The Saraswati Guitar is an instrument designed and built by Wes Lambe and conceived by Jay Manley. It took more than a year to plan and build. Imagine a seven string semi-hollow body acoustic/electric guitar with added chikari and twelve sympathetic strings: twenty one strings altogether.

It has roots in many other instruments and designs. There is a long lineage of sympathetic string, harp, double-neck, seven string and sitar inspired guitars. This will hopefully be something fantastic and unique to add to the family.  Like many guitar hybrids in the past, the goal was to create a guitar suited to playing Hindustani classical and light music and to launch into new forms of Eastern and Western fusion. It is also a fruition of my dream to create a guitar to perform this music without being strictly a slide guitar and retaining much of the standard tuning. Main strings are e b g d a e a and chikari will typically be a and e or d (Sa, Pa and Ma). It also can be tuned to all twelve keys or any altered tunings.

One aspect of Hindustani classical music is meend: a smooth transition across several notes akin to portamento in string instruments. The electric guitar is quite good at this. If the guitarist is using deep bends or meend and trying to allow strings to ring for “air” or support it is lost the second the meend stops the transference of an adjacent string. The player has to mute every string but the one being played in order to control the sound. But what if you could still play using correct muting techniques and get the resonance from auxiliary sympathetic strings?

The Saraswati Guitar is based on Wes Lambe's eight-string guitar designs and draws inspiration from Novax and Linda Manzer's work. To voice the instrument, we listened to a Saraswati Veena because it resembled an electric guitar tone naturally. The semi-hollow body is mahogany. The necks are maple with ebony fretboards, piezo and handmade Kent Armstrong pickups. The main neck has fanned frets and is designed to accommodate meend.