Simon Thacker has never been to India but through the miracle of the internet it's almost as if he lives there.

Get this classical guitarist from the village of Pencaitland in East Lothian onto the powers of YouTube and you’ll be regaled with enthusiastic endorsements of his latest favourites, some of which are so far off the mainstream that even the hugely resourceful Indian musicians who join Thacker in his Svara-Kanti group are taken aback by his discoveries.

It’s not just Indian culture that Thacker explores in depth either: Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Thessalonica and, perhaps less unusually for a classical musician, Brazil have all fed into his thinking on repertoire and how to present the music from across the globe that has affected him in performances that will affect western audiences in the same way.

For the moment, though, as he prepares to premiere a new suite by American-based Indian composer Shirish Korde with Svara-Kanti at the Edinburgh Mela this weekend before touring with the group through September and into October, Thacker’s mind is on India.

“I was looking at an old CV from 2001 the other day and even at that time I was particularly interested in bringing non-western forms into the classical guitar repertoire,” he says. “I remember being very dissatisfied with my playing then. I’d done my degree in classical music at Napier University and was probably spreading myself too thinly by playing jazz and improvised music on electric guitar as well as classical. So when I moved on to the RSAMD and to studying with Fabio Zanon, the great Brazilian guitarist, I decided to concentrate on performance and to integrate music from outside the western tradition.”

Indian music had excited him from, as he says, some time after he got over his Guns ‘n’ Roses and AC/DC period around the age of seven. Groups fusing the Indian tradition with western approaches, such as John McLaughlin’s Shakti, were easily accessible and they led to deeper exploration into Carnatic and Hindustani culture. It wasn’t until his solo tour of 2007, The Alternative Guitar, that Thacker began to give serious thought towards working with Indian musicians. On that tour he’d been playing pieces by Manchester-born composer Nigel Osborne and Shirish Korde that had gone down particularly well.

Struck by how effortlessly Korde integrated the language of Indian music into western contemporary music, he began talking to the composer about a guitar concerto. At the same time Osborne was also working with the sarod player Wajahat Khan and was looking to further develop his explorations into Indian music. The upshot of this was the formation of Thacker’s Nava Rasa Ensemble, which toured to considerable acclaim in autumn 2009, playing Korde’s Nada-Ananda concerto and Osborne’s The Birth of Naciketas, both of which appeared on the ensemble’s debut recording earlier this year.

The downside of this success was that Nava Rasa was a nine-piece group and presented logistical and economic problems as a working ensemble. So to create something more manageable and looking to offer promoters, to use crude music industry terminology, a product that was ready to go, Thacker took the essential Indian components, violinist Jyotsna Srikanth and tabla player Sarvar Sabri and added singer Japjit Kaur to form a quartet, Svara-Kanti. If he thought his logistical nightmares were over, he had to think again. Rehearsals have involved Thacker and the Birmingham-based Sabri meeting up with the other two in London and Srikanth’s busy diary has meant the Shetland isles’ very able musical adventurer Chris Stout taking the violin part on the Mela gigs this weekend.

‘Indian music is so vast,” says Thacker, “and even if you just take the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions, which Jyotsna and Sarvar come from, these are huge areas to explore. Then in Japjit Kaur we have someone who is classically trained from the age of 10 but who has also worked in Asian underground music, bhangra, and has studied Qawali and Sufi singing.

“So there are fantastically rich possibilities in the group, in terms of rhythmical and melodic concepts but also in terms of ornamentation which is crucial to the way Indian musicians and singers express themselves. It’s just a question of harnessing all of this for a western audience but I think if you can express what it is that excites you about the music in your playing, then the audience will get those same emotions from your performance.”

Svara-Kanti represents just one strand of Thacker’s performing and teaching schedule. He teaches guitar at Napier University, Stevenson College and St Mary’s Music School in Edinburgh and gives masterclasses at the University of Aberdeen, where he is an Honorary Fellow of Music. He has a continuing programme of solo concerts, works in duos with singers Claire Debono and Daisy Chute and leads the Camerata Ritmata quartet, whose repertoire has expanded way beyond its original intentions of playing jazz, Brazilian and contemporary classical guitar pieces.

“I keep telling myself that I should stop my urge for constant experimentation and exploration for a while and concentrate on the repertoire I’ve developed so I can offer promoters something finite,” he says. “But then I’ll go on the internet and discover a blog where someone’s posted a 78rpm disc from India in the 1930s or Iran in the 1940s and I’ll want to work on ways of presenting those songs, too. YouTube’s an unbelievable resource; can you imagine explaining to someone in their teens or early twenties what life was like before the internet? You’d think you’d reach a point where you’d heard everything there is to hear but I never stop discovering new music, and I hope I never do because I find it so exciting.”

Simon Thacker’s Svara-Kanti plays the Edinburgh Mela on Saturday and Sunday and Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, September 8; Aberdeen Sound Festival October 13 and Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, October 20. The Edinburgh Mela runs from Friday to Sunday. Visit www.edinburgh-mela.co.uk.