The bağlama has seventeen frets in an octave, not twelve: five extra frets sit between the semitones. Choose a düzen to see what every fret plays on each string — with the fret's ratio, its size in cents and where it sits on your instrument's neck.
| Fret | Ratio | Cent | cm from nut | Top | Middle | Bottom |
|---|
The ratios are the traditional bağlama frets given by Yalçın Tura (Türk Musikisinin Mes'eleleri, 1988, p. 159): from 18/17 for the first fret to 2/1 for the octave. Twelve of them are close to the semitones of a piano; the other five — marked red — lie between two semitones and give folk music its in-between notes. On the la string they are si♭2, do#2, mi♭2, fa#2 and la♭2, the names bağlama method books use.
The distance from the nut is the string length minus the length that still vibrates, which is the string length divided by the fret's ratio. The string lengths in the menu are the Ministry of Education's figures for each member of the bağlama family; measure your own instrument from the bridge to the nut if it differs. Many makers now place frets with calculators or tuners, so a real instrument can differ from these ratios by a few cents.
Every düzen is written with the bottom string as la; the other strings and the karar follow the düzen tables of turkuler.com and baglamaci.com, which agree. Bozuk (kara) düzen — la, re, sol — and bağlama düzeni — la, re, mi — are the two most played. Rast, Segah, Şur and Yeksani düzen are left out because the octave of their strings is not documented clearly enough to play them back correctly.
Why does my bağlama have more than seventeen frets?
This chart shows one octave. Above the octave the same pattern repeats; how many frets an
instrument has there varies with its size and maker.
What do the 2 signs mean?
In bağlama notation the in-between frets are written with a numbered accidental: si♭2 is the
fret between si♭ and si, do#2 the fret between do and do#. The cents column gives the exact
size.
Can I use this to re-fret my instrument?
Yes, as a guide: measure your string length from the bridge to the nut, choose it or the
nearest length, and read each fret's distance from the nut. Check the result by ear and with
a tuner — the frets of a real bağlama are tied by hand and adjusted.
Is the sound a real bağlama?
Yes — recordings of a real bağlama, released into the public domain (CC0) by their recordist
on Freesound. Nine recorded notes are retuned to the exact frequency of each fret, so a fret
between two semitones sounds where it really is. Source: the
Baglama Notes
pack by fcerim.