In the first half, we hear tracks to compare three solo plucked instruments -- the oud, the lute, and the guitar. Then we feature three songs by Latin jazz saxophonist Leandro "Gato" Barbieri, who passed away recently. I reminisced about my interview with Gato in a blog post earlier this week. The oud, the lute, and the guitar all come from same musical family. The oud is the oldest of them all, going back thousands of years. The oud also called ud typically has strings, is unfretted, and is played with a feather.
It is an Arabic instrument often featured in middle eastern music as well as Turkish music. With an oud which is tuned in the Arabic way, the C major scale will be the easiest one to tackle. With the Turkish tuning, D major will be the first one to try. You will then want to start slowly piecing together some of the more testing scales. At this stage, you should think about seeking out a teacher with experience to guide you.
Alternatively, there are some useful DVDs and guidebooks to give you a helping hand. Take a look at this video below by Oud for Guitarists which shows you how to play a basic jurjunah rhythm on the oud to help you get started. We are very sorry, but the browser you are visting us with is outdated and not complient with our website security. Please upgrade your browser to a modern secure version to view our website. What is an oud?
An Arabic Oud from our range. So I ended up with just a guitar. It's never going to be the same thing, but I did find that, with a bit of a change in technique, you can get into the same emotional zone. Funnily enough, I found a flamenco guitar actually works better than a classical for the six-course renaissance repertoire.
This may sound surprising since they're generally built for a more brash style of playing but they're built more lightly and have a faster response and a more delicate, silvery tone, when played gently. I still played with the nails as with an oud, fingertips just don't give you enough purchase but found it worked quite well.
Just tune the G string down to F sharp and you'll have the same intervals as a lute. If you want to get up to the most common lute tuning, which is G-g', use a capo on the 3rd fret. However, I generally found this sounded a bit thin on the guitar and the sonority was better with the capo on the 2nd.
The capo also helps get over the problem that some lute fingerings are a bit difficult for people with lazy fingers such as me using the full guitar string length.
Overall, my gut feeling would be that this would work better for the fingerstyle renaissance repertoire than a converted oud, though, as others have said, if you want to go for medieval plectrum style, the oud is your best bet.
Just to repeat myself and charlie though, the renaissance lute repertoire around the mid 16th century really is a garden of delights. As the lute was the main classical instrument of the time, you can go on exploring for ever. The music is of as high a quality as any written in the western tradition in any era and its relatively unknown, so you can feel very self-satisfied in your arcane specialism. It's quite a special feeling to read tablature, sometimes in facsimiles of the original, and hear the notes come out as intended by the composer nearly years ago.
You feel like a cross between a mechanical piano and a time machine. My personal favourites are Francesco as mentioned , and the great three spanish vihuela composers, Mudarra, Narvaez and Milan. Then later on, Dowland is equally sublime, but I prefer the earlier style. If you want to get into this area, the Diana Poulton lute tutor is a brilliant book and will, on its own, keep you out of the pub for a couple of years with very well-chosen pieces - none of your boring dozen a day stuff here.
With Marais, you're getting into the baroque, which is a whole new world to explore and you'll need a viol, which is beyond my ken. Happy hunting. Hi Bill, Wow. That's amazing that you've tried it so quickly. I had a look on the web sites, but the fret packs and lute gut strings are quite expensive, so I thought that I need to do more research and give it more time I did sent an email to aquila in the USA to see if I can get lute strings and fret packs for a reasonable price, but I haven't heard from them yet - Maybe they just thought my project is crazy.
So, I'm just curious now, when you say you put frets on the oud? Did you also have lute strings, or did you just use the oud strings, and is it an Arabic or a Turkish oud?
Maybe all of these variables make a difference too, but I must say that my expectations are quite low given what everyone had already said. I saw they offer lute kits on the web site which are much cheaper, but I really don't know how hard these are to build by following the instructions, and I'm not confident at all of my ability to follow the instructions and put a lute together. This option would eliminate much of the time consuming and skilled work involved in making a lute but there would still be quite a bit left to do in fitting and assembling the instrument.
So, if you have doubts at all about your manual skills or are not interested in undertaking the challenge and satisfaction of building your own lute, assembling a kit might not be a good option. Also, there is no guarantee that the finished lute will turn out to be a good instrument but it will likely be quite satisfactory if the instructions are followed. The advantage in buying a lute used or new from an instrument retail outlet is that you should be able to verify how good or bad an instrument is before you buy it.
Best not to buy without trying. I'm having such a good time with the oppositethat is a lute converted to an oudalthough I realize that's an oversimplification to interchange the wordsas I wrote in another post I cut the frets off of an Early Music Shop 8c Lute a few months ago.
Its interesting to stumble upon this archived post 5 years later. As experiment I have been using mono-filament fishing line for most of the strings not the outer ones and the 0. I mostly just wanted to continue playing with all fingers no pick when I decided to give the lute a try and also thought a few more courses to fill out solo performance would fit my goals.
The wider neck of the 8c lute compared to classical guitar requires a much more " open" rt hand for sure. Been enjoying the change. After starting out on the oud learning maqamat, with a risha, I've lately been enjoying playing with my fingers, like fingerpicked guitar, and using the tip of the index finger for strong notes and tremolo.
Trying to build up a bit of a "practical chords" vocabulary. The narrower the neck the more impractical ;-. Note that no matter how many courses there are on a lute, only the first six courses occasionally the seventh are stopped on the fingerboard the remainder being played 'open' - so no requirement to stretch further than this with the left hand at least.
Multiple courses beyond the seventh are plucked with the thumb of the right hand extended - the hand being 'anchored' on the sound board with the little finger so that the thumb can find the appropriate open bass strings with certainty. Also the string spacing at the nut on a lute with six double courses is usually significantly less than on a modern classical guitar with six single strings.
So for example on surviving lutes the overall spacing of the first six courses can range between 33mm and 39mm - which is about the same spacing for a 6 course oud 33mm to 38mm. This compares with a modern classical guitar spacing of 43mm to 45mm. Narrow spacing is also necessary on the larger lutes some with over 90 cm stopped string length where great stretches of the left hand are necessary.
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