I love the sound of Sitars, in fact I studied Sitar for a year as part of my BMus Degree at Birmingham Conservatoire although my teacher was an old 70′s hippie who liked to talk about his special roll up cigarettes tied with string, in fact he gave me one to try and I was quite disappointed when I realised it was actually just a cigarette and not some mind altering 60′s halucogen that made you think you were an amazing Sitar player!
Anyway since then I haven’t played a Sitar since but I do always get excited when I play with a multi-fx unit that tries to emulate the sound produced by all those sympathetic strings, unfortunately they never get very close which is why Electro-Harmonix have created a pedal dedicated to doing just that and produced one of the best Stomp Box names in the process, genius.
Check out the press release below:
Electro-Harmonix introduces the Ravish Sitar pedal, which transforms a guitar into a sitar. A traditional sitar achieves its instantly recognizable sound through a combination of melody, drone and sympathetic strings, as well as its unique construction. Mike Matthews and the pedal wizards at Electro-Harmonix have distilled the essence of that exotic instrument into a compact, polyphonic pedal.
The Ravish Sitar features three independent level controls, one each for the Dry sound, Lead voice and Sympathetic strings. There are also individual Timbre controls for the Lead voice and the Sympathetic strings. The Timbre controls act like filter controls and introduce more harmonics as they are turned clockwise.
I/Os include a ¼″ Instrument input as well as two ¼″ outputs: Main Out which sums the Dry, Lead and Sympathetic voices, plus Sympathetic Out which isolates only the Sympathetic signal.
A conventional sitar is usually re-tuned for each raga that an artist performs. The Ravish Sitar enables the player to quickly choose a Sympathetic key by playing a note on his guitar, or select keys and scales for the Sympathetic strings, including major, minor and a selection of exotic scales. In addition, the Ravish Sitar allows the musician to enter their own custom scale and then save it to a preset.
Two Expression pedal inputs are also provided, one for Drone and one for Pitch. With an optional expression pedal, the guitarist can control the level of and freeze the Sympathetic strings (Drone) or bend the pitch of the Lead voice up from one semitone to a full octave (Pitch).
The Ravish Sitar comes equipped with ten factory preset programs, and a user can create, recall and store up to ten of their own programs in those memory locations.
Made in New York City, USA, the Ravish Sitar is housed in a solid die-cast package and is equipped with a standard 9.6-Volt/DC200mA AC adapter. It will begin shipping in early September 2011 with a U.S. list price of $319.
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