Choose a sarangi

The hard part is not choosing between models. It is telling a playable instrument from an ornament — most sarangis on sale in Nepal were made to be hung on a wall.

What you are buying

A Nepali sarangi (नेपाली सारङ्गी) is carved from a single block of wood: neck, body and pegbox in one piece, hollowed out into two chambers. The upper chamber stays open; the lower one is covered with dried goat or sheep skin, and the bridge stands on that skin. Four strings run from the pegs over the bridge to the base. The neck has no frets.

It is not a standardised instrument. Size, wood, string material and even the tuning vary between makers and between players — a Gandharba traditionally built one to fit their own body and tuned it to their own voice. So there is no "correct" length and no model number to look up. Two sarangis side by side may be a semitone apart and both right.

Six things to check before you pay

1. The skin. Taut, unbroken, no wrinkles or sag around the bridge. A slack or split head is the one fault that makes an instrument silent, and re-skinning is a workshop job.
2. The bridge stands up straight on the skin and does not lean toward the pegs. It is held by string tension alone, so it can be moved — but it should sit flat and stable where it is.
3. The pegs hold. Turn each one. It should move smoothly and then stay. Pegs that slip make tuning impossible, and on a fretless instrument tuning is everything.
4. The neck is straight and the body has no cracks, especially where the neck joins the body and behind the base where all four strings pull.
5. The strings clear the neck by a small, even gap the whole way. Strings lying on the wood will buzz; strings miles above it will hurt.
6. There is a real bow. Many decorative sarangis come with a stick that has never been strung properly. See below.

Strings and bow

The original strings were made from sheep intestine. Gandharba families took the entrails of sheep sacrificed at Dashain, left them in a pot for some days until the flesh rotted away, drew out the fine fibres that remained and wound them into string. Almost nobody does this now: modern instruments are strung with nylon, with steel, or — famously and practically — with badminton racket string, which is cheap, strong and available in any bazaar.

The bow was traditionally a bamboo stick strung with horse tail-hair; nylon bow hair is common today. Ram Sharan Nepali, who did more than anyone to modernise the instrument, went further and played with metal strings and a violin bow — a choice many players have since copied.

Where to get one

Project Sarangi in Kathmandu is the straightforward answer for someone starting from nothing. Founded by Kiran Nepali in 2012, it exists precisely to make the instrument learnable: it runs production units in Bhaktapur and Kirtipur with assembly at its Jhamsikhel base, has deliberately standardised size, materials and acoustics so that instruments are consistent, and teaches a four-level course from Basic to Post-Advanced. Its instruments run in tiers, roughly:

Prices are what was listed at the time of writing — treat them as an order of magnitude, not a quote.

Purna Nepali, of the same Gandharba family, builds instruments by hand at his Kathmandu workshop. Outside Nepal, buying unseen is a gamble; if you can, have someone play it first, or buy from a maker who plays.

What else you need

• Rosin. See above. Nothing works without it.
• Spare strings. They break, usually the thin one, usually mid-practice.
• A way to find a starting pitch. Traditionally your own voice. If you would rather see a number, the shared Frequency tool listens and tells you what you are playing.
• Nothing else. No case is traditional; Gandharba carried the instrument slung on a shoulder with the bow tucked through the body.

Next