After the Monsoon: What to Check on Your Instrument Now

Every year, around the second week of September, our workshop gets busy in the same way. The rain stops, the air starts to dry out, and instruments that seemed fine through July and August begin to misbehave. Keys stick. A tabla that sounded fat in the humidity goes thin. A sitar that held its tuning all season suddenly will not.

None of this is coincidence. Wood, skin and leather all take on water through the monsoon and give it back afterwards, and the giving back is the part that causes trouble, because it happens faster than the taking in. Here is what to look for, in order of how often we see it.

Harmoniums: the keys and the bellows

The most common monsoon casualty is a key that will not come back up, or one that feels heavy compared with its neighbours. Wood swells sideways more than it swells lengthways, so a keyboard that was made with correct clearances in March can be tight in August and stay tight into September.

Do not force it. Play the instrument for ten minutes in a dry room and see whether the key frees on its own as the wood gives up moisture. If it is still catching after a few days, it needs easing on a bench, which means a few strokes with fine abrasive in exactly the right place - not the whole edge.

The second thing to check is the bellows. Damp leather and cloth feel fine while they are damp. They lose their flexibility as they dry, and small perishes that were sealed by moisture open up. Pump the bellows gently a dozen times and listen with the instrument silent. A faint hiss that was not there in June means air is escaping somewhere, and it will get worse through the winter if it is left.

The third is tuning. Reeds themselves do not care much about humidity, but the reed board and the valves do, and a harmonium that has been through a monsoon will usually have drifted a little. If two or three notes are sour against the rest rather than the whole instrument sounding low, it is worth tuning now rather than in January.

Sitars, tanpuras and sarods: the pegs

Friction pegs are the part of a stringed instrument that notices weather most. A peg and its hole are two matched tapers, and they do not swell and shrink at the same rate, so the fit changes twice a year: pegs bind in the monsoon and slip afterwards.

If yours have started to slip, resist the urge to push them in harder. That is how peg boxes crack, and a cracked peg box costs many times what a peg does. Take the string off, clean the peg and the hole, apply a little peg compound, and refit. If it still will not hold, the taper has gone and the peg needs reshaping.

While you are there, check the fret thread. Cotton thread stretches when it is wet and does not fully recover, so frets that were tight in May can often be rocked with a fingertip by now. Retying them takes an evening and transforms how the instrument plays.

The one thing not to worry about too much: a rattle inside the gourd. That is almost always a loose flake of dried gourd, and it is harmless.

Tabla: the heads

Goat skin is the most weather-sensitive material in any of these instruments. Through the monsoon a head absorbs moisture, goes slack, and the tone goes dull and fat. As the air dries, the skin tightens again, and this is when small problems announce themselves: a syahi that had started to lift will crack properly, and a head that was already thin will split at the braiding.

Retension gradually and work around the drum, a little at each point, rather than pulling hard in one place. A head that is dragged to one side will never sound right again.

If the syahi is flaking rather than just crazed, or if the skin has opened up anywhere around the edge, that head has finished its working life. Replacing it now is much better than discovering it the night before a performance. Measure the shell properly first - the number written on a head is not the number to go by.

Where the instrument lives matters more than what you do to it

Most of the damage we repair was not caused by the monsoon itself. It was caused by the change afterwards: an instrument moved from a damp room into an air-conditioned one, or stood against an outside wall that has been wet for three months, or left in a case that never dried out.

Three habits are worth more than any amount of repair work:

• Open the case and let it dry properly once the rain stops. A closed case holds damp for weeks.
• Keep instruments away from air-conditioner vents and off the floor against exterior walls.
• Move them between climates slowly. If an instrument is going somewhere much drier, give it a day in its case in the new room before playing it hard.

If something is beyond a home fix

Send us a photograph or a short video. We look at instruments in our Mumbai workshop whether or not you bought them from us, and we would rather tell you an instrument is fine than sell you work it does not need.

For customers outside India, shipping an instrument back is almost never worth it - two-way freight usually costs more than the repair. What we do instead is diagnose the problem with you over a video call and send the parts you need, whether that is a replacement tabla head, fret thread, bellows cloth or a set of strings. That reaches you far faster and costs a fraction of the freight.

Get in touch, or send a WhatsApp message to 98335 99433.