There are no frets, and that is the feature
Put a finger anywhere on the neck above and slide it. The pitch follows continuously — not in steps, not to the nearest marker, not to the nearest quarter tone. Nothing on this page rounds the note you are playing. The line under the instrument reads back what you are actually sounding, to the cent, because that is the only honest way to show a position on a piece of glass you cannot feel.
Every other virtual oud we could find draws a fretted neck, and it is not a small simplification. An oud is fretless for a reason: Arabic music needs pitches that lie between the twelve a piano has, the whole system is built on being able to place them by ear, and a fret is a decision made in advance by somebody who has never heard you play. The moment you snap the pitch to a grid you have built an instrument that cannot play the repertoire the real one exists for.
Six courses, eleven strings
The rows are courses, not strings. Five of them are two strings tuned to the same note and taken by a single stroke of the risha; the lowest is a single bass string. That is why the top five rows are drawn as pairs and the bottom one as a single line, and why the instrument has eleven strings and six things to play.
The pairing is audible before it is visible. Two strings tuned to “the same” note are never closer than a few cents, and they are never struck at the same instant — the risha crosses them a couple of milliseconds apart. What you hear is a small flam on the attack and a slow beating through the sustain, and that beating is most of what separates an oud from any other large plucked lute. This page synthesises both strings of every course rather than one string turned up, which is why a course rings longer and less evenly than a single string would.
Arabic and Turkish are not the same instrument
The two tunings in the chip row are the two you will actually meet, and the difference between them is bigger than the semitone that separates their pitches:
- Arabic — C2 F2 A2 D3 G3 C4. Fourths, except for a major third between the 5th and 4th courses. The most widespread modern Arabic tuning, and what most Arabic method books assume.
- Turkish — C♯2 F♯2 B2 E3 A3 D4. A semitone higher, and fourths all the way up with no gap anywhere.
Because one has a third in the middle and the other does not, they are not transpositions of each other. A shape that crosses the 5th-to-4th boundary moves by a different interval in each, so a fingering carried across from one tuning to the other is wrong from that point up. Anything that stays on one course transfers perfectly.
Regional variation does not stop at those two. Iraqi tuning differs again, and a great many players use whatever their teacher handed them. These are the two this site has reviewed note charts for; if your instrument is set up differently, tune it the way you were taught and use the tuner to get there.
The markers, and what a quarter tone actually is
The Markers menu changes what is drawn on the neck. None of the options change what is played — there is nothing to snap to, and switching them off leaves the instrument exactly as playable as it was.
- Quarter tones — the 24-note grid, a marker every fifty cents. The dashed blue ones are the twelve positions no piano and no fretted instrument has.
- Maqam Rast — the eight degrees of Rast measured up from each open course: Rast, Dukah, Sikah, Jaharkah, Nawa, Husayni, Awj, Kirdan. Two of them, sikah and awj, are quarter tones; the other six are ordinary notes, which is the fact that makes Rast tunable on a fixed-pitch instrument at all.
- Semitones — the twelve-note grid, for finding your way if you have come from a fretted instrument.
Because every course is the same length, a position on the neck is the same position on all six — 350 cents above the open string is the same distance from the nut whichever course you are on. That is why the markers are drawn once across the whole neck and labelled with degrees rather than note names: the degree is what stays true across the board, and the note name is not.
Where sikah actually is
Switch the markers to Maqam Rast and look at the third degree. It is not drawn as a line. It is drawn as a band, and there is a separate dotted tick above it, because the single most useful fact about the quarter tone is that it is not one pitch:
- 342 cents — Egyptian practice, taken from later twentieth-century recordings. The lowest of the group; the Egyptian E half-flat drifted downward across the century.
- 350 cents — the equal 24-quarter-tone theory fixed at the Cairo congress of 1932, and exactly halfway between E♭ and E.
- 356 cents — Syrian and Levantine practice, a little above the Egyptian.
- 384.9 cents — the corresponding Turkish makam degree, which is built on 53 commas rather than 24 quarters and is not a quarter tone in any sense. That is the dotted tick, drawn separately because calling it the same note would be the mistake the whole distinction exists to prevent.
Fourteen cents between Cairo and Damascus is comfortably audible, and an experienced listener places a player’s school from it before the first phrase is over. A fret has to choose one of those numbers and is then wrong for everyone else. A marker does not have to choose, which is why the band is drawn as a band — and why the reading under the neck names a note like E½♭4 rather than calling it “E, fifty cents flat”. Sikah is a note with a name, not a mistuned E.
Why the markers crowd together
The spacing is not a drawing decision. Stop a string halfway along its length and it sounds the octave; stop it a third of the way and it sounds the fifth above that. Every interval higher is packed into what is left, so the octave marker sits at the exact midpoint of the neck and everything above the fifth is squeezed into the last third.
Spreading the markers out evenly would make them far easier to hit and would be the second most misleading thing this page could do, after adding frets. The crowding is the instrument: it is why intonation gets harder as you go up the neck, why oud teachers spend so long on the low positions, and why the first octave is where the repertoire lives.
The risha, and the tremolo
A plucked string cannot be sustained. Bow an instrument and a long note is one gesture; on an oud a long note has to be manufactured out of a rapid alternation of down and up strokes, ten to fourteen a second, and that is the tremolo. It is on a large fraction of every oud recording ever made, and without it the instrument cannot hold a melody note against anything.
Turn Risha tremolo on and hold a finger down. The strokes are not evenly spaced — each gap is drawn a little short or a little long, and down and up strokes are given different weight, because a perfectly regular tremolo stops sounding like a plectrum and starts sounding like a machine. Slide while it is running and you have the two hands doing what they actually do.
Playing it with a keyboard
The letters on the courses are keys: Q down to Y, running from course 1 at the top to course 6 at the bottom. They sound the open courses only, which is the honest limit — a keyboard has no way to say “and 350 cents up”, and the whole of this instrument above the nut is a position rather than a key. Use a finger or a mouse for anything stopped.
Tuning a real one
This page has nothing to tune: the courses are set to the tuning you pick and stay there. A real oud is the opposite of that, and it is a genuinely hard instrument to keep in tune — eleven strings, friction pegs with no gearing, and nylon that goes on stretching for days after a restring. Nothing catches an error for you, because there are no frets to disagree with.
The tuner listens through your microphone and tells you what has drifted and by how many cents. It also has the frequency readout you need for the quarter tones, which the note names alone cannot give you: at sikah, around 320 Hz, a tenth of a hertz is about half a cent, so the number is several times finer than the difference between two schools.
Frequently asked questions
Is this oud really fretless, or does it snap to the nearest note?
Really fretless. The pitch is calculated from exactly where your finger is, to a fraction of a cent, and nothing anywhere in the page rounds it to a marker, a semitone or a quarter tone. Put your finger seven cents above sikah and you get seven cents above sikah. That is the whole point: an oud is fretless, a maqam needs pitches that no fretted instrument has, and a virtual oud that snapped to a grid would be a virtual guitar with a different picture on it.
What is the standard tuning for an oud?
The most widespread modern Arabic tuning is C2–F2–A2–D3–G3–C4, low to high, which is what this page opens with. Turkish ouds are commonly tuned C♯2–F♯2–B2–E3–A3–D4 — a semitone higher and, more importantly, in fourths all the way up, where the Arabic tuning has a major third between the 5th and 4th courses. Regional variation beyond those two is real and large: Iraqi tuning differs again, and plenty of players use a set their teacher gave them. Treat the Arabic tuning as a default rather than as the answer, and check it against your own method book.
Why do the two tunings need different fingerings?
Because they are not transpositions of each other. The Turkish set is fourths throughout; the Arabic set is fourths except for a major third between the 5th and 4th courses. A shape that crosses that gap moves by a different interval in each tuning, so anything learned on one is wrong on the other from the 4th course up. Within a single course both behave identically, which is why scale exercises transfer and chord-like shapes do not.
What is a quarter tone, and where is it on the neck?
In the 24-note system Arabic music has been taught in since the Cairo congress of 1932, a quarter tone is half a semitone — fifty cents — and the markers on this page put one exactly halfway between each pair of ordinary notes. In practice it is not that tidy. The third degree of maqam Rast, sikah, is played at about 342 cents by Egyptian musicians, about 356 in Syria and the Levant, and 384.9 in Turkish makam, which is not a quarter tone at any reading. Fourteen cents is audible and identifies a school the way an accent identifies a speaker. Switch the markers to Maqam Rast and the sikah is drawn as the band those schools occupy rather than as a line.
Why are there eleven strings but only six things to touch?
Because five of the six courses are two strings tuned to the same note, struck by one stroke of the risha, and the sixth — the bass — is a single string. Six courses, eleven strings. The pair is not decoration: two strings are never exactly in tune with each other or exactly in phase, and the shimmer that comes out of that is most of what makes an oud sound like an oud. This page synthesises both strings of every course, a few cents apart and two milliseconds apart, rather than one string played louder. Twelve-string ouds with a doubled bass are common too; eleven is what the reviewed tuning chart on this site records, so eleven is what is drawn.
What is a risha and what is the tremolo?
The risha is the plectrum — traditionally an eagle feather quill, now usually shaved horn or plastic. The tremolo is a rapid alternation of down and up strokes on one course, roughly ten to fourteen a second, and it is how an oud sustains: a plucked string cannot be bowed, so a long note is made out of many short ones. Turn it on and hold a finger on the neck, then slide while it is running — that combination, a tremolo over a moving left hand, is the sound of a taqsim.
Why do the markers get closer together as they go up?
Because that is where the notes are. Stopping a string halfway along its length sounds the octave, at a third of the way along the fifth above that, and every interval higher is squeezed into what is left — so the top of any fretless neck is physically cramped and the intervals near the nut are wide. The markers here are placed by that geometry rather than spread out evenly, which would be easier to hit and would teach a hand position that does not exist on a real instrument.
Can I play maqamat other than Rast on this?
You can play any of them — it is a fretless neck, so every pitch is available, which is exactly why the oud is the instrument the maqam system is taught on. What this page draws markers for is Rast, because that is the scale this site has reviewed cent values for. Bayati, Saba, Sikah and Huzam all need the same E half-flat that Rast does when they sit on the notes those maqamat are usually played on, so the quarter-tone markers reach them; Nahawand, Ajam, Kurd and Hijaz need no quarter tone at all and sit on ordinary notes. Markers for the rest would mean publishing interval sets nobody here has checked, and a wrong one would be undetectable by ear on a page that just makes a sound.