majnuunNavid
Oud Junkie
Posts: 622
Registered: 7-22-2013
Member Is Offline
Mood: Dude, where's my Oud?
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Want to play some chords? LOL
I don't play Oud like this or encourage learning this, but I had a request from a reader for some ways that you can play chords on the Oud, so I made
a video that shows some very basic major, minor, and seventh chords on the Oud.
I hope it makes you smile, laugh, smirk, or faint.  )
http://www.oudforguitarists.com/oud-chords-play-basic-chords-oud/
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jdowning
Oud Junkie
Posts: 3485
Registered: 8-2-2006
Location: Ontario, Canada
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
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It would be easier and better if the oud was fitted with frets (as the oud once was until as late as the 17th C in Persia). Fretting the modern Arabic
oud was a suggestion reportedly made in 1932 at the Congress of Arabian Music in Cairo by Egyptian musicologist Ahmed Amin al-Dik Efendi but which
clearly 'fell on deaf ears' in these modern times.
Dr G.H. Farmer reported ample historical evidence in support of the use of frets on the oud in his study 'Was the Arabian and Persian Lute Fretted?'
(Studies in Oriental Musical Instruments). For example, the 14th C Arabic musician Ibn al-Tahhan wrote that he used a pair of dividers to determine
the fret positions on the fingerboard to which the frets of gut were tied - requiring four rolls of gut of different diameters to fret an oud.
However, he went on to state that he did not find it necessary to use tied frets as he knew the place of every note on the fingerboard.
I read somewhere - but cannot immediately find the reference - that the fretted oud may at times have been played poly-phonically (two or three part?)
during a period predating the first mention of polyphony in Europe (10th C) - like the lute was at a later period.
It would be interesting to hear how that might have sounded.
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Lysander
Oud Junkie
Posts: 410
Registered: 7-26-2013
Location: London, UK
Member Is Offline
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I've heard a fretted oud, it just sounds wrong to me. In spite of the fact that it might be easier to play in tune, the lack of frets is what gives
the oud its edge. Without the freedom of microtones it just sound too regimented.
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abc123xyz
Oud Junkie
Posts: 114
Registered: 5-17-2007
Member Is Offline
Mood: No Mood
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Quote: Originally posted by Lysander  | | I've heard a fretted oud, it just sounds wrong to me. In spite of the fact that it might be easier to play in tune, the lack of frets is what gives
the oud its edge. Without the freedom of microtones it just sound too regimented. |
Yes, I agree. For me glissando is essential, and any instrument that can't produce it is, in a sense, incomplete.
However if some people started keeping special ouds with tied-on frets for doing chords, I don't think it would necessarily threaten the existence of
unfretted ouds, and any such instrument could easily be restored to its "normal" state at any time by simply cutting off the frets.
Navid's method is the best of both worlds, allowing some chords on the oud without modifying the instrument at all, though naturally without frets
it's more difficult to accurately intone more than one note at a time, and without frets the total number of chords and inversions available is
smaller too.
David
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