The Noise Room stopped by the Danelectro booth at NAMM to get a look at the Baby Sitar. It’s a fun instrument to play, and it sounds the part. For guitar players, the appeal is immediate: six strings, tuned like a standard guitar, so there’s no relearning required to get into sitar territory.
Danelectro built the Baby Sitar as a compact take on its original 1960s electric sitar, using a round body shape and the brand’s signature “thermometer” headstock. Other features include:
- Round body shape
- “Thermometer” headstock shape
- Scale length: 25?
- Number of frets: 21
- Gotoh sitar bridge
- 1 lipstick® pickup
- 1 master volume
- 1 master tone
The Gotoh sitar bridge is doing most of the work here. It shortens sustain and adds a buzzing edge to each note, which is what gives the Baby Sitar its sitar-like character without asking a player to learn actual sitar technique. Add some reverb or a touch of chorus and the tone opens up further, closer to the psychedelic guitar textures of the 1960s than to a straight electric sitar.
The Baby Sitar remains part of Danelectro’s current Sitar & Resonator lineup, alongside the brand’s full-size Sitar reissue and the ’59 Resonator. All three trace back to instruments Danelectro built decades ago, reissued with the same intent: an affordable way for guitar players to reach a sound they’d otherwise only hear on record.
This kind of instrument tends to turn up at NAMM specifically because it doesn’t fit neatly into a standard guitar rig. It’s a one-trick instrument in the best sense: pick it up for a specific texture, then set it back down. That’s exactly the role it plays for the studio guitarists and session players who keep one on hand, reaching for it on a track that needs an unmistakable, era-specific color without committing to a full sitar.
More than a decade after this NAMM introduction, the Baby Sitar is still part of the catalog, which says something about how often that specific sound gets called for.
