... Continued from pt. 2

Sarangi

One of the most foremost out of all of the bowed relatives is the sarangi, which is an instrument capable of making a voice like and evocative sound that is one of the best of the instruments from north India as well as Pakistan. This is a squat and chunky shaped fiddle that is carved out of a single piece of wood, featuring a goat skin sound board, a neck that is very wide and a peg box that is nice and hefty. From the back, the sound box appears to be hemi-cylindrical, but the sides and the front are actually scalloped, making a waist instead.

As with many similar fiddles, the gut playing strings are stropped without actually being pressed on a fingerboard. The surface of the nails and the skin immediately above the strings are used, however. The sound that they offer is given some silver reverberation that comes from sympathetic strings, which number around 35, at least among the concert style, present day sarangis. The three melody strings are typically joined together using a drone string, and they run over the bridge until they reach the peg box, and the sympathetic strings run underneath the bridge, and most of them run to rows worth of tuning pegs that are inserted directly into the side of the neck, but some also run to extra pegs that are belong the peg box for the melody, by way of a pair of flat bridges that are adjusted to allow the strings to buzz similarly to the strings of a sitar instrument.

The Setor

The Setor appears like similar plucked style lutes, but it is bowed. This is the same for the sato and the satar. The Setor is from Uzbekistan, the Sato is from Tajikistan and the Satar is from the Uighur people that hail from western China. These instruments all have a teardrop sound box that has wood on its front and a single melody string in conjunction with as many as 12 different sympathetic strings. The Uighur kushtar is almost similar to a mandolin and has sympathetic strings as well as a front with scalloped sides to accompany the sound box which is shaped like a teardrop. The Tambur of Turkey has a sound box that is nearly circular, it has a wooden sound board and it has a neck that features a finger board and tied frets, and this instrument is typically plucked but has also been bowed as well by some players.

The Horse Head Fiddle

The horse head fiddle is morin khuur from Mongolia, and it is a cello length spike fiddle that is named for the shape of the head with a trapezoidal shaped sound box with a skin sound board that is also occasionally wooden featuring f holes. This fiddle features two strings that are made out of parallel horse hair rather than twisted horse hair, and it sometimes features synthetic strings as well. An equivalent is the Tuvan igil but it features a smaller and shallow bowled sound box with a sound board made from skin.

Photo Credits: pixiduc

Originally posted 2009-08-26 03:00:48. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Acoustic Musical Instruments

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concert style, drone, evocative sound, fiddles, fingerboard, goat skin, lutes, Mandolin, melody string, melody strings, north india, peg, reverberation, satar, sato, setor, sympathetic strings, teardrop, tuning pegs, western china