I have been working with Turkish and Arabic instruments since 2009, together with luthiers in Turkey, Armenia and a few other places, and there is one question that comes back more than all the others. Somebody sends a photo of two Ouds and asks which one is which.
From a photo it is genuinely hard. Same pear shaped body, same pegbox bent back at the top, same six pairs of strings, and no frets anywhere on the neck. Stand them side by side and you are looking at maybe two centimetres of difference here, two there.
Then somebody plays them, and you know in one note.
Listen for two things while you watch that. Where the bass sits, the Arabic one goes lower and stays down there. And how the note hangs on afterwards, the Turkish one keeps ringing, brighter, for longer. Both of those come from decisions the maker made long before anybody put strings on it.
A couple of centimetres of string, and a whole tone of pitch
The Turkish Oud is the strict one. 58.5 cm of string between the nut and the bridge, and Turkish makers hold that number the way violin makers hold theirs. There is a smaller size too, the Zenne Oud, around 56 to 57 cm, which was originally made for women players and today is what anyone with smaller hands ends up loving.
Arabic Ouds are much less standardised, and they can run anywhere from 58.5 cm on the modern ones up to about 61.5 cm, and interestingly it is the old Egyptian instruments that stretch the longest. Two extra centimetres sounds like nothing until you hear what it does to the bottom end. When somebody asks me to compare Turkish & Arabic Ouds, this is the number I start with.
Then comes tuning, and honestly this is where most of the difference lives. Arabic players usually tune from C to C, or from F to F when they want the instrument to sit higher, which is common in Iraq. Turkish tuning sits about a whole tone above the Arabic C to C, most often D G B E A D. So you have a shorter string, pulled to a higher pitch, and that is the whole recipe for the quick bright attack you hear on a Turkish Oud.
One thing to know before you start experimenting. You can take a Turkish Oud and tune it down to Arabic pitch whenever you want, nothing bad happens. Do not do it in the other direction. An Arabic Oud pulled up to Turkish pitch can be damaged, because that top and that neck were never built to carry the extra load.
The wood, and why “Arabic Oud means cedar” is wrong
Almost every page online will tell you that the Arabic Oud has a cedar top and the Turkish Oud has spruce. It is a nice clean rule, and it is not true.
What really decides the top is much less romantic. Makers use what grows near them, or what is already arriving at the local timber yard.
In Turkey the spruce comes down from the north east, from the mountains around Yusufeli and Borçka, up near the Georgian border. It is a cold, steep, slow growing corner of the country, and slow growth is exactly what a soundboard wants, a tight even grain that stays light and stiff.
Syria and Lebanon have cedar growing at home, the same cedar that is on the Lebanese flag. It is a bit heavier than spruce and a bit softer in the treble, and it is a good part of why Syrian and Lebanese Ouds have that rounded, sweet voice people fall in love with.
And Egypt? Egypt has very little cedar and very little spruce, so Egyptian makers reach for خشب موسكي, khashab muski, sometimes said “moska”. It is Scots pine, shipped in from Russia and Finland, and in Cairo it is plain building timber, the ordinary stuff you buy for door frames. Some of the finest Egyptian Ouds ever made have a top of imported construction pine.
| Where it is built | Top wood | What you hear |
|---|---|---|
| Turkey | Spruce from the north eastern mountains | Bright, quick, clear on top |
| Syria and Lebanon | Lebanese cedar | Round, sweet, warm trebles |
| Egypt | Muski, which is Scots pine | Deep, thick, vocal in the low end |
Which brings up how much the name of the wood matters in the first place. There was a study where researchers built six guitars that were identical apart from the back and sides, six different woods, rosewood, mahogany, maple and so on. Then they had 52 guitarists rate them blind, in a dim room, wearing goggles so nobody could see what they were holding. The ratings came out the same. Nobody has ever run that test on an Oud, and an Oud bowl is a far deeper, rounder thing than a flat guitar back, so I would not stretch the result too far. But if you are choosing an Oud mainly by which wood the bowl is made from, keep it in mind.
What the maker does to that top matters much more than the species. An Oud soundboard is thin, around two millimetres, a lot thinner than most guitar players picture, and towards the edge it is worked thinner still so the whole top can keep moving at the rim. Judging that by eye and by feel, on this piece of wood and not the last one, is most of the craft, and it is where the difference sits between a cheap Oud and one you keep for the rest of your life.
While you are looking at the top, look at the holes, because that is the one difference you can actually see in a photograph. The Turkish Oud is consistent again, three holes, one big one in the middle and two small ones sitting higher up, and all three are filled with a carved wooden rosette. Arabic Ouds are all over the place. Plenty of them have the same three, but you will also find Syrian instruments with a single large hole and nothing carved in it, and Iraqi ones with three plain oval holes and no rosettes anywhere.
The names are lovely, too. The big carved rosette is the shams, which is Arabic for the sun. The small oval holes are qamariyya, from qamar, the moon. So you have the sun and the moon sitting there together on the face of the instrument.
The bowl, which is where the bass comes from
Turn an Oud over and you get the part with no equivalent on a guitar, a deep bowl built from a lot of thin ribs bent over a mould. Walnut, maple, mahogany and rosewood are the usual ones, and on Turkish folk instruments you also see mulberry and apricot.
Depth is the bass, that is the short version. Turkish bowls sit around 19 to 20 cm deep and Arabic bowls go deeper, past 21. However the holes are arranged, the total opening does not change much between the two, so the air inside the bowl is really the only thing a maker can push on, and depth is what moves it fastest. More air inside, lower resonance, bigger bass. That is why an Egyptian Oud feels like it is sitting underneath the music, while a Turkish Oud sits on top of it.
Inside, glued across the underside of the top, there are usually seven light braces. Where exactly they sit matters far more than you would think, and moving one of them by half a centimetre will change the depth and the projection of the whole instrument. Egyptian makers even have a name for the gap between two of them. They call it the safe, because, as one of them said, that is where all the treasures are hidden.
The great makers never agreed on a formula, by the way. The Nahat family of Damascus built the most famous Arabic Ouds there are, and when a repairman measured a dozen of them he found the braces in different places, different sizes and different shapes on every single one. Faruk Türünz, one of the Istanbul masters, argues that the bracing should not even be symmetrical, since the strings themselves are not symmetrical, so why pretend the top is.
So which one should you play?
Choose by the music you want to play, not by the size of your hands.
If what pulls you in is Turkish makam and taksim, the playing of Şerif Muhiddin Targan or Cinuçen Tanrıkorur, then you want the Turkish instrument. The short scale and the high tuning are not details there, they are part of that sound.
Farid al-Atrash and Mohammed Abdel Wahab take you to Egypt instead. Both of them played instruments from the Gamil Georges workshop in Cairo, which opened in 1906, and people still chase that name today.
And if it was Munir Bashir, the Iraqi who did more than anybody to turn the Oud into a solo concert instrument, there is a lovely story behind his sound. In 1957 the Baghdad maker Mohammed Fadel built him an Oud with a floating bridge, so the strings pull against the body of the instrument instead of lifting the top. Bashir also tuned his highest string a whole tone lower than Iraqi players normally did. That one instrument changed the way people built Ouds, and workshops from Damascus to Abu Dhabi followed it.
The labels are looser than the shops make them sound anyway. There are Iraqi Ouds built at 58.5 cm, the Turkish measurement, and tuned in the Arabic way. There are Turkish workshops turning out lovely Arabic Ouds. As one Arabic maker put it, you cannot just take a Turkish Oud, tune it a whole step down, and announce that you now have an Arabic Oud.
If you are still torn, do not let your hands decide it. The physical difference between the two is two or three centimetres, and a hand gets used to that in a few weeks. The voice is the thing you are really choosing, and you will live with it for years. So go back and listen to the players you love, and then buy the instrument that made that sound.
Daniel Karni, Ethnic Musical. Daniel plays several instruments. Since 2009 and has been working with luthiers in Turkey & Syria, making handmade Turkish and Arabic instruments.
Way cool! 😎