Sitar - Ravishankar style

The Sitar is one of the most popular melody instruments in classic North Indian musical tradition. Together with her bigger sister the Surbahar the Sitar as well as the Tanpura belongs to the family of the long-neck lutes. Her resonator is made of a seared pumpkin while the cover, neck and sometimes a second resonator are made of Tun timber which is an Indian subspecies of Teak. Two bent bridges made of bone or horn of the antelope have metal strings running on top of it, usually steel and in the bass bronce or brass. Even for the frets which are tied movable to the neck with cord steel is used. Most sitars are decorated with inlays of celluloid.
Ravishankar sitar or the Kharaj Pancham Sitar

In this style of playing, the second string (Jure) is tuned to the tonic, the fourth string (Kharaj) one octave lower, the sixth (Chikari) one octave higher and the seventh (Chikari) two octaves higher. The fifth string (Pancham-Chikari) is the fifth over the tonic and the third string (Pancham) is the fifth in the low octave. The main playing string (Baj or Nayaki) is tuned to the fourth. If C sharp is chosen as the tonic, the following tuning results from that: f sharp, c sharp, G sharp, C sharp, g sharp, c sharp', c sharp".
The resonance strings (Taraf) are tuned to the chosen scale, the longest resonance string is the tonic, and then they are tuned starting from the next lower seventh up to the high third. An
especially important note can be tuned twice in the middle octave.