The left hand

There are no frets and, on this instrument, no single agreed technique. Two schools stop the string in genuinely different ways, and it is worth knowing which one you are being taught.

You are not pressing the string down

Start with the thing both schools agree on. On a guitar you press a string onto a fret and the fret does the work. Here there is nothing to press it against that would help — so the finger itself defines where the vibrating length ends, and it does that by touching the string lightly from the side, not by crushing it into the wood.

Light contact matters for a reason beyond comfort: a finger resting lightly can slide, and sliding between notes is the sarangi's whole expressive vocabulary. A finger clamped down cannot move without stopping the note. See Meend.

If it hurts, you are pressing too hard. Soreness on the fingertips in the first weeks is normal; sharp pain is a sign of force. Force also pulls the note sharp, so hard pressing sounds out of tune as well as feeling bad.

Fingertip or fingernail

The fingertips — the common way

Most Nepali sarangi players stop the strings with the fingers of the left hand, pressing lightly. The pads and sides of the fingers meet the string; the fingers curve over from above and slightly to the side.

This is where to start. It is what most players do, it is intuitive if you have played anything fretted, and it gets you making music soonest.

The fingernails — Bharat Nepali's school

Bharat Nepali and his students stop the strings by rubbing the fingernails against them — the string is stopped by the nail and the flesh around the cuticle, from the side, rather than by the pad of the finger.

This is also how the Hindustani classical sarangi is played, where players use the part of the nail just under the cuticle and dust their fingers with talcum powder so the string slides. It gives a harder, more precise edge to each note and a very clean slide, at the cost of being much harder to learn and rough on the fingers until the skin toughens.

Which should you learn? Whichever your teacher plays. If you have no teacher, start with the fingertips. The nail technique is a real tradition with real advantages, but it is a poor place to begin from scratch and unlearning it later is worse than learning it later.

Finding a note with no frets to help

You find notes by ear, against the drone. That is not a limitation to work around; it is the method, and it is why sarangi players tend to have very good ears.

  1. Switch the drone on so Sa is sounding continuously.
  2. Bow the thick string open. That is Pa below Sa — listen to how it sits under the drone.
  3. Now put a finger on the thick string and slide slowly upward while bowing. Somewhere up there the note will lock in against the drone — it will suddenly sound settled instead of restless. That is Sa.
  4. Take the finger off, put it back, and see whether you land in the same place. Then do it fifty more times. That is the skill.

Slide from the open thick string up to Sa and hear everything in between. This is what your finger is doing when it hunts for a note.

Pa.
open string · Pa belowSa

Which finger

There is no canonical fingering for the Nepali sarangi — no equivalent of the tables the Hindustani classical tradition argues over. The neck is short, so most playing happens in one hand position, with the hand shifting for anything higher rather than stretching for it.

A workable default: index, middle and ring fingers take the first three scale notes above the open string, and the hand moves up the neck for the rest. The diagrams on Where the notes lie mark this, with an arrow where the shift happens.

Keep the fingers you are not using close to the strings rather than flying off. Every millimetre a finger has to travel back is a millimetre of imprecision.

Next

Practice routine Where the notes lie