First: which tanbur is in your hands?
Two instruments share this name and they have almost nothing in common beyond a long neck and a plucked string. Everything below depends on which one you have, so start here.
| Turkish tanbur | Kurdish / Persian tanbur | |
|---|---|---|
| Body | Large hemispherical bowl, very thin soundboard | Small pear-shaped bowl |
| Strings | Six or seven, in courses | Three — two in unison plus one |
| Frets | Around fifty, tied gut, microtonal | Roughly fourteen, tied gut |
| Neck | Extremely long — often longer than the body is wide by several times | Long, but spannable |
| Played with | A tortoiseshell or plastic plectrum, and a bow in the yaylı version | The fingers, with a distinctive strumming action |
| Tuned to | The ensemble’s ahenk, set by the ney | The mode being played |
The Turkish tanbur: fifty frets, and why
The Turkish tanbur carries around fifty tied gut frets — more than any other instrument in common use anywhere — and the reason is arithmetic rather than decoration. Turkish theory does not divide the octave into twelve. It divides it into 53 commas, and a makam needs pitches that no semitone fret can reach: the neutral degrees, the koma-inflected notes, the two sizes of mücenneb. Every one of those needs its own fret, and the tanbur is where they all live. It is the instrument Turkish theory is normally demonstrated on for exactly that reason.
Because the frets are tied, they are also movable and losable. An instrument that has been restrung, transported, or set up by someone playing a different repertoire will genuinely be in the wrong place — and the intervals involved are small enough that “wrong place” can be a fraction of a millimetre.
| Interval | Cents | From the nut | Why there |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koma | 23.5¢ | 12.1 mm | 1 comma. The Pythagorean comma, 531441/524288 — the smallest fret step on the neck. |
| Bakiye | 90.2¢ | 45.7 mm | 4 commas. The limma, 256/243 — the diatonic semitone. |
| Küçük mücenneb | 113.7¢ | 57.2 mm | 5 commas. The apotome, 2187/2048 — the chromatic semitone. |
| Büyük mücenneb | 180.5¢ | 89.1 mm | 8 commas. 65536/59049. Two bakiyes stacked. |
| Tanini | 203.9¢ | 100.0 mm | 9 commas. The whole tone, 9/8. Bakiye + küçük mücenneb, exactly. |
| Artık ikili | 270.7¢ | 130.3 mm | 12 commas. The augmented second of Hicaz — bakiye on büyük mücenneb. |
| Perfect fourth | 498¢ | 225.0 mm | 22 commas, 4/3. A landmark: it should agree with your open courses. |
| Perfect fifth | 702¢ | 300.0 mm | 31 commas, 3/2. |
| Octave | 1200¢ | 450.0 mm | 53 commas. Exactly half the string, whatever the comma arithmetic says. |
What the frets are actually for: makam Rast on a tanbur
The scale below is what the fret table adds up to. It is the theoretical Rast — the codified version, not a transcription of a performance — with each degree’s distance from the tonic in cents, accumulated from the Pythagorean ratios above:
| Degree | Cents above the tonic | What a chromatic dial will call it |
|---|---|---|
| Rast · 0 commas above the tonic | 0.00¢ | the tonic |
| Dugah · 9 commas above the tonic | 203.91¢ | 2 semitones up, +4¢ |
| Segah · 17 commas above the tonic | 384.36¢ | 4 semitones up, -16¢ |
| Cargah · 22 commas above the tonic | 498.04¢ | 5 semitones up, -2¢ |
| Neva · 31 commas above the tonic | 701.96¢ | 7 semitones up, +2¢ |
| Huseyni · 40 commas above the tonic | 905.87¢ | 9 semitones up, +6¢ |
| Evic · 48 commas above the tonic | 1086.31¢ | 11 semitones up, -14¢ |
| Gerdaniye · 53 commas above the tonic | 1200.00¢ | 12 semitones up |
The third column is the practically useful one: it is what this tuner will say when you fret each degree, and it is how you check a fret without owning a comma-calibrated device. Segah — the third degree, and the one everyone argues about — reads as a flattened major third, not as a quarter tone. Turkish theory puts it at 384 cents; the Arabic degree of the same name is measured between 342 and 356. That is thirty to forty cents apart, comfortably audible, and it is the single clearest reason a Turkish tanbur and an Arabic oud cannot share a fret pattern.
Tuning routine, Turkish tanbur
- Establish the level from the ensemble, not from a fork. If you are playing with a ney, its ahenk decides the pitch and everything else follows it. If you are alone, pick a level the strings are comfortable at and read what it is.
- Tune the courses one string at a time, damping the neighbour — the courses are doubled and the plectrum will set both going.
- Check the fourth and the fifth against fretted notes — those two frets are the only ones you can verify against an open string, so they anchor the rest of the neck.
- Then walk the comma frets with the cents readout. Work down from the octave rather than up from the nut: errors accumulate away from the nut and are easier to spot where the frets are widely spaced.
- Round again. The soundboard is very thin and moves under full tension.
The Kurdish tanbur
A different instrument and a much simpler tuning job: three strings, two of them a unison pair that carries the melody and one that acts largely as a drone, with around fourteen tied frets. It is tuned to the mode being played rather than to a fixed pitch, and the drone is what fixes the tonic — so the tuning question is not “what notes” but “what interval between the pair and the drone”, and the answer comes from the maqam of the piece.
The practical tuner advice is the same as for the pair on any coursed instrument: damp one of the two while you tune the other. The unison is the thing that makes the instrument sound like one voice, and a dial cannot help you with a pair it is hearing as two pitches.
Frequently asked questions
Which instrument is a tanbur?
Two different ones share the name, and they do not share a tuning. The Turkish tanbur is a long-necked classical lute with a hemispherical body, six or seven strings in courses, and the densest fretting of any instrument on this site — around fifty tied gut frets laying out the Turkish comma system. The Kurdish and Persian tanbur is a smaller, pear-bodied instrument with three strings, two of them in unison, central to the Yarsan repertoire. If your instrument has a very long neck crowded with tied frets, it is the Turkish one; if it has three strings and a neck you can span, it is the Kurdish one.
Why does this page not give me target notes?
Because the two instruments would need two different sets, and neither has a single standard. A Turkish tanbur is tuned to the ensemble’s ahenk — the transposition level the ney dictates — rather than to a fixed pitch, so its absolute tuning changes with the room. A Kurdish tanbur is tuned to the mode being played. A chip bar would have to pick one instrument and one convention, and would then be wrong for most of the people who arrive here. The plain chromatic dial plus the interval relationships on this page is the honest tool.
How many frets does a Turkish tanbur have?
Around fifty, and the exact number varies by instrument and by player, because they are tied gut and can be added, removed and moved. That density is the point: the Turkish comma system needs pitches a semitone fretting cannot reach, so the neck carries frets for the koma, the bakiye and the two mücenneb intervals as well as the whole tones. It is the most finely fretted instrument in common use anywhere, and it is why the tanbur is the instrument Turkish theory is usually demonstrated on.
My tanbur plays a makam wrong even though the open strings are correct.
Check the frets before anything else. They are tied gut and they move — under the string, under your hand, and over time — and the intervals they are meant to place are small: a koma is 23 cents, which is a fret position difference of well under a millimetre near the nut. An instrument that has been restrung, transported, or set up by someone playing a different repertoire will genuinely be in the wrong place. Fret the note, read the cents, slide the gut.
Is the Turkish comma really 1/53 of an octave?
No, and this is the most quoted wrong fact in the subject. Turkish theory counts an octave as 53 commas, but its intervals are Pythagorean — stacked 3/2 fifths — and the Pythagorean comma is 23.46 cents. Fifty-three of those is 1243 cents, which is not an octave. The unit that does divide the octave 53 times is 22.64 cents, and it is not the interval the theory’s ratios describe. Both statements survive because the comma counts are a labelling scheme that adds up correctly inside the Pythagorean lattice rather than a multiplication: four commas plus five commas really is nine commas, because 90.22 + 113.69 = 203.91 exactly.