The sitar is the Indian string instrument George Harrison played on The Beatles’ 1965 song “Norwegian Wood.”
Harrison’s sitar part appears on the song recorded for the album Rubber Soul. It marked one of the earliest prominent uses of an Indian instrument in Western rock and helped introduce the sitar’s distinctive sound to a broad international audience. Harrison had become interested in Indian music after meeting sitarist Ravi Shankar.
A sitar usually has a long, hollow neck, movable frets, sympathetic strings, and one or more main playing strings. Its resonant, buzzing tone comes partly from the bridge design and the sympathetic strings vibrating along with the notes being played.
The sitar is not the same as the sarod, which has a fretless metal fingerboard, or the tanpura, which generally supplies a continuous drone rather than a melodic line. “Norwegian Wood” helped make the sitar especially associated with 1960s psychedelic rock.