Chord Voicings — Sitar

A Western reference layer over an instrument that does not itself play chords — pick a root, pick a quality, and the chart appears.

The Sitar chord reference: pick a root, then any of 62 qualities, and every charted voicing arrives on CGCGC with its frets, its fingers, and audio.

Hindustani classical music does not move through chords and scales the way Western harmony does — a performance moves through a single raga, one melodic line, over a held drone rather than a chord progression. A chord chart on this page is a Western convenience: useful for finding where a set of pitches sits on the neck, and honest about being nothing more than that.

The sitar's own intonation bends beyond what fifteen fixed frets can show: meend, the pull across a fret that raises a pitch without a new finger position, is the technique no fret diagram can draw. Treat every chart here as a 12-TET reference position, not the sound a sitarist actually makes.