Within You Without You - recreating the tambura sound

The drone or continuous chord in Within You Without You is produced by a tambura tuned in C (G & C for a "power chord").  The version on Sgt. Pepper was sped up a it so it sounds almost like a C#, but the instrumental version on the Anthology is at the original speed, in C.

The tambura has a wide bridge against which the open strings vibrate in order to produce the characteristic buzz. The long neck and loose strings provide lots of sustain. I recreate this sound by using an eBow for infinite sustain, and every so often touching the string with the eBow to get some buzzing.  I use a looper (the Echoplex Digital Pro) to overlay multiple notes (GCgc).

In this video you can see how I start the looper (pressing RECORD) and after a few seconds I put it in overdub mode (pressing OVERDUB).  Then I overlay each of the four notes adding buzz and changing the sound slightly without any particular rhythm, to create a drone with a rich texture.

For the actual multitrack recording I will add EQ and other effects to approximate the sound a bit better, but this approach seems like a good starting point.