Electro-Harmonix Announces Ravish Sitar Pedal
Electro-Harmonix has announced the Ravish Sitar pedal. We usually don’t “discuss” guitar gear at FutureMusic, but when something comes along that offers new sonic possibilities for electronic musicians, we can’t help but share. This new pedal from E-H, one of our favorite boutique stomp manufacturers, transforms a guitar, or any other sound, into a sitar. A traditional sitar achieves its instantly recognizable sound through a combination of melody, drone and sympathetic strings, as well as its unique construction. Mike Matthews and the evil-geniuses at Electro-Harmonix have claimed to “distilled the essence of that exotic instrument into a compact, polyphonic pedal.”
The Ravish Sitar features three independent level controls, one each for the Dry sound, Lead voice and Sympathetic strings. There are also individual Timbre controls for the Lead voice and the Sympathetic strings. The Timbre controls act like filter controls and introduce more harmonics as they are turned clockwise.
I/Os include a 1/4″ Instrument input as well as two 1/4″ outputs: Main Out which sums the Dry, Lead and Sympathetic voices, plus Sympathetic Out which isolates only the Sympathetic signal. A conventional sitar is usually re-tuned for each raga that an artist performs. The Ravish Sitar enables the player to quickly choose a Sympathetic key by playing a note on his guitar, or select keys and scales for the Sympathetic strings, including major, minor and a selection of exotic scales. In addition, the Ravish Sitar allows the musician to enter their own custom scale and then save it to a preset.
Two Expression pedal inputs are also provided, one for Drone and one for Pitch. With an optional expression pedal, the guitarist can control the level of and freeze the Sympathetic strings (Drone) or bend the pitch of the Lead voice up from one semitone to a full octave (Pitch). The Ravish Sitar comes equipped with ten factory preset programs, and a user can create, recall and store up to ten of their own programs in those memory locations.
This Mike Matthews demo video is a little nutty, but it gives you an idea of what it’s capable of…
The Ravish Sitar is housed in a solid die-cast package and is equipped with a standard 9.6-Volt/DC200mA AC adapter. It will begin shipping in early September 2011 for $319.
