Dashtick guitars

artisan string instruments

The Blue Tarpan of DaShtick Guitars

The Blue Tarpan is a fretless 3 string viola with a set of sympathetic strings.

It is a solid body, fully electric instrument with 3 melodic and 7 sympathetic strings. The Blue Tarpan is a variation on a number of ethnic instruments such as sarod or rebec. The three melodic strings (D-A-d) played with a bow make the sympathetic strings vibrate and produce very unique overtones and harmonics. The vibrations of both, the melodic and the aliquot strings are amplified by two separate pickups creating a highly unique sound.

The balance between the pickup outputs is smoothly controlled by a blending potentiometre. The sympathetic strings could be tuned accordingly to a desired scale, which turns this relatively small and lightweight instruments into a very powerful medium.