भारतीय स्लाइड गिटार

How quickly you learn Indian slide guitar depends on regular practice and on your ear, because a slide bar sets each pitch. At Foundation, with the guitar across your lap, you hold the bar still at one position and pluck one melody string until your teacher hears a clean attack.

Later stages add meend, a glide made by moving the bar after the pluck. Each level you complete on KalaSudha's courses earns an award, and the award records your learning hours. You learn live and one-to-one online, with workshops and summer camps where enough learners sign up.

Beginners learn Indian slide guitar with KalaSudha online and in workshops, starting at Foundation level. The first stage sets your posture, with the guitar flat across your lap, and teaches the slide in an open tuning. We teach children as well as adults; ask us about a starting age and about a size for a younger learner.

Players returning after a long break start again where they left off. Our courses run in levels, and your teacher first checks where you stand.

You can learn Indian slide guitar with Pandit Debasis Chakroborty on Indian Slide Guitar, a course he built with KalaSudha. It runs in three levels, Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced, which lead to the Sthayi Certificate, the Antara Diploma and the Sanchari Advanced Diploma. He teaches every lesson live, and you book in your own time zone. He teaches that on the slide the string speaks, and that the silence between notes carries as much meaning as the sound.

KalaSudha's academy teaches every discipline of Indian classical music and keeps adding courses and teachers. It is hybrid: KalaSudha brings workshops and summer camps where enough learners sign up, so you can learn online and in person.

A blues or lap steel slide player learns ragas from a teacher, in lessons called talim, with daily practice, riyaz, in between. A lap steel player already holds the bar over a guitar laid flat across the lap, as on Indian slide guitar. A blues player who wears the slide on a finger moves to that lap position.

The raga is the new part: its notes, set by ear because nothing on the strings fixes the pitch, and meend, the glide that joins them. You can learn with KalaSudha in live online lessons, with workshops and summer camps where enough learners sign up. Your teacher first reviews where you stand. See our courses.

You can play Hindustani ragas on a lap steel or resonator guitar. Indian slide guitar grew from the Hawaiian guitar, a lap steel instrument, and KalaSudha sells adapted lap steel and resonator guitars for Indian slide technique.

Brij Bhushan Kabra raised his strings with a high nut so the bar clears the frets, and an open tuning gives a stable chord on the open strings, which suits raga. The ethnomusicologist Andre-Jacques Elias notes that the Hawaiian guitar had no chikari, high drone strings, so it could not play jhala, the fast closing section. Concert instruments add them: ask us about our Indian slide guitars.

A Western guitarist can learn Indian classical slide guitar by ear, and the instrument asks for it. On Indian slide guitar the strings sit above the frets, so the frets mark positions while the ear sets the pitch.

Your teacher sings or plays a target note, and you find it with the bar, pluck and compare. With KalaSudha every lesson is live and recorded, so you can replay a phrase when you practise. Beginners start at Foundation on our courses.

The Indian slide guitar suits ragas that move in long glides (meend) and held notes. The ethnomusicologist Andre-Jacques Elias notes that a slide note sustains far longer than on sitar or sarod, and that very fast runs (taan) are harder on the bar. Gamak, a forceful oscillation, is also harder to sustain than on sitar.

KalaSudha's concert videos of Pandit Debasis Chakroborty include Bhairavi, Madhuvanti, Miyan ki Malhar and Kirwani, a late-night raga whose minor intervals the slide draws out. Watch them on our videos page.