They threw in a black checkerboard Italia gig bag, which is where this guitar will spend most of its time, because again, I don't often need sitar, and there is no way to turn off this guitar's sitarness short of major surgery. That's ok, because the guitar sounds exactly as I expected. It was well set up straight out of the box. I tuned it and played The Rolling Stones' Paint It Black sitar part, and it was awesome. I tried The Beatles' Norwegian Wood, but I never played that so it wasn't quite so good because of me. I tried playing one of the keyboard sitar parts I wrote long ago, and guess what - when I write a part on keyboard, it doesn't translate well to strings. Memo accepted.
There is no pickup selector, just separate volume and tone controls for each of the 3 lipstick pickups. You can vary the tone of the instrument a lot just using those. The rest is up to your fingers. I tried e-bow on it, but won't be doing that again. It sounded like any other guitar with e-bow. The e-bow worked, but did not get the buzz on. The sitar buzz comes entirely from the Gotoh Buzz bridge, and is dynamically responsive. Play quietly, you can almost eliminate the buzz. Play hard and it's in your face. The further up the fretboard you play, the more muted the buzz becomes. Knowing what to expect has its own unique learning curve, but it's fun. I realized I am spending all my time getting to know the instrument, and not paying any attention to its fitness for the purpose, and that is great. It means the neck is comfortable and nothing is getting in the way. I also found it is fine with slide, so if I need to get all microtonal with it, that's probably how I would.
The high e string volume was noticeably lower than the b string, which troubled me at first. But the pickups are adjustable, and I was able to get that under control with a little tweak. Sometimes it's surprising how much of a difference that can make. These pickups are fairly low output, but the guitar works well with a boost without being the slightest bit noisy. It sounds clean and clear.
Note there is an oddball 13 string sympathetic harp on the upper bout. It has its own pickup with volume and tone. You can play these strings directly, and the guitar came with a tuning wrench just for these. I have not yet changed their tuning, but I will later. They appear to have once been tuned from e to e, but are not quite there now. I imagine when I tune them better, they will add more sympathetic ringing. Right now at full volume they only account for maybe 3% of what I hear playing the 6 strings, but it's a nice atmospheric nuance. You can also play directly on the harp, which is then every bit as loud as the 6 strings. I don't look forward to having to change the harp strings in the future.
Turning the volume of the sympathetic harp off and playing sitar-ish phrases, I realized that I would have been fine without the harp. Aside from its ability to do a full octave glissando, it doesn't add very much. The sitar sound from the Gotoh Buzz bridge is what my ear was after. Given that, I could have just bought another Danelectro U2 or 59 and swapped in a Gotoh Buzz bridge for pretty close to the same sound. It appears that adjusting the bridge to get the buzz right would be straight forward but might be painstaking. Apparently dialing it in is part of Italia's setup process.
One thing you don't get with this bridge is any hope of proper intonation. The way the buzz bridge works, intonation is going to be all over the map and there is nothing to be done about that. Trev Wilkinson designed Italia's take on the sitar-guitar, and I read somewhere he said the point of the Gotoh Buzz bridge is to make a guitar sound bad. He has a point, because nobody should ever try to play SRV's Lenny on one of these - never, and I mean it. It's just not made for that. But when you want Eastern flavor in a piece, you half expect bad intonation anyway... it goes with the territory. I now have that covered in my arsenal.
So this is my 3rd Italia guitar, and it is what I expected. It is a very well made instrument, but not for cork sniffers. As with my other Italias, I don't find any issues at all with fit and finish, and as an instrument, it delivers playability, tone, and character. I never looked into how crackle finishes are done until I bought this guitar, and I guess I'm a fan of that now too. It's interesting how they do crackle paint, and it looks better in person than in pictures.
There is a YouTube video from Andy at ProGuitarShop demoing this model, and surprisingly, that video nails the sound of this model very well. I tend to like their videos, but I think many YouTube demos cover shortcomings with processing. As such, it is nice to see that a video actually conveyed the reality of my experience with an instrument.
