Voices of India - Sitar Loops

Here is a beautifully psychedelic collection of deeply sampled playable sitar for use in film, tv, game and album production. Vast textural landscapes, melodies and rhythms played on sitar through a rack of effects give you an amazing pallete to enlighten your music.

The sitar is a very expressive Instrument that represents rich North Indian Music.

All the sitar loops this pack contains have been manipulated with various sound designing techniques such as Modulation effects like Chorus, Tremolo, Flanger and Phaser, Time-based effects like Reverb, Delay and Echo, Spectral effects like EQ and Panning, Dynamic effects such as Compression and Distortion and Filters to create unique ambient soundscapes.

The resulting loops are far from a traditional sitar, yet will provide you very useful new soundscapes you have never heard before and will be useful for cinematic music productions.

The sitar is a North Indian (hindustani) stringed instrument. A traditional Sitar has 20 strings. 7 Main strings and 13 sympathetic strings. First string is used to play melody. 2nd, 3rd,4th strings are used either as drones as well as to play melody. 5,6,7th strings are called chikari and played together to play drones. 13 sympathetic strings are placed under the frets.

There are 2 main traditional sitar styles- Vilayat Khan style and Ravi Shankar style and depending on the style tuning, and sitar types, playing styles could be slightly different.

The tuning of a sitar depends on the style of playing. Traditionally, Sitar is mostly tuned to C# or D, and the drone strings are tuned to the equivalent of an open major or minor chord. The sympathetic strings are tuned to the raga or the key that is being played.

Tuning of Main strings(If the sitar is tuned to C)

7th-C5
6th-C4
5th-G3
4th-C2
3rd-G2

2nd-C3
1st-F3

The sympathetic strings are tuned depending on the 'raga', basically it would be C5 C5 B4 A4 G4 G4 F4 E4 E4 D4 C4 B3 C4. But tuning will depend on the raga played on sitar.

Even though the traditional tuning is like that, some alternative tuning methods have been used in this pack to be able to use in other genres as well.