What Is the Sarod Instrument?

Last Updated on June 21, 2026 by folkstrings

The sarod is a fretless, plucked string instrument from North Indian classical music — one of the two main instruments in that tradition alongside the sitar. If you’ve heard Hindustani classical music, particularly anything featuring the late Ali Akbar Khan or Amjad Ali Khan, you’ve heard a sarod.

What Makes It Distinctive

Unlike the sitar, the sarod has no frets and a fingerboard covered in polished steel rather than wood. You don’t press the string down onto a fret — you slide your fingernail along the metal fingerboard itself, which is what gives the sarod its distinctive, almost vocal sliding quality between notes. It typically has around 17-25 strings total, only a handful of which are actually played melodically; the rest are drone and sympathetic strings that ring along underneath, similar in spirit to how a sitar uses sympathetic strings.

Is It Hard to Learn?

Genuinely, yes — it’s considered one of the harder instruments in Indian classical music to pick up, for similar reasons to why fretless instruments generally are: there’s no fret marking the note, and your fingernail sliding on steel demands real precision and a callused technique that takes time to build. It’s not something I’d recommend as a casual first instrument; this is one for someone genuinely drawn to Hindustani classical music specifically.

Can You Actually Buy One?

Worth being upfront here: I checked, and there’s no real sarod inventory on Amazon — what comes up is unrelated percussion instruments, a replacement string set, and a replacement skin head, but no actual instrument. This is a specialist instrument that’s genuinely made by a small number of luthiers, mostly in India, and bought through specialist Indian classical instrument dealers rather than general retail. If you’re seriously interested, that’s where to look, not Amazon.

Conclusion

A real, distinctive instrument with a genuinely different playing technique from anything fretted — worth knowing about even if it’s not a realistic “browse and buy today” purchase the way most things on this site are.