I switched from guitar to sitar earlier this year . It ' s intense but I like it . If music is a pool , and Indian classical music is the deep end , then western popular music is a puddle outside of the locker room . Things you should understandIndian classical players don ' t play straight notes and ornament a little . They ornament EVERYTHING . Often with microtones . Some people consider it playing between notes rather than playing notes . There ' s no timekeeping in the alaap that makes up the bulk of a raag . The rest of the timekeeping is cycles that , at the most complex , make mathcore seem laughable . Trying to write this stuff down can be next to pointless , so almost nobody does and it ' s an oral tradition . You WILL need a teacher . Fortunately there are lots of them on Skype . There are numerous schools of thought on pretty much everything , including basic terminology . Listening to someone from a different school talking about raags can sound like gibberish . Don ' t expect to learn much on your own . Indian classical music takes lots of practice . Ravi Shankar got good by playing ten hours a day , every day , for seven years . 75 % of practicing sitar is just playing scales and repetitive fundamental exercises . You only get creative for the 25 % you spend improvising . Most people play for at least five years before performing in public . Playing sitar is painful . Sitting with one leg folded beneath you to rest an instrument on starts to hurt after about ten minutes . Your feet go numb and your hips ache . The mizrab plectrum digs into your finger . The string cuts into the callus it makes on your other finger . After three months I can usually only handle around 20 minutes before I need a break . At my best I can manage 30 minutes . I ' m often grinding my teeth and moaning in pain if I make it to 25 minutes . On Monday night I woke up screaming in agonizing pain because a ligament in my knee was throbbing . Because I hadn ' t stretched enough during playing breaks . Sitars are still made almost , if not entirely , by hand , without power tools . There is a large market for sitars used only as decorations . So most of the sitars on the market are garbage . Even the good ones usually aren ' t set up for playing . If you aren ' t in India you effectively must buy from Rain City Music in Seattle or Musicians Mall in Berkely . Buy anywhere else and you ' ll probably get a worthless instrument , or an instrument that is good but hard to play . My sitar is as cheap as one can go and still do well . It ' s a Radha Krishna Sharma # 3 from Musicians Mall . With a case and shipping it was $ 700 . I should have sold some guitars and spent a lot more . I ' m not trying to discourage you . Indian classical music is wonderful and I ' m glad I got into it . But this is nothing like buying a $ 200 guitar , plugging it into Rocksmith , and being able to bash out punk songs after a week .