Four strings, three pitches, and a name that lies
Se-tār means three strings, and for most of the instrument’s history that is what it had. The fourth arrived in the 19th century — traditionally credited to the Sufi musician Moshtaq Ali Shah — and it was added beside the bass string rather than given a position of its own. So a modern setar has four strings and three stopped courses, and the extra one is a drone that sounds an octave above the bass, which is the same pitch as the melody string.
That is the reading that confuses people. A tuner will name the same note twice on a four-string instrument, and nothing is wrong. Written on C: melody C4, brass string G3 a fourth below, bass C3 an octave below the melody, drone C4.
Two levels of the same tuning — the intervals are identical. The 1st and 4th strings are the same pitch on purpose.
The frets are tied on, and you are meant to move them
A setar carries around twenty-five frets of tied gut. They slide. On a guitar the intervals are decided at the factory and fixed with a fret saw; on a setar they are a setting, adjusted for the dastgah in front of you, and an instrument set up by someone playing a different repertoire is genuinely in the wrong place for yours.
This is the reason a setar can pass every check above and still play the mode wrong. The dial sees open strings. The open strings are not the problem.
What the frets have to place is the neutral second, roughly 125–145 cents — wider than a semitone, narrower than a whole tone, and on no keyboard anywhere — together with the wide plus tone of Chahargah and Homayoun. Both are what the koron and sori accidentals notate, and neither is a quarter tone. The tuning-systems page has the sourcing and the size of the disagreement.
| Interval | Cents | From the nut | Why there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semitone | 90¢ | 33.4 mm | The Pythagorean limma, 256/243. |
| Neutral second | 135¢ | 49.5 mm | A band rather than a value — Farhat gives 125–145¢. This is its middle. |
| Whole tone | 204¢ | 73.4 mm | 9/8. |
| Plus tone | 270¢ | 95.3 mm | The wide step of Chahargah and Homayoun. |
| Minor third | 294¢ | 103.1 mm | 32/27. |
| Fourth | 498¢ | 165.0 mm | 4/3 — check this one against your open brass string. |
| Fifth | 702¢ | 220.0 mm | 3/2. |
| Octave | 1200¢ | 330.0 mm | Exactly half the string. |
Koron, sori, and what the dial will say
Persian notation has two accidentals Western notation does not: the koron, which lowers, and the sori, which raises. Vaziri defined both as exactly half a semitone — 50 cents — which is tidy, is what students are taught, and is not what players do.
On Hormoz Farhat’s measured interval sizes a koron applied to a whole tone lowers it by roughly 59 to 79 cents, not fifty. Farhat’s wider point is that Persian music has no fixed interval sizes at all: the neutral second moves with the performer, with the teaching line, and with where in the dastgah it falls. He treats that variability as the system’s defining property rather than as imprecision in it, and a page that printed one number for a koron would be contradicting the best source it has.
In practice: fret a koron and this dial will name the semitone below and report you somewhere between 25 and 45 cents sharp of it. That number is not an error to correct. It is the interval, and the range is the point.
Tuning routine
- Melody string first, to a level that feels right. Whatever note it lands on becomes the reference for everything else.
- Brass string a perfect fourth below it. C4 melody gives G3 here.
- Bass string an octave below the melody.
- Drone string in unison with the melody. Damp the bass beside it while you do — they are adjacent and the plectrum will set both going.
- Round again. Low tension means large movement: bringing four strings up pulls the light soundboard and the first string you tuned will have dropped.
- Then the frets, fourth first, then whatever the dastgah needs.
Frequently asked questions
How many strings does a setar have?
Four, despite the name — se-tār means "three strings", and it was one for centuries. The fourth was added in the 19th century, traditionally credited to the Sufi musician Moshtaq Ali Shah, and it sits alongside the bass string rather than in its own position on the neck. That is why the instrument still looks and is fingered like a three-string instrument: you stop three courses, and the fourth string rides beside the bass as a drone.
Why does my tuner read the same note twice?
Because two of the four strings really are the same pitch. Written on C the melody string is C4 and the drone string beside the bass is also C4, an octave above the bass itself. Nothing is wrong: a setar has four strings and three pitches. If you are counting strings by pitch and expecting four different readings, that is the reading that will confuse you.
What pitch should I tune a setar to?
Whatever the instrument wants. Persian music does not fix the setar to a reference the way an orchestra fixes a violin to an oboe — the written convention puts the melody string on C, and plenty of players sit a tone or more below that to suit the instrument’s build, the string gauge and the singer they are accompanying. A setar is a very lightly built instrument at low tension, and forcing it up to a written pitch it does not like is a good way to lose a soundboard. Keep the fourth and the octave exact and put the level where it sounds right.
The open strings are fine but the mode sounds wrong.
Move the frets. A setar carries twenty-five or so frets of tied gut, and they are meant to be adjusted — the neutral intervals a dastgah needs sit between the semitones a fixed fret would give you, and an instrument set up for one repertoire is genuinely in the wrong place for another. Fret the note, watch the cents readout, slide the gut until the number is what you want. The table on this page gives starting distances from the nut.
Is a koron the same as an Arabic half-flat?
They are written almost identically and they are not the same pitch. Vaziri defined the koron as exactly half a semitone, 50 cents, which makes it the Arabic quarter tone — but that is a notation convention rather than a description of practice. On Farhat’s measured interval sizes a koron applied to a whole tone lowers it by roughly 60 to 80 cents instead, so a Persian neutral second lands around 125 to 145 cents where an Arabic one is notated at 150. That is a real, audible difference between the two traditions, and it varies by performer and school on top.