Resources / Using This App

Using This App

This page covers what's on screen and what it does — not the music theory behind it. For what a makam actually is, why tunings disagree, or what a koma sounds like, see the theory and catalog resources instead.

The fastest way into any of it:

1. Click a tuning chip to set the instrument's strings.
2. Pick a makam from the dropdown to light up its notes on the neck.
3. Press Play the makam to hear it, or click any dot yourself.

The sections below cover each of those pieces, and everything around them, in more depth.

Navigation and theme

A small bar pinned to the top-right corner is present on every page: a theme toggle (Light / Dark) and links to Patterns and Resources. Switching the theme swaps the whole palette — parchment-and-ink by default, wood-and-parchment in dark — and remembers your choice for next time. It has no effect on tuning, makam, or sound settings.

Neck interaction

The neck is the main visualization: courses running left to right from the nut. Spacing along each string is logarithmic, the way it actually falls on a fretless neck -- positions crowd together as you climb, they aren't spaced evenly like frets.

• Courses run thickest at top. The top row is always the bam, the lowest drone string. Turkish convention numbers the rest from the thinnest string, so the bottom row is 1. tel.
• Every course shows a dot at each semitone position, 0 through 12, counting from the open string. There are no frets on the real instrument, so a dot marks where a semitone lands, not a fret boundary -- landing between them is normal and expected.
• Each dot is labeled with its note name (E, F#, and so on), so you don't have to count positions to know what you're about to hear.
• The ruler below the neck labels each position; acik marks the open string.
• Hover or focus a dot for its full note name and octave, its position number, and how far it sits from the nut in millimeters -- that distance comes from whatever scale length you've set, so it matches your actual instrument.
• Every dot is a real button -- you can tab to it with the keyboard and trigger it with Enter or Space, same as clicking.
• When a makam is active, some of its scale degrees fall between the fixed semitone dots instead of on one. Those get their own dashed, unfilled marker positioned exactly where the pitch lands, labeled with the perde's written pitch (e.g. B-flat-up) -- hover it for the full perde name. These are koma markers; see Legend below.

Interaction modes

The app supports two interaction modes, selectable via the toggle in the toolbar:

• Auto mode (default): tap any position on the neck to hear the note immediately. The left hand simultaneously selects pitch and triggers the pluck. Practice Start here if you're exploring makams or learning positions -- it's the most direct way to hear what's on the neck.
• Strum mode: the left hand frets silently (selecting pitch without producing sound), and a strum zone appears at the right edge of the neck where you pluck or strum with the right hand. This simulates the real two-hand playing technique: left hand frets, right hand plucks. Practice Use this when you want to practice fret-then-pluck coordination or play chords across multiple courses.

Switching modes stops any currently sounding voices. The mode you choose persists across page reloads.

Touch gestures

On touch devices, several gestures go beyond basic tap:

• Tap -- plays the note at that position (Auto mode) or silently selects the fret position (Strum mode).
• Glissando -- horizontal drag along the string axis. Slides the pitch continuously from the initial position. Touch only; not available with a desktop mouse.
• Bend -- perpendicular drag across the string axis. Bends the pitch up or down, up to one semitone. Touch only; not available with a desktop mouse. Practice Both glissando and bend require a touch screen for full gesture support.

Strum zone

When Strum mode is active, a strip appears at the right (bridge) end of the neck:

• Tap a course's target to pluck it at its current fretted pitch (or open string if nothing is fretted).
• Swipe vertically across courses for a strum effect -- each course plucks as your finger crosses it, producing a natural strum with the timing of your swipe.
• Hold on a single course for about 300ms to mute it -- the voice stops and releasing produces no sound.
• Changing the left-hand fret position while a voice is ringing retunes the voice without restarting it -- the sound continues at the new pitch.

Multi-finger interaction

Both modes support holding multiple fingers on the same course:

• Hold one note, press another higher on the same string. The voice retunes to the higher pitch (hammer-on).
• Release the higher finger and the voice falls back to the still-held lower pitch (pull-off).
• Alternate between two held positions for trills.
• The finger stack always sounds the highest held position, regardless of the order fingers were placed.

Keyboard input

On desktop, keyboard rows map to courses, keys to positions along each course:

• Hold a key to sustain its note; release to let it decay.
• Arrow keys apply microtonal inflection (one Holdrian comma per press) while a note is held.
• Page Up / Page Down shift the keyboard mapping up or down by one octave along the neck.
• Keyboard input always uses auto-strum behavior regardless of the mode setting -- pressing a key always produces sound, since keyboard users cannot interact with the strum zone.

Fullscreen

A fullscreen toggle is available in the toolbar on mobile and smaller screens. Entering fullscreen removes browser chrome so touch gestures aren't intercepted by the browser's own swipe navigation.

Tuning selection

The chips above the neck list every tuning in the catalog, grouped under a family label in catalog order, not alphabetically. Each chip shows the tuning's name and its course notes at a glance.

• Click a chip to switch tunings. The neck, its course labels, and every marker on it update immediately. The active chip is filled in dark.
• Most of the catalog sits under one family, Oud — bam+fourths; the rest is grouped into a smaller All-fourths set and a handful of one-off conversions.
• The app opens with Bam Mi selected by default.
• Bam retunes just the bam course — the top, thickest one — to any of the twelve pitch classes, keeping the same octave. Use it to pull the drone to the karar of whatever you're about to play.
• Scale length (mm) is the physical string length of your actual instrument, from 300mm to 900mm in 5mm steps. It never moves a marker — position on a fretless neck is always a percentage of string length, so the layout doesn't depend on scale length by construction. Changing it only updates the millimeter distance shown in each marker's tooltip, so that number matches your instrument.
• Transpose is a dropdown of whole-semitone steps from -4 to +4. It shifts everything you hear without changing any displayed note name or tuning info — use it to play in a different absolute pitch than what's labeled on the neck.
• Octave placement in the catalog varies with scale length and string gauge — treat the note names as pitch relationships first, not a promise of a specific octave.
• Below the neck, the tuning panel names this tuning's tradition, a confidence badge for how well it's sourced, its course notes (a ~ before a note means the octave was inferred rather than measured), and a short citation for where it came from.

Makam selection

A makam isn't just a scale — it's a scale plus a hierarchy of important pitches (the karar, or resting note; the güçlü, a secondary point of emphasis; the yeden, a leading tone into the karar) and a customary melodic path through them.

• Makam is a dropdown: pick one by name — Hicaz, Uşşak, Rast, Segâh, Nihâvend, and on through the rest of the catalog — or choose — none — to clear it.
• Karar (tonic) is a separate dropdown covering all twelve pitch classes, defaulting to D. It's independent of which makam is selected, so the same makam can sit on any starting note — pick the makam first, then move its karar wherever you need it.
• Switching the makam or moving the karar updates the neck overlay immediately — there's no separate "apply" step.
• Picking a makam lights up the neck. Every fixed semitone dot is recolored to show whether it's the karar, another degree belonging to the makam, or outside it entirely; degrees that don't land on a fixed dot get their own koma marker instead. Choosing — none — clears all of that back to neutral.
• Ascending and descending (seyir). Many makams behave differently on the way up than on the way down — that behavior is called seyir. The makam panel below the neck names which kind the active makam has — çıkıcı (ascending), inici (descending), or inici-çıkıcı (both) — alongside its karar, güçlü, and yeden by name.
• The same panel also flags whether the makam is playable in twelve-tone equal temperament or needs microtones, and shows a confidence badge for how well its construction is sourced.

Sound panel

Collapsed by default, below the tuning and makam info panels — click Sound design to open it. Every change here applies immediately to whatever's already set up to play; there's no separate "apply" step and no interruption while you adjust it.

• Preset is a dropdown of saved sound configurations. Save overwrites whichever preset is selected (or prompts for a name, the first time you save from scratch); Save as… always prompts for a new name and leaves the original preset untouched. A Modified indicator appears next to the panel's header whenever the current sound no longer matches the preset it was loaded from.
• Five curated knobs, each shown as a percentage, cover the adjustments that matter day to day: Brightness (warm to bright), Sustain (short to long), Body (thin to full), Shimmer (tight to wide), and Pluck character (soft to hard).
• Advanced (raw parameters), collapsed inside the panel, exposes the underlying synthesis values directly — filter frequency, highpass frequency, filter Q, filter gain, decay coefficient, blend ratio, detune amount, detune offset, pluck sharpness, and output gain. Editing one of these updates the curated knobs above to their closest match; the two don't always agree exactly, since several raw parameters can feed into a single knob.
• Whatever the sound is currently set to is remembered across reloads, whether or not you've saved it as a named preset — you don't need to save just to avoid losing your settings.
• There's no instrument switcher: everything here shapes the same cümbüş-style voice the rest of the app plays. The preset list includes a seeded oud-flavored default alongside the cümbüş one, but selecting it only changes the timbre — it has no effect on the neck, tuning, or instrument model shown elsewhere.

Pattern playback

• Play the makam, in the Listen row, plays the active makam: a short characteristic phrase where the app has one authored, or a plain run through its scale degrees where it doesn't. It stays disabled until you've picked a makam. A drone sounds on the karar underneath, so the phrase has something to sit against.
• Play open strings plucks each course of the current tuning in turn, from the bam down. It doesn't depend on a makam being selected — it's a quick way to hear the tuning itself.
• Transport gives you Play / Resume, Pause, Stop, and a Loop toggle once a makam is playing or paused. Pause holds your place and leaves the drone sounding; Stop resets to the beginning and cuts the drone; Loop repeats the pattern until you stop it.
• Play the makam and Transport's Play control the same playback, not two separate ones — start it with either button, and Pause / Stop / Loop apply to it no matter which one you used to start it.
• Tempo is a 40–200 BPM slider with a live numeric readout. Changes take effect immediately, including mid-playback, so there's no need to stop and restart to hear a new tempo.
• Sound on / Sound off mutes everything at once, pattern playback included.
• Muting, tempo, and loop are independent of which tuning or makam is active — switching either one doesn't reset your sound or playback settings.

Saved patterns

The Patterns link in the top-right nav opens a separate page for browsing and building note sequences — distinct from this page's Play the makam / Transport, which always play whichever makam is currently active here.

• Built-in patterns lists every seyir skeleton included in the app, one per makam that has one authored. These are read-only: just a Play button, no rename or delete.
• My patterns is where anything you build lives. New pattern opens the editor; each saved pattern shows Play, Edit, Rename, and Delete. Deleting asks for confirmation first and never touches the built-in list.
• Building a pattern works by tapping the neck shown inside the editor — each tap sounds the note, same as the main neck, and appends it to the sequence below. Every note in the sequence gets its own duration slider (50–2000ms) and can be reordered with the up/down arrows or removed outright.
• Name the pattern before saving — Save stays disabled until it has one. Cancel discards an in-progress edit without writing anything.
• Saved patterns persist locally — the same on-device storage the sound presets use — so they're still there next time you open the app, but they don't sync anywhere else.

Legend

The bar under the neck's hint text explains what each dot style means. It only does anything once a makam is selected — before that, every position on the neck reads the same, unhighlighted.

• Karar — the resting note — a filled verdigris (teal-green) dot. The makam's tonic.
• In the makam — a pale parchment-colored dot with a thin tan border. A scale degree of the active makam that lands on one of the fixed semitone positions.
• Koma position — between the keys — a dashed maroon outline with no fill. A scale degree that falls between the fixed positions rather than on one of them — this repertoire routinely uses pitches finer than a semitone, and this is how the app shows them on the neck. The dot's own label is the perde's written pitch; the full perde name is in the tooltip.
• Chromatic, outside the makam — a dot the same warm brown as the neck's wood, with a border. A fixed position that exists on the neck but isn't part of the active makam.

All four styles are still clickable. The color changes what a position means relative to the makam, not whether you can hear it — an "outside" dot plays exactly as readily as the karar does.