The maqam scales of Turkish music — explained, structured, and played at their true microtonal pitch. The comma system, the perdes, the çeşni building blocks, twenty makams and the transposed şed makams, each with its scale, final, dominant and melodic path.
A makam is a dizi (a scale, usually spanning an octave) plus a karar (the final, the note a piece comes to rest on), a güçlü (a secondary centre of gravity, often the 4th or 5th degree), and a seyir — the characteristic way a melody moves through the scale: ascending (çıkıcı), descending (inici), or both.
Two makams can use the same seven notes and still be different makams, because their seyir starts in a different place and leans on different degrees. This is why makam is a system of melodic behaviour, not just a list of scales.
Turkish theory divides the octave into 53 equal commas (koma) — about 22.6 cents each — following the system codified by Hüseyin Sadettin Arel, Suphi Ezgi and Salih Murat Uzdilek, which is the standard taught in Turkish conservatories, at TRT and in the state curriculum. Where a Western semitone is one fixed size, a makam step can be a bakiye (4 koma), a küçük mücennep (5), a büyük mücennep (8), a tanini (whole tone, 9) or an artık ikili (augmented second, 12–13).
The named notes are perdes. Below is one octave from perde Rast. Click any perde to hear it — every pitch is played at its true position in the 53-comma octave, not rounded to a piano key.
Red ticks are perdes that fall between the piano keys. Note names follow AEU notation (perde Rast is written as G). Turkish music is written for one reference tuning, Bolâhenk, and played on differently sized neys and instruments that transpose it down — the written perde names never change, only the sounding pitch. Pick an ahenk above to hear it.
Every makam scale is assembled from a dörtlü (tetrachord, spanning a fourth) and a beşli (pentachord, spanning a fifth), joined at one shared note. Each has a name and a fixed interval pattern in koma. Learn these seven and most makam scales become recognisable at a glance.
T = tanini (9), K = büyük mücennep (8), S = küçük mücennep (5), B = bakiye (4), A = artık ikili (12).
Each card shows the makam's scale in koma steps, the çeşni it is built from, its karar and güçlü, its seyir, a note on its character, and a well-known piece in that makam. Press play scale to hear it ascend and descend. The Hicaz family — Hicaz, Uzzâl, Hümâyun, Zirgüleli Hicaz — shows the point of makam plainly: several of them share almost the same notes and are told apart by seyir and güçlü, not by the scale.
Pick any two makams to line their dizis up step by step. Green means the step is the same at that position, red means it differs. When two makams share the whole dizi, the thing that separates them is the seyir and the güçlü, not the scale.
A şed makam takes the interval pattern of a simple makam and rebuilds it on a different karar. The character carries over; the pitch level changes. Nihâvend, on this page as a makam in its own right, is Bûselik moved to Rast. The main şed makams:
The twenty makams here are given in their standard Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek / conservatory form, each built by joining two named çeşni; every scale is checked to close the octave at 53 commas.
Turkish makam theory has real, well-known debates that a page like this cannot resolve: the exact comma of Uşşak's and Hüseyni's second degree, whether a fixed Saba tetrachord exists at all, and the gap between what the theory writes and what performers play. Saba is not given here — its tetrachord is now confirmed (Dügâh–Segâh–Çârgâh–Hicaz, 18 koma), but every source describes the rest of its octave as overlapping the start of a Zirgüleli Hicaz dizi rather than joining it at one clean note, so no source gives its full scale as a single unbroken koma formula. Every makam above now has its own page; Saba, and any scale we are not yet sure of, wait on a review by a Turkish theory teacher — that review is something we actively want.
For Western scales and modes, see the Scale Library; the deeper history and practice of maqam and modal traditions is in the free Cloud Atelier guides.
Each makam below has a full page — a plain answer to "what is this makam", the dizi perde by perde, the two çeşni it is built from, its karar, güçlü and seyir, how the melody moves, how to recognise it by ear, related makams, an FAQ, and microtonal playback.