Insane Cover of the Day – ANIMALS AS LEADERS On The Sitar Is SO SICK

Tosin Abasi is pretty much the modern day champion of the 8 string guitar. The music of his band Animals As Leaders is one of the primary sources of inspiration for extended range guitar players the world over.

But what if you didn’t need 8 strings to play one of their songs? What if, say, you could do it on a 2-stringed instrument? Such as…. a sitar?

18 year old Rishabh Seen is an Indian sitar player who decided to take on this utterly insane challenge, and saw it through to the shredding end. His arrangement of “Tempting Time” from the first AAL album is breathtaking, and the tonal qualities of the sitar are a perfect match. I foresee the usage of sitar in prog music skyrocketing.

In college I was a member of the Indian Singing Ensemble, a class headed up by a popular Indian classical music singer and a cultural treasure trove of information. He said that when he learned to sing, he went to the house of his teacher every single day and sang for ten hours straight. He spent a year singing nothing but scales up and down. This kind of dedication to the craft is evident in this young man’s performance, and I think we all need to take it as an inspiration.