a drone string. Since the 1960s, the drone has become a prominent feature in drone music and other forms of avant-garde music. In vocal music drone is particularly widespread in traditional musical cultures, particularly in Europe, Polynesia and Melanesia. It is also present in some isolated regions of Asia (like among Pearl-divers in the Persian Gulf, some national minorities of South-West China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Afghanistan). Part(s) of a musical instrument Drone is also the term for the part of a musical instrument intended to produce the drone effect's sustained pitch, generally without the ongoing attention of the player. Different melodic Indian instruments (e.g. the sitar, the sarod, the sarangi and the rudra veena) contain a drone. For example, the sitar features three or four resonating drone strings, and Indian notes (sargam) are practiced to a drone. Bagpipes (like the Great Highland Bagpipe and the Zampogna) feature a number of drone pipes, giving the instruments their characteristic sounds. A hurdy-gurdy has one or more drone strings. The fifth string on a five-string banjo is a drone string with a separate tuning peg that places the end of the string five frets down the neck of the instrument; this string is usually tuned to the same note as that which the first string produces when played at the fifth fret, and the drone string is seldom fretted. The bass strings of the Slovenian drone zither also freely resonate as a drone. The Welsh Crwth also features two drone strings. Use in musical compositions Composers of Western classical music occasionally used a drone (especially one on open fifths) to evoke a rustic or archaic atmosphere, perhaps echoing that of Scottish or other early or folk music. Examples include the following: Haydn, Symphony No. 104, "London", opening of finale, accompanying a folk melody. Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral", opening and trio section of scherzo. Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 3 in A minor, opus 56, 'Scottish', especially the finale. Chopin, Mazurkas, Op. 7: all five contain a drone. Berlioz, Harold in Italy, accompanying oboes as they imitate the piffero of Italian peasants Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra, Introduction: the opening grows out of a drone effect in the orchestra. Mahler, Symphony No. 1, introduction; a seven-octave drone on A evokes "the awakening of nature at the earliest dawn". Bartók, in his adaptations for piano of Hungarian and other folk music. The best-known drone piece in