The Esraj

Over the years I've had lots of inquiries about fitting pickups to a whole host of ethnic instruments. The issue with making a 'fits all' pickup for a lot of these instruments is that for a given named type of instrument, although they all may look the same, most are built quite differently in terms of structure and / or bracing.

A fellow called up a few days ago looking for a pickup for an esraj. Alrighty, I had to Google / image that to see what it was. My previous experience with wood bole / gourd / armadillo instrument bodies having skin heads has not been vast and there are a lot more different types of these ethnic instruments than I have seen to date.

Normally if you take a soundboard pickup and plunk it on a skin headed instrument one either gets reams of feedback or a sound akin to what you would expect if you put your ear up to a steamer trunk and whacked it with a mallet.

Since the esraj had quite a small head area, placing one of our LP-15 pickups on the head right near the juncture of the head and bole, produced a really good amplified sound without feedback issues or other extraneous body sound.

Interesting instrument.....good solution.

When we were done testing I just took a quick photo of the instrument with the pickup. I apologize for the potato quality of the pic.