Sarod Dilip Mondal Standard - Amjad Ali Khan Style
Clarity, good sustain and nice balance between the four melody strings are the hallmarks of this beautiful professional sarod. The affordable price makes it a great choice for beginners and students.
Dilip Mondal is less famous as a sarod maker than Kanailal or Naba Kumar, but also offers a very good professional standard.
Body, neck and pegbox made of medium to dark brown stained toon wood with highly polished shellac surfaces, body covered with goatskin, chromium-plated fretless steel fingerboard, four melody strings, two drone strings, two chikari strings, 11 sympathetic strings, tailpiece made of polished brass.
A fretless metal fingerboard and the goatskin top of the body give the sarod its unmistakable sound: rich, powerful, bright, metallic, with long sustain and most sophisticated melodic articulation possibilities. Thanks to the drone and chikari strings and the plucking technique with a large plectrum the sarod can also be played very rhythmical, almost percussive. It is the most important solo melody instrument of North Indian classical music tradition apart from the sitar and became popular in the West as well in the second half of the twentieth century due to great virtuosos like Ali Akbar Khan and Amjad Ali Khan.
Construction
Body, neck and pegbox of the sarod merge into each other. Sometimes they are carved out of a single piece of wood, usually toon or teak these instruments are called one-piece sarods. In a more common way of construction, the pegbox is joined to the neck these instruments are called two-piece sarods. Opinions differ whether one-piece or two-piece sarods are considered superior. The difference is very hard to detect once the wood is stained and varnished. Therefore India Instruments does not distinguish between these two styles of construction.
The body is covered with goatskin. A thin horn bridge is placed on top of the goatskin with the strings running through and over it. The neck carries a polished steel plate used as fingerboard. Moreover, at the upper end of the neck an additional sound-box is attached. It is usually made of brass. Like many other Indian string instruments the sarod has - apart from those strings which are plucked and played - numerous sympathetic strings which are not struck but merely vibrate in resonance during playing and thus create a kind of inbuilt reverberation effect. These strings are running in one line of holes inside the finger-board and are tuned by smaller pegs fixed on the side of the corpus.
Types of Sarods
There are two different types of sarods in common use nowadays, differing slightly in construction and stringing. Maihar style sarods have been made popular by Ali Akbar Khan and his disciples and have 25 strings (four melody, four drone, two chikari and 15 sympathetic). All sarods in our assortment are in Maihar style.
Amjad Ali Khan, Buddhdadev Dasgupta and their disciples play sarods with 19 to 23 strings. They have four playing strings and two chikaris, too, but less drone and sympathetic strings. Their pegboxes carry only six pegs and are therefore considerably shorter than those of Maihar sarods with their eight pegs. We don't carry any sarods in this style in our regular assortment, but we're glad to order them on request.
DILIP MONDAL is one of several little-known instrument makers from Uluberia, a rural south-western suburb of Kolkata. He learnt sarod making from Dulal Kanji and sitar making from Jayant (JK) Sengupta in Kolkata. Dilip Mondal trained his son Tanmay in instrument making from an early age and works together with him today. Most of their instruments are delivered as a shell to renowned workshops in India or finished to shops. We are getting fine sitar & sarods directly from Dilip Mondal under his own label since 2024. Dilip Mondal stands for fine quality at lower prices.
1st main string melody = fourth / madya MA
2nd main string melody = root note / madhya SA
3rd main string melody = low fifth / mandra PA
4th main string melody = low octave / mandra SA
5th main string melody = fifth / PA
6. Main string melody = fifth / PA
7. & 8. Main string chikari = high octave / tar SA
1. - 11. sympathetic string = scale of the selected raga
Measure: length 107 cm, width 29 cm, depth 19 cm, diapason 68 cm, weight: 4.1 kg
Each instrument is individually hand-crafted and might differ from our description.
The sarod is a plucked instrument, held cross-legged in the lap. To strike the strings a plectrum carved from coconut shell is used, allowing a great range of complex, rhythmical stroke variations. The typical clear metallic and lingering sound of the sarod is created by pressing the strings onto the fingerboard with the tip of the fingernail and not (like for instance with guitar or violin) with the fingertip. Another peculiarity of playing is the continuous sliding along one string with one fingernail on the fretless fingerboard thus creating all the ornaments and micro intervals which are so important in Indian Music.