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Reference material

Resources

Reference material for makam-based music on fretless instruments — cümbüş, oud, and by extension tanbur, kemençe, violin, fretless bass. Fretless instruments can play pitches keyboards can’t, and the entire expressive vocabulary of this music lives in those pitches.

This content is a work in progress and may contain inaccuracies. Every claim is tagged with a confidence badge so you can judge its sourcing for yourself.

Start here

Reading order

If you’re new to the material

Pitch systems → Çeşni and ajnas → Makam catalog

If you’re building on this app

Using this app → Tuning overview → Tuning catalog

Contents

A standing warning about sources

This subject is unusually polluted with confident misinformation, and LLM-generated answers about it are frequently fabricated wholesale — see the Şurmat case study for a documented example. Every factual claim in these pages carries a confidence marker:

Established
corroborated in published theory or primary sources
Attested
found in a source, but a source that could not be fully verified
Practice
how players actually do it, which often contradicts theory
Uncertain
plausible, unverified, flagged so it doesn't harden into fact