Indian Slide Guitar

Pitch depends on where the bar touches the string. While the bar keeps light contact and moves, one plucked note travels through changing pitches, which is how players make meend. Lifting the bar and setting it down again gives separate, detached notes. The middle finger trails behind the slide on the string to control the tone, and the picking hand decides when a fresh attack enters.

The same bar shapes the ornaments of raga music. Murki, a quick flourish between neighbouring notes, is common. Gamak, a forceful oscillation between two notes, is harder to sustain on slide guitar than on sitar. Elias weighs the instrument against sitar and sarod. A slide note sustains far longer, and one stroke can glide a long way along a single string. The bar hand has less speed, so very fast runs (taan) are harder. Krintan, the hammer-on and pull-off ornament, needs an open string at one end. Most models reach little of the low register (kharaj).

On an Indian slide guitar the strings sit well above the fingerboard and never press down onto the frets. The frets, sometimes only painted lines, act as visual markers while the ear sets the pitch. Elias gives about two centimetres of clearance for the Hawaiian guitar in India, and Kabra raised his strings with a high nut.

The player sits cross-legged with the instrument flat across the lap. No left-hand grip holds the neck, and many players steady the body with the right little finger. Elias describes a slide three to four inches long, held between the index and middle fingers and steadied by the thumb. This lap position separates the practice from upright slide playing, where the guitar is held as usual and the slide is worn on a finger.

Open tunings give a stable chord on the open strings, which suits the modal character of raga. Tunings vary by player and raga, and no single tuning is standard.

Many designs add two groups of strings to the melody strings. Chikari are high drone strings struck between melody strokes. Tarab (also taraf) are sympathetic strings tuned to the notes of the raga; they vibrate when the main strings sound and add sustain. Elias reports that the Hawaiian guitar had no chikari, which ruled out jhala, the fast section that alternates melody and drone strokes.

Two layouts dominate. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt places the chikari at the back, near the body, and strikes them with the thumb. Debashish Bhattacharya places them at the front and plays them with the fingers while the thumb takes the melody string, a layout that favours faster jhala. Elias calls these the closest thing slide guitarists have to an instrumental gharana, or school. Tarab may run under the playing strings for a stronger response, or in a side course the player can strum like a swarmandal. Counts and arrangements differ between designs and models.