A Gypsy Major — Sitar

A Gypsy Major is 7 notes to the octave (world family), drawn here across the Sitar's CGCGC strings with every A marked, so home stays visible from anywhere in the pattern.

Brash and colorful — a #2 crushed against the major 3rd and a #4 give it a Lydian-dominant swagger with a Romani twist. Bold, spicy, and unpredictable.

Heard in: Hungarian and Romani folk, Bartok and Liszt, gypsy-jazz flourishes, and fusion lines over dominant chords.

Five strings tuned CGCGC put a 12-TET scale map in an honest place: it names every fret and marks every root, but it cannot draw meend, the pitch a sitarist bends into rather than frets outright. Read this as a Western scale laid over the strings, and the thaats engine as the raga-native classification sitting beside it.

A sitarist does not run this scale as a ladder — a raga moves through its own ascent and descent, skips notes deliberately, and lingers on the swaras it favors. Treat this map as a place to find pitches, not a phrase to play.