Long-necked, dry and precisely fretted — the sound most closely tied to the microtonal precision of Ottoman court music.
The tanbur is a plucked long-necked lute with a small, semi-spherical body and a neck that is unusually long relative to the body. The body is built from 17 to 23 thin hardwood ribs joined edge to edge; the neck is a slender, roughly D-section fingerboard about 100–110 cm long.
The frets are movable gut ties, not fixed metal frets, so a player can slide each one to the exact position a given makam calls for. The strings are plucked with a plectrum called bağa, an asymmetric wedge traditionally cut from tortoiseshell.
The strings are generally tuned around the yegâh reference pitch, but the exact tuning changes with the makam being performed — which makes the tanbur one of the most direct expressions of the Turkish 53-comma pitch system. Finger and neck vibrato, harmonics, portamento and glissando are common ornaments.
A central instrument of the Ottoman court, the tanbur remains one of the core instruments of the classical fasıl ensemble today, used for both solo taksim and ensemble accompaniment.
Performance: Necdet Yaşar — "Nihavend Taksim" (Kalan Müzik — Arşiv Serisi 2, © 1998). Shown via YouTube's own player under its embed licence. Watch on YouTube →
Instruments from the same family, sharing a similar way of making sound:
The tanbur is a plucked long-necked lute with a small, semi-spherical body and a neck that is unusually long relative to the body. The body is built from 17 to 23 thin hardwood ribs joined edge to edge; the neck is a slender, roughly D-section fingerboard about 100–110 cm long.
The strings are generally tuned around the yegâh reference pitch, but the exact tuning changes with the makam being performed — which makes the tanbur one of the most direct expressions of the Turkish 53-comma pitch system. Finger and neck vibrato, harmonics, portamento and glissando are common ornaments.
A central instrument of the Ottoman court, the tanbur remains one of the core instruments of the classical fasıl ensemble today, used for both solo taksim and ensemble accompaniment.
Listen for a dry, resonant plucked attack with a long metallic ring; because the pitch is fretted, each note lands exact and fixed, without the sliding colour a bowed instrument gives.
This page is written from more than one source; where sources disagreed or a technical detail (an exact string count, an exact tuning) had only a single unconfirmed figure behind it, we left it out or described it in general terms rather than publish a number we could not confirm.
Back to the Turkish Instruments tool for all instruments; for the melodic side of Turkish music see the Makam tool, and for rhythm the Usul tool.