Qanun Tuner

Seventy-eight strings, twenty-six notes

A qanun is a trapezoidal box zither with 26 courses of three strings each — 78 strings in total, and 26 distinct pitches. Every course is a plain unison: all three strings are tuned to exactly the same note, and the reason there are three rather than one is volume, because a plucked nylon string over a skin-mounted bridge is quiet on its own.

That arithmetic sets the whole character of the job. Tuning a guitar is six decisions; tuning a qanun is 26 decisions and 78 adjustments, of which only 26 are things a dial can help you with. The other 52 are unison matching, which is an ear task by definition — two strings a few cents apart both read centred and still beat against each other, because the needle’s tolerance is wider than your hearing’s.

The base tuning is nothing but naturals

This surprises people who come to the instrument expecting a microtonal tuning to match its microtonal reputation. The pegs are set to plain diatonic naturals — C, D, E, F, G, A, B, repeating — with no sharp, no flat, and no quarter tone anywhere. An Arabic qanun spans roughly G2 to D6, and if you count the naturals from G2 up to D6 you get exactly 26, which is exactly the number of courses. The range and the course count are the same fact stated twice.

Everything the instrument is famous for happens after that, with the levers.

The mandals: where the quarter tones live

Running along the left edge of the soundboard is a bank of small brass levers — the mandals (Turkish: mandal; the Arabic term ‘urabis also used). Each sits under one course and, when flipped, presses a fret-like stop against the strings, shortening the speaking length by a precise amount. Because the shortening is fixed by where the stop was installed, the pitch change it produces is repeatable to within a cent or two, and it happens instantly, mid-phrase, under the player’s left hand while the right hand keeps playing.

On an Arabic instrument the mandals lower the pitch in quarter-tone steps from the natural the pegs set. One lever on the E course takes E to E half-flat, the note called sikah; a second takes it to E flat. That is the reason the base tuning is all naturals — the naturals are the ceiling, and every microtone is reached by working downwards from them. Arabic qanuns typically carry four to five mandals per course.

The consequence for you is worth stating plainly: nothing microtonal is a tuning task. If the E course is 320 Hz instead of 329.63 Hz with the levers up, a mandal is engaged, not a peg gone wrong. Set every lever to the natural position before you tune anything, or you will spend the session tuning against the mechanism.

How to tune it

1. Reset every mandal to the natural position. Run a thumb down the whole bank. This is not optional and it is the step people skip.
2. Set one reference course. A4 at 440 Hz is the usual anchor — it is the note the rest of the ensemble tunes from, and it sits in the middle of the instrument where the soundboard is most stable. Tune all three of its strings before moving on.
3. Tune each course as three separate strings. Damp two with a fingertip, set the third against the dial, then rotate. Three strings sounding at once give the detector an average, not a note.
4. Work outwards in octaves. From the reference course, go up and down an octave at a time and check with the dial, because an octave error is the only mistake here that a trained ear will not immediately catch — every course sounds plausible in the wrong octave, since the pattern repeats.
5. Fill in the fifths and fourths by ear. Traditional practice tunes A to D as a pure fifth, then C to G, then F to C, and so on, listening for the beat to disappear rather than for the needle to centre. A beatless fifth is very slightly wider than an equal-tempered one, and on an instrument this resonant the difference is audible.
6. Go back over the triples. By the time you reach the end, the first courses have moved — 78 strings pulling on one soundboard means every adjustment changes the tension the others sit under. A second pass is normal, not a sign you did it wrong.

Arabic and Turkish are two instruments

They share a shape and very little else about tuning.

The base tuning above works for both; what differs is what happens once the levers come into play, and how far apart the notes you reach with them are. A Turkish player asking for the third degree of Rast wants a note about 385 cents above the tonic; an Arabic player wants one nearer 350. Those are not the same pitch and neither is a mistake.

Equal temperament, quarter tones, and what is actually played

The dial above is equal-tempered, and for the qanun’s base tuning that is exactly right — plain naturals are plain naturals. The complication starts one lever down.

The 24-division system that Arabic qanun mandals are built to was formalised at the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music, and it puts the quarter tone at a clean 50 cents. Measured performance does not sit exactly there. The third degree of maqam Rast has been documented anywhere from about 342 to 356 cents above the tonic depending on the school, with Syrian practice a touch higher than Egyptian, and Egyptian recordings drifting lower across the twentieth century. A qanun, whose microtones are screwed into a brass lever at the factory, cannot follow that drift — which is one honest reason some players consider the instrument to have standardised Arabic intonation rather than merely recorded it. If your instrument’s sikah lever sounds slightly wrong to you against a singer, that is a real disagreement between a fixed mechanism and a living practice, not a fault. See what cents actually measure for the arithmetic behind those numbers.

Frequently asked questions