Sitar vs guitar: which is harder?
The short answer: the sitar is harder to start and the guitar is easier to start, but at the level of a serious player, both take years and neither is "the easy one." What differs is where the difficulty sits. Here's an honest comparison.
Hear the core difference
The first is closer to how a guitar phrase moves; the second, to how a sitar phrase does. Much of the difficulty of the sitar lives in that second line.
Side by side
| Guitar | Sitar | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Cheap, available anywhere, many teachers | Costlier, fewer sellers and teachers |
| Holding it | Strap or lap, any chair | Traditionally on the floor, cross-legged |
| Strings to tune | 6 | About 20, a third retuned per raga |
| Fingertips | Sore for a couple of weeks | Thin steel at high tension — sore for longer |
| Playing melody | Across six strings | Mostly on one string |
| Harmony | Chords are central | None — melody over a drone |
| Bending | A semitone or tone | Often several notes, and part of the melody |
| Rhythm | Mostly 4/4 and 3/4 | Long cycles: 16, 10, 7, 12 beats and more |
| Improvisation | Over chord changes | Within a raga's rules, over a drone |
| Reading music | Optional (tab or staff) | Optional (sargam notation, often by ear) |
Where the guitar is easier
- The first month. Three chords and a strumming pattern make a song in a week. A sitar beginner spends the first weeks on posture, strokes and one string.
- Getting hold of one. Decent guitars are everywhere at every price. A playable sitar takes some care to buy and usually a setup — see the buying guide.
- Maintenance. Six strings and a truss rod. A sitar has a hand-filed bridge and twenty strings.
- Finding a teacher. Easy anywhere for guitar; for sitar, often online.
Where the sitar is easier
- No chord shapes. There's no vocabulary of grips to memorise. One string, mostly two fingers.
- Everything sounds right over the drone. A beginner playing a raga's notes over a tanpura sounds like Indian classical music almost immediately. A beginner guitarist playing one note at a time doesn't sound like much yet.
- Note names you can sing. Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni, always relative to your own tonic. No key signatures and no transposing.
- Less theory up front. You learn one raga at a time, and each raga contains its own rules. You don't need the whole system first.
Where both are hard
At a serious level, both instruments ask for the same things: years of regular practice, a precise ear, clean technique at speed, and a deep knowledge of a musical language. A guitarist working on jazz harmony and a sitarist working on a raga's improvisation are doing comparably hard work.
The skills that are genuinely different
Meend. Pulling the string sideways across a fret to glide between notes — in tune, and through exactly the notes the raga wants. It's the hardest single skill on the sitar and has no real guitar equivalent at that scale. The what is meend guide explains.
Rhythm cycles. Instead of bars of 4, Hindustani music counts long cycles — Teentaal's 16 beats, Jhaptaal's 10, Rupak's 7 — and phrases often end precisely on beat one. Hard at first, then deeply satisfying.
Improvising within a raga. Instead of choosing notes that fit a chord, you develop a raga's phrases following its rules. It's a different kind of creativity, closer to speaking a language than to soloing.
Cost of getting started
A playable beginner guitar costs very little. A playable beginner sitar costs several times more, and usually needs a setup visit after arrival. Add a case, spare strings and a few mizrabs. Against that, you can learn a surprising amount of sitar before buying one at all — swaras, ragas, rhythm cycles and the shape of phrases — on the sitar in your browser, which a guitar learner can't really do.
If you already play guitar
You'll start faster than a complete beginner. Your picking, fretting, bending and timing all transfer, and a few habits need replacing — the sitar for guitar players guide lists them.
Which should you learn?
The one whose music you want to play. Difficulty differences fade beside motivation: if the sound of a sitar in an evening raga is what moves you, that's the instrument you'll practise. If you're unsure, the sitar in your browser costs nothing to try, and the is sitar hard to learn guide sets out a realistic timeline.