Making an Ektara — India's One-String Drone You Bend by Squeezing

The ektara — 'ek' one, 'tara' string — is the drone of India's wandering singers. You pluck its single string and SQUEEZE its springy neck to bend the note up and down.

Cut the top off a dried bottle gourd to make an open bowl. This gourd is the sound-body of the instrument.

Soak a piece of rawhide, stretch it drum-tight over the open mouth of the gourd, glue and lash it down, and let it dry hard. This skin will boom when the string is plucked.

Take a length of bamboo and split it partway down into two long, springy arms — a forked neck that can flex when squeezed.

Fit the two arms of the neck onto opposite sides of the gourd, straddling the skin, and lash them on firmly so they stand up tall and springy.

Bore a hole near the top of the neck and fit a single tuning peg.

Tie the string to the very centre of the skin, run it straight up between the two neck arms, and wind it onto the peg.

Turn the peg until the string gives a clear, ringing note. This single note is the drone the whole instrument is built around.

Pluck the string with one finger. The skin booms and the string rings out its steady drone, richer and louder than a bare string could ever be.

Now SQUEEZE the two neck arms together. They flex inward, slackening the string, and the note DROPS. Let go and it springs back up — the ektara's bouncing 'boing'.

Pluck in time and pulse your squeeze so the drone bends up and down under the rhythm — the hypnotic sound the Baul singers of Bengal carry through their songs.

The ektara turns one of the deepest facts of music into something you feel in your hand: a string's pitch depends on its TENSION. Pull a string tighter and it rises; let it go slack and it falls. On most instruments the tension stays fixed while you play, and you change the note by shortening the string with frets or fingers — but the ektara does the opposite. Its one string never changes length; instead, squeezing the two springy arms of the split-bamboo neck bends them inward, which slackens the string and drops the pitch, and releasing them lets the arms spring back so the note rises. That living, sliding drone is the ektara's whole voice. It is the same physics as the musical bow, whose string tension bends the wooden stave into a bow — here the idea is simply turned around, with the player doing the bending by hand. And like the erhu and the banjo, the ektara sings through a skin: the string is tied to the middle of a stretched membrane over the gourd, and that membrane radiates the sound far more strongly than a bare string could. The ektara is the instrument of India's wandering singers, above all the Bauls of Bengal; add a second string and a longer neck and it grows toward the dotara and the wider family of Indian lutes.