Sarod Musical Instrument

History and Facts about Sarod Musical Instrument. The Sarod is a twined musical instrument, similar to a lute instrument that hails from India. The instrument is chiefly used in the classical music of India. This is among the most admired and famous instruments in Hindustani classical music, together with the sitar instrument. The Sarod instrument is recognized for a profound, heavy, meditative sound, in comparing with the sweet, rich over pitch sound quality of the sitar instrument, with compassionate strings that offer it an echoing, reverberant sound quality. Sarod is a fretless musical instrument, which is capable of producing the incessant slides between notes called Meend, which is significant to Indian music.

Origin of the Sarod Musical Instrument

The Sarod instrument is considered to have descended from an analogous musical instrument called the Afghan rubab, which was originated in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The meaning of Sarod in Persian means melody or beautiful sound in Persian. Even though the instrument has been mentioned as a bass rubab, the bandwidth of its tone is, in fact, significantly exceeding that of the rubab, particularly in the medium and high registers.

Among the several contradictory and disputed histories of this musical instrument, there is one that features its discovery to the forerunners of the current Sarod maestro, Amjad Ali Khan, and the ancestor of Amjad Ali Khan, Mohammad Hashmi Khan, who is a horse trader and a musician, visited India during the middle part of the 18th century with the Afghan rubab, and turned into a court composer to the Rewa Maharajah. It was the successor, Ghulam Ali Khan, who was a Gwalior court instrumentalist, and who transformed the rubab instrument into Sarod that we know nowadays.

An analogous hypothesis credits the successors of Niyamatullah Khan, Madar Khan, with the similar novelty in 1820. The present form of the Sarod instrument dates back to 1820, when it began gaining acknowledgment as a sober instrument in Rewa, Gwalior, Shahjahanpur, and Lucknow. The Sarod time-honored some concluding touches during the 20th century from Allauddin Khan, the musician-pedagogue from Maihar, the best recognized as the sitarist guru of Ravi Shankar. However, like the cases with nearly all young, developing instruments, much work remains to be carried in the part of Sarod Luthiery so as to achieve dependable customization, and exact replication of booming instruments. This reproduces the common state of Indian instrument construction today.

Design of the instrument

The design of the Sarod instrument counts on the school of playing. The first type is the conservative Sarod instrument, which is a lute-like musical instrument, designed with 17 to 25 strings. In this instrument four to five major strings are used for playing the tune, one or two are drone strings, nine to eleven compassionate strings and two chikari strings. The plan of this early mock-up is generally attributed to Ghulam Ali Khan of the Gwalior-Bangash Gharana and Niyamatullah Khan of the Lucknow Gharana.

Method to play the instrument

The lack of the string tensions and frets make the Sarod instrument very challenging to play because the strings have to be pressed firmly against the fingerboard. There are two ways to stop the Sarod strings against the fingerboard. One entails employing the tip of the fingernails of the performer to stop the strings, and the other employs a grouping of the fingertip and the nail to stop the strings.

Fingering methods and the way they are educated counts mostly on the individual preferences of composers instead on the basis of school association. Most performers use their index, center and ring finger of their left hand to stop the string. However, some performers will make more extensive use of their third fingernail for the hammers and slides, whereas some others prefer to make use of just the index and center fingers of their left hand. However, some other artists even use all their three fingers to play the Sarod instrument.