Why is the oud called ‘The King of Instruments’?
The guitar is an instrument steeped in history. While one might assume that its prominence is largely tied to the 20th century—a time when music was undeniably shaped by the six-string—it would be a mistake to overlook its deeper roots. In truth, the further back you go, the more you realise that guitars, in various forms, have always been part of everyday life. Instruments like the lute, the Indian sitar, the Persian chartar, and the Central Asian tanbur were not confined to concert halls or elite societies. Instead, they were used to tell stories and sing the songs of ordinary people, cementing their place as instruments of the people, across cultures and eras.
Among the earliest examples of this type of instrument is the Oud, an ancient Arabic instrument whose unmistakable twang is still heard in the music of Fatemeh Dehghani, Naseer Shamma and Rahim Al-Haj. The oud, coming from the Arabic for Wood, was originally a four-stringed instrument plucked with a feather. This tradition also carries on to this day, as the word for an oud plectrum is still ‘risha’, the Arabic word for feather.
Since then, more strings have been added, from five to its current tally of 11. Currently, the instrument is stringed like a cross between a banjo and a mandolin. A single bass string is normally tuned to C, while the four others are paired with another string tuned to the same note for added resonance. Unlike the mandolin, though, it’s the exact same note, rather than an octave higher.
The first record of the Oud’s presence in Western music comes from the Umayyad Caliphate’s invasion of what we now call Spain from North Africa in the year 711. In a way, the oud is not just an instrument but a Rosetta stone for Arabic music as a whole. Take the fact that oud are uniformly fretless. This adds to the instrument’s unmistakable tone, allowing for slide-in between notes and more license for improvisation, but also for a much more important reason. It’s the only way a stringed instrument is able to play every maqam, the Arabic term for scales.
In contrast with the seven dominant modes of Western classical music, there are around a hundred regularly used maqams, several of which use what we would call microtones, notes between notes that we would reach by bending the strings of a guitar. On an oud, it just takes a slightly different placement of the finger. Sounds simple, but it makes truly mastering the instrument extremely hard.
Once the oud found a place in Europe, though, it quickly captured the imagination. Soon, versions of the oud were built to better Western forms of folk music, which led to the development of what we would call the lute soon afterwards. Of course, its influences go far beyond European music to all over central and Eastern Asia.
In fact, there’s a song you almost certainly know that was originally composed on an oud, Dick Dale heard the instrumental ‘Misirlou’ being played on one and it inspired him to try it on the electric guitar, inspiring one of the defining works of surf rock. It’s found its way into music by Coldplay: check out ‘Arabesque’ from their album Everyday Life. It’s even featured in the solo on ‘Nuguns’ by System of a Down!
Considering the influence that the oud has had on all music, it’s truly worthy of the nickname “the sultan of instruments”.
