Under Construction

This entry presents a summary of my research into the Saz. It's based on my own observations of the Saz in music shops in Istanbul and on various websites trying to explain the saz in rather loose terminology. I haven't got a Saz so I can't experiment directly. (If I had one, I would adjust the bridge until the octave was exactly in tune, then measure the pitches of all the notes.)

Some Reference Websites

• www.khafif.com/rhy/saz/
• Monz's Discussion
• Tying a gut fret
• Wikipedia Article

Introduction

The saz or bağlama¹ is a Turkish musical instrument of the long-necked lute family. Note that both the names saz and baglama may be used in other countries near Turkey to mean slightly different instruments – this Entry is about the Turkish instrument. It is very similar to the Greek bouzouki, and there's a good reason for this: the bouzouki was made by adapting the saz.

The saz has a rounded body which looks much like the bouzouki's body but not quite as rounded - it has a slightly flattened base. Like the bouzouki, it has a flat top. There is no sound hole on the top - instead the sound hole is on the side of the instrument and is covered in a fretwork 'rose' like that on a lute.

The saz has a very long, narrow neck like the trichordo bouzouki. It in fact appears to be even longer - Thomann have a 'Saz Long Neck' for sale and they give its scale length (nut to bridge) as 860mm. My bouzouki has a scale length of 680mm. So the Saz is 25% longer.

The strings are metal, and are tuned using friction tuning pegs at the head, like the ones on a violin, rather than using machine heads. (For metal strings, machine heads are more efficient, and some modern sazes use them, but these haven't really caught on yet.) There are normally seven strings, which are grouped into three courses.

The frets on the fingerboard are made from gut or plastic rather than metal which gives the saz a slightly different sound from the bouzouki. In older sazes the frets were made by tying a loop of gut string around the neck, so they could in theory be moved slightly. Modern sazes have the frets firmly fixed in place, but the fret still goes all the way around the back of the neck for the look of it.

The frets are not evenly spaced but have larger and smaller gaps - in addition to the normal semitone-spaced frets that you would find on a guitar or bouzouki, there are extra frets dividing some of the semitones into quarter tones and sometimes a few extra frets for playing the slightly flattened notes needed for Turkish and Arabic music in certain keys.

Terminology

While the end of the resonating section of the strings at the head is normally called the 'nut' in English and the 'bone' in Greek, it is called the 'upper bridge' (Üst Eşik) in Saz terminology. The main bridge on the soundboard is called the 'lower bridge' (). I'm going to ignore this and refer to the lower bridge as the bridge, the upper bridge as the nut.

Scale Length

One of the most important features of a string instrument is the length of the vibrating string, as this affects the tone of the instrument. This length is known as the scale length and is measured from the nut to the bridge (upper bridge to lower bridge). It is the very long scale length, for example, that makes a bouzouki a different instrument from an octave mandolin. I have not personally measured a saz. Monz's website gives a scale length of 670mm, about the same as a bouzouki. On the other hand, Thomann feature a 'Saz Long Neck' with a scale length of 860mm, about 25% longer.

String arrangement and tuning

The arrangement of the strings in a saz is unusual because both the bass and treble courses have a combination of thick and thin strings tuned an octave apart, while the middle course has a pair of identical strings. The tuning described here is the normal one, although alternative tunings are common.

• The treble course, sometimes called the Z-course, has one thick string, normally tuned to an A and two thin strings, each tuned to the A an octave higher than the thick string. All melodies are normally played entirely on this course, with a lot of jumping of the hand up and down the neck.

• The other two courses are used for playing chords and accompanying harmonic notes.

• The middle course, sometimes called the Y-course, consists of two thin strings, slightly heavier than the thin ones in the treble course. These are tuned to the D a fourth below the A of the two thin treble strings.

• The bass course, sometimes called the X-course, has two strings - a thick one tuned to G, a tone below the thick string of the treble course, and a thin one tuned an octave higher, to a tone below the thin strings of the treble course.

In summary, if we use capital letters for the lower octave and lowercase ones for the upper octave, the seven strings are tuned as follows from bass to treble:

G g | d d | A a a

Relative pitch - the absolute pitches of the notes appear to be flexible. The instrument can be tuned up or down to match the range of a singer or the pitch of a wind instrument. Even if this is done, the note are still called G, D and A. It seems unlikely, however, that the pitch could be changed too far from the standard, as raising the pitch too high will break the strings while lowering it will cause the strings to be too slack and they will go out of tune.

Fret Spacing

Websites say that there are semitone frets, similar to the bouzouki, and then between certain ones of these there are quarter tone frets. There are also some extra frets on some sazes which are just slightly flatter than the semitone frets. It's not clear from these descriptions whether these all are using Turkish koma tuning or western semitones with equally spaced quarter tones.

Someone with the internet handle of 'Monz' bought a saz in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and measured the frets. He analyzed the spacing and says that it doesn't use Western equal temperament (cents) or Turkish komas (53 / octave) but is quite close to a division of the octave into 159 equal intervals. While I'm happy with his measurements, I don't go along with his conclusion. I think that any real instrument is going to have to take into account the distance from the fret to the top of the bridge being affected by the height of the bridge, and the increased tension in the string when you press it down. These will make the fret spacings not correspond exactly to predicted values.

Monz's measurements are as follows. The values are the distance of each fret (in millimetres, of course) from the nut and the distance of the bridge from the nut:

• 36.8
• 54.1
• 71.7
• 102.9
• 123.6
• 138
• 164.9
• 192.7
• 206.2
• 222
• 244.1
• 258.9
• 269.8
• 290
• 306.5
• 322.7
• 333 (octave)
• 352.1
• 370
• 670 (lower bridge)

He has labelled the fret at 333mm as the octave fret. Calculating the pitch based on the measurements above, it seems to indicate that the octave is about 10 cents flat. This could be because the bridge isn't in quite the right place or because pressing down the string raises the tension slightly, raising the pitch. If we assume that the octave is perfectly in tune, then the other frets work out as follows:

I've used the convention here that b and # represent flat and sharp, while d and + are quarter tones half-flat and half-sharp. The instrument does not appear to be tuned to the Classical Ottoman Scale which would divide the octave into 53 komas and use multiples of 4, 8 and 9 of these.

The Equivalent Bouzouki frets apply to the Bouzouki or any equal-tempered instrument such as a mandolin or guitar. You can see that there are standard equal-temperament semitone frets, numbered above with whole numbers. The only one not quite right is fret 11, which is 30 cents flat. There are also five extra frets, at 1.5, 3.5, 6.5, 8.5 and 11.5

What Jas Says

Jas's website says that the long-neck Saz has the normal 12-to-an-octave semitone frets, some quarter-tone frets between these and possibly a few extra frets which adjust a tone by a very small amount, probably one Turkish koma which is about 0.2 of a semitone.

The quarter tone frets are at positions 1.5, 3.5, 6.5, 8.5, 11.5, 13.5 and 15.5. Since position 12 is the octave, these last two are just 1.5 and 3.5 again, shifted up an octave.

The extra "koma" frets are at 1.2 and 6.3.

How Does This Fit With Turkish Scales?

The 'classical' Ottoman system was a mathematically sound system of tuning based on the 'koma', a 53rd of the octave. The Ottoman system made use of whole tones of 9 komas and semitones of 4 komas, making the whole tones larger and the semitones smaller than their equivalents in the equal-tempered scale. There were also smaller whole tones of 8 komas and bigger semitones of 5 komas to be used in special circumstances to make the notes harmonise better. There were also many variant scales which sound odd to us.

The Saz straightens this out to a system of 24 quarter tones in the octave and since many of these quarter tones are never used, there aren't any frets for them. The additional koma frets between 1 and 1.5 and between 6 and 6.5 allow the scale to get closer still to the Ottoman classical system, but the result will still be more like Arabic music than like Ottoman Classical music.

Playing the Saz

I've seen it stated that players use the first three fingers of the left hand for fingering the tune, played entirely on the first course. For ascending sequences, they use a 1-2-3-1-2-3 pattern, shifting hand position each time there is a jump from 3 to 1. For descending sequences, they shift downwards on every note so the finger pattern is 1-1-1-1-1-1.