These notes hit different

What happens when a flute and guitar have a baby? Or when a violin gets an extra string? Hear from four musicians whose inventions can't be beat

- Reya Mehrotra

When Rishab Rikhiram Sharma released the music video for Bijli, a track from his album Navaras, last year, he knew the song would go viral. It's based on Raga Kirwani, and is as thunderous as the name suggests. What the 26-year-old musician didn't expect is to be almost upstaged by his own instrument. It sounded like the sitar, but where the traditional instrument has a heavy, bulbous base, Sharma's contraption was flat and light, almost like a guitar. He was strumming it like a guitar too, standing up. The world was curious.

Sharma is the son of national-award-winning instrument maker Sanjay Rikhiram. The family runs music stores in Delhi and the US. They know that sitars are frightfully expensive — even a zitar, an electric version invented by Rikhiram, costs close to ₹1 lakh. So Sharma developed a lighter, cheaper version, ideal for one starting out.

His Rik-E-Sitar isn't on sale yet, but across India, musicians are tinkering with popular instruments to create new sounds. See how tech, tradition and literal fine tuning are making this possible.

Nine strings to rule them all Vishnu Ramprasad, 29 Ramprasad comes from a family of musicians and grew up in Bengaluru, studying Carnatic music, but also rock and Western classical jazz. He knew they all sounded unique. He'd watched East-West collabs. "I realised that the guitar has limitations in bringing out ghamaks, the microtones and oscillations of Indian music," he says.

He wondered if there was a way to work them all into a single instrument. It had to be a stringed one, which could be played like a guitar or lute, and allow for separate fretted and fretless play.