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, four drone strings, two chikari strings, 15 sympathetic strings, tailpiece and removable upper resonator 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.

KANAILAL & SONS founder Kanailal Bhowmick is a native of the present day Bangladesh and started his career originally as a carpenter. After India became independent and divided, he moved to Calcutta and trained with the renowned instrument manufacturers Hiren Roy and Radha Krishna Sharma. Principally since the turn of the millennium, his own shop in Howrah, a neighbouring town to Calcutta on the other side of the Ganges, has acquired a good reputation among musicians because of its high quality sarods and sitars. Kanailal Bhowmick runs it with his three sons Subhas, Mintu and Ashutosh. Kanailal & Sons are not directly related to the legendary sitar, surbahar and rudra veena manufacturer Kanailal & Brother, who closed down in 1995 due to a lack of succession.

Sarod Tuning Maihar / Ali Akbar Khan Style

Measure: length 119 cm, width 31 cm, depth 19 cm, diapason 68 cm, weight: 4.7 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.