Oud

The parts of an oud

An oud looks unlike any Western instrument at a glance: a half-pear shape with a deep round back, almost no waist, a very short neck relative to body size, and a pegbox that bends back at roughly 45°. The geometry is designed around the music — short scale for fast ornamentation, fretless neck for microtones, and a light top for a quick, vocal attack.

• Top (soundboard): thin spruce or cedar, lightly braced. Often unfinished or with a very thin shellac finish to let the wood resonate freely.
• Bowl back (qasa): a deep half-pear bowl built from 16–21 thin wood ribs glued edge-to-edge. There is no flat back, no waist, and no carved arching — the bowl gets its shape from the ribs themselves.
• Neck (raqaba): short, broad, and unfretted. Typically walnut or mahogany with an ebony, rosewood, or hardwood veneer on the playing surface.
• Pegbox (banjaq): bent back from the neck at roughly 45–60°. Holds the friction tuning pegs — traditional ouds use ebony or other dense hardwood pegs, not geared tuners.
• Soundholes: typically one large central rosette and two smaller ones at the upper bouts. Hand-carved geometric rosettes are often a luthier’s signature.
• Bridge (faras): a fixed bridge glued directly to the top, with the strings tied off in pairs through holes in the bridge. No saddle and no string pins like a guitar.
• Nut (anf): ebony or bone, with channels for each pair of strings.
• Pickguard / scratch plate: a thin shell or hardwood guard glued below the soundhole to protect the top from the risha’s repeated strokes.

Fretless & microtonal

The oud has no frets — not because medieval builders couldn’t make them, but because the music requires intervals that frets cannot reproduce.

• Quarter tones: Arabic maqam scales use intervals between the Western semitones — notes that fall roughly halfway between, say, E and E-flat. A fretted instrument can only approximate these; a fretless neck lets the player place the pitch exactly.
• Microtonal slides & ornamentation: sliding into pitch from above or below is a defining oud ornament. Vibrato, glissando, and pitch bends shape every long note — the oud is, by design, a vocal instrument that imitates the human voice.
• Intonation by ear: oud players develop an intonation ear comparable to a violinist or fretless bassist. The left-hand thumb commonly rides up onto the neck above the fingerboard as a reference point.
• Short scale: the typical 58–61 cm Arabic-oud scale (a few centimetres shorter on Turkish ouds) is short enough that small finger movements produce big pitch changes — ideal for fast ornament-heavy melodies.

Strings & courses

A modern oud typically has 11 or 12 strings arranged in courses. The number and arrangement varies regionally, but the general pattern is consistent across Arabic, Turkish, and Greek traditions.

• 5 doubled courses + 1 single bass (11 strings): the most common modern Arabic-oud configuration. The five upper courses are doubled (10 strings) and the lowest bass course is a single string — total 11. Sometimes called “5+1.”
• 6 doubled courses (12 strings): the standard Turkish-oud setup — all six courses doubled. Some Arabic and Iraqi luthiers also build 6-course ouds, especially for solo recital work.
• Doubled course pitching: the higher courses are tuned in unison; the lower courses are often tuned in octaves (a heavier wound string paired with a thinner plain string an octave higher) for a 12-string-like shimmer.
• Materials: traditionally gut (largely replaced now), modern strings are nylon, fluorocarbon, or other synthetics for the plain strings, and silver-plated copper or nylon-core wound for the bass courses. Pyramid, Aquila, La Bella, and Kürschner are common string makers.
• Tied at the bridge: strings tie directly to the wooden bridge through holes — no ball ends, no bridge pins. Replacing strings is more like a classical guitar than a steel-string acoustic.

Arabic vs Turkish tunings

Oud tuning differs by region. The two main traditions are Arabic (Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese) and Turkish; Greek and Armenian playing borrows from both. The differences in tuning are small in absolute terms but they shape what scales fall under the hand.

String Warrior’s oud pages default to the Arabic D–G–A–D–G–C tuning, since it is the most widely taught and recorded standard.

Arabic vs Turkish oud (the instrument)

Beyond tuning, the Arabic and Turkish ouds are built differently. If you know what to look at, you can tell them apart across the room.

The risha (plectrum)

The oud is played almost exclusively with a long, flexible plectrum called a risha (Arabic for “feather”). The risha is held differently from a guitar pick and produces a sound the right hand alone could not.

• Traditional risha: a single long quill from a large bird — historically an eagle, vulture, or eagle-owl wing feather, cut to length and softened with water before playing.
• Modern risha: a strip of plastic, celluloid, horn, or cow horn cut into a flexible blade roughly 8–14 cm long. Players carry several of different stiffnesses for different repertoire.
• Grip: held between thumb and index finger with most of its length pointing back along the forearm. The risha’s tip strikes the strings with the wrist; its flex stores and releases energy.
• Tremolo: the risha’s flexibility is essential to oud tremolo — sustained rapid alternation on a single note or course. The whole technique is built around the plectrum’s controlled bounce.
• Tone: changing risha material is one of the main ways an oud player shapes tone. Hard plastic gives a bright, focused attack; cow horn or celluloid gives a warmer, more rounded sound; a stiff plastic risha can sound almost percussive.

Music: the maqam tradition

The oud’s repertoire is built on maqam — the modal system that organises Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and related musics. A maqam is more than a Western scale: it has a tonic, a characteristic tetrachord (jins), microtonal intervals, melodic direction rules, and emotional associations.

• Maqam Rast: the foundational mode of Arabic music, similar to a major scale but with a half-flat (quarter-tone) third and seventh. The oud’s default home.
• Maqam Bayati: built on a half-flat second — dark, plaintive, common in vocal accompaniment.
• Maqam Hijaz: built on an augmented second between the second and third degrees — the “exotic” minor sound widely associated with Middle Eastern music in Western ears.
• Maqam Saba, Nahawand, Kurd, Sikah, & more: dozens of additional maqamat, each with its own intervals, melodic rules, and modulation conventions.
• Taqsim: the central solo improvisation form. A taqsim explores a maqam without strict rhythm, moving through its modulations to related maqamat and back home. The form most associated with virtuoso oud playing.

Players to know

A short, non-exhaustive list of recordings that map the modern oud landscape.

• Munir Bashir (1930–1997): Iraqi master, the architect of the modern oud taqsim recital. His slow, meditative solo recordings (especially the Ocora label albums) define the contemporary Iraqi school.
• Anouar Brahem: Tunisian composer and player on ECM. Combines Arabic tradition with jazz, North African, and European chamber music — albums like Astrakan Café and Le Voyage de Sahar are widely regarded entry points.
• Naseer Shamma: Iraqi virtuoso, founder of Beit al-Oud in Cairo. Famous for left-hand technique that extends what the instrument can do; teaches a major generation of contemporary players.
• Farid al-Atrash (1910–1974): Syrian-Egyptian singer and composer, the most influential oud-playing star of 20th-century Arabic popular music.
• Marcel Khalifé, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Dhafer Youssef: contemporary players who have brought the oud into jazz fusion, world-music festivals, and concert-hall composition.
• Yurdal Tokcan, Necati Çelik: leading Turkish-school players whose recordings are excellent introductions to the Turkish oud tradition.

A short history

The oud’s lineage traces back through the medieval Arabic-Islamic world to the pre-Islamic Persian barbat and ultimately to ancient Mesopotamian short-necked lutes documented in carvings more than 3,500 years old. The 9th-century scholar Ziryab, working in Cordoba, is traditionally credited with adding a fifth string to a four-course instrument and codifying much of its modern playing practice.

Through medieval Andalusia and Sicily the oud entered Europe and became the European lute. The European lute kept the bowl back and the bent-back pegbox but eventually added frets and a different tuning. The oud meanwhile remained fretless and continued to develop within the Arabic and Turkish maqam traditions.

In the 20th century, the oud was central to the Arabic recording industry — the music of Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Farid al-Atrash. After World War II, players like Munir Bashir built a recital tradition around solo taqsim that has since spread worldwide. Today the oud is taught in conservatories from Baghdad and Cairo to Istanbul, Boston, Paris, and Tokyo, and is increasingly heard in jazz, contemporary classical, and film scoring.

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