The Electric Sitar Project | Hacker News Reader

The Electric Sitar Project

chandrakantha.com

18 pointsd137 comments

The luthier in me cringes at how he goes about this and his considering a cracked soundboard reducing an instrument to firewood, it would not be terribly difficult or expensive to replace a sitar soundboard. I will not comment on the paint job. All the work he did could have been done without inflicting that massive wound and it would have been less work in the end.

Can you recommend any resources for learning the basics about guitar setups and repairs? I’ve done some basic setup and soldering work in the past, but recently have been getting into modding guitars and don’t want to butcher anything too badly…

The Guitar Player Repair Guide by Erlewine is pretty good and goes over a great deal of information, probably would cover most if not all of your needs and will cover most of the information required to fix your mistakes when you make them. I generally recommend avoiding the internet since it tends to provide a multitude of solutions for any given task which is not great if you don't already have the knowledge required to pick the best solution or ask a question in a way which will provide the ideal solution.

Best thing you can do is just get a few cheap beatup guitars and have fun with them, make mistakes and make those cheap guitars into something more than cheap guitars.

Regarding that sitar work in thread link, it is not that bad and probably a common way to work on sitars since they lack holes and the soundboards are often heavily ornamented which makes removal risky. What makes me cringe about it is that in his case it was not needed, he could have easily done all that work through the hole he made for the jack plate and I would say he did not think through the project and just went at it, which is not a bad thing and he did accomplish his goal. But those of us who primarily work on western instruments are used to working through sound holes and f-holes and pickup mounting holes, it is second nature to us just as sawing off the back of a sitar is probably second nature to those who work on sitars.

Touching on your lack of comment on the paint job, I have seen one instrument (a guitar) painted with a delightfully kitsch Elvis portrait. It was a gift to a musician by his lover, but it affected the tone of his guitar so much. They had to tearfully scrape the whole job off before he could tour with the instrument again.

I for one found this a remarkably engaging and delightful tour through the electronics and theory of piezo pickups, philosophical observations, history of the sitar, a love story, a maker's chronicle, and a delightful mix of bricolage.

The couple paragraphs the author used to trash talk East Texas was really off-putting. I’ve never been there so perhaps I’m missing something, but this elitist attitude (which the author openly admitted to in detail) of judging a book by its cover is a major contributor to the problem. Just put on your empathy hat for a moment and switch from rough looking gun totin’ Harley riders at a BBQ place to baggy pants wearing thug looking low rider drivers at an inner city fried chicken joint. And in both situations, you’d miss out on some mighty fine cooking.

I was also interested until I hit that set of paragraphs. The sitar became less interesting and I started wondering where these movie-scene racist gun-waving restaurant standoffs were happening and why can't we do something about them.

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