking ss.org, but if they are, it's the first I've been aware of that problem.
odibrom
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Thanks for the link. Now I saw the pics, but they still don't show up on my SS.O page view, don't know why.
... and you quoted me faster than I could edit my previous post.
When I was planning this, I stumbled on someone who had something like what you describe on etsy or a similar site, except it was just a removable piece of plastic that snapped on between the bridge and bridge pickup and snapped off quickly. But I think that the buzz effect does alter the intonation- whether it's enough to notice or not is maybe subjective- but even the creator of this particular piece of hardware pointed it out. Then again, I can't seem to get the intonation to be any good on my own instrument on more than 9 or 10 frets at a time, unless I adjust the buzzing until it's not perceivable, so, IMO, the effect on intonation is pretty profound.Love your effort, but pics aren't showing...
... about the outputs, throw them into an audio interface directly and process them independently... you can then add synth FXs and go nuts...?
... I would love to see the pics. I've been wondering about a contraption to add between the bridge and the bridge pickup (or eventually just after it) that could turn ON/OFF some adjustable buzzing on the strings. The principle of the idea is solid, but making it happen not so much. It would be a small rod perpendicular to the strings with set screws to adjust the buzzing. The rod would turn within its axis in 90º to make the set screws get in contact with the strings, making them buzz. Like the screws that set a saddle's height, these could be adjust the amount of buzz per string. Rotating the rod would turn the buzz ON or OFF. To fix each ON or OFF position there should be some sort of spring/pressure design and the movement would be controlled by a thumb wheel or small lever.
I really do think that the quality of the buzzy tone is proportional to the length of the javari piece within the string's path.
Oh, I found something extremely similar to what I saw before: http://aaronlumguitar.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-diy-sitarcaster-revisited.html
odibrom
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On that rabbit hole, found this video...
Wow, that tone is fantastic. Looks like a straight-up sitar bridge. Maybe I should have just gone that route. I believe those can be special ordered made from delrin, but it'd likely be an overseas special order...
odibrom
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I like extra mile the guy went with the added chamber in the neck joint...
odibrom
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