About Sitars and Other Imported Instruments

Most of the really interesting things we buy from overseas are hand-made, usually Third World instruments especially from Asia, Africa, and South America. There are no overseeing government organizations, no manufacturing guidelines, no grading standards, no factory guarantees, no consistency in quality, no consumer advisory boards, none of the mechanisms we take for granted in this country. If there is a serious problem with an instrument that we import from overseas, it is not feasible for us to ship it back to the exporter and demand a refund, as we would usually do with an instrument made in the U.S. We either pay for the repairs, if possible, or if the instrument cannot be repaired for a reasonable amount, we absorb the loss entirely, because we guarantee all shipments to the customer.

What is written below regarding sitars also applies to tamburas, tablas, harmoniums, and other foreign imports.

About quality and consistency

Although we try to describe the sitars in our catalog so that you will know what you are getting, there are no standard designations for these things. Expecting a "standard" or "better quality" sitar from one shipment to be the same as a "standard" or "better quality" from another shipment is wishful thinking. They may designate an instrument on the Indian end as "standard" and there can be quite a variety of quality from one shipment to the next.

We never know what we'll see in the next shipment until it actually comes in from India or Pakistan, and we never know what the instruments will look like and what they might need to have done to them before they can be sold. Almost all of them need some sort of adjustment at the repair shop before they can be put out for sale, and some will need to go back in for repairs at least once before they end up in a customer's hands.

Student sitars

We define "student sitars" as instruments with sparse to moderate decoration and full sympathetics. We don't carry the bare bones models, with no sympathetics and no decoration, mainly because they don't tend to sell.

Cosmetics

Cosmetic problems could be anything, especially on a used instrument. It might mean scratches or chips in the decoration. Often in overseas shipping, the cloth bag that the sitar is shipped in gets wet, and then dries and sometimes shrinks onto the outside of the sitar, sticking to it and creating impressions in the lacquer. These impressions can usually be buffed out by hand, but this requires extra work for someone. Sometimes the finish is just cloudy.

Tweaking

Tweaking refers to any number of improvements that can be made to an inexpensive sitar to make it play and sound better. It could be jivara (shaping of the bridge), it could be that the pegs are rough cut and need to be finished, or that the pegs are slipping and need to be chalked, etc. There are many possibilities. It all depends on the individual instrument.

When the maker leaves off these fine touches, he saves on labor and material costs and can sell the instrument for less. Then it is up to the buyer, either HMT or the end buyer, our sitar customer, to finish "tweaking" the instrument. When we do it here, obviously we have to raise the selling price to cover the additional labor costs. However, as many of our customers are knowledgeable and capable of doing the tweaking themselves, they may prefer to buy the sitar "as is" for less, and fix it up at home. In the case of our finer instruments, either the maker or our HMT expert has taken care of these little details, so that the buyer doesn't have to be concerned with them.