Welcome! In this web-site, you can find information about the Middle-Eastern lute, oud (also known as ud). We also included a list of of oud CDs from variety of cultures with information on how to obtain these CDs on our "Oud CDs" page. We have many links to other oud related web-sites on our "Links" page as well. We have no financial association whatsoever with any of the record labels mentioned in this web-site, except as consumers or possibly reviewers. Please do not use the images without permission. If you want to link us on your website, please let us know. For any questions or comments, please use our "Feedback" page. Thanks a lot for visiting and please come back again! What is new?   Hello everyone, We haven't had an update in awhile but there is one coming soon, I promise. There will be many new Links Like oudonline.com and Aravod's home page. We will also be putting up some new CD's that should be available widely. I am also taking submissions from any of you who want to see your favorite recordings under our CD's link. All you have to do is type out the liner notes, if there are any, and provide the copyright and date published and we may add it to the CD's section, send submissions to ME. We still don't have any Farid al-Atrache, maybe someone who knows his work better than I could select a favorite and donate the information to us? Thanks to all the members of the message board community for making the message board such a great place to learn new things. Special thanks to all the luthiers that contribute their knowledge to people in need of short notice information on how to repair and maintain an Oud. See you soon with an update.  Sincerely, Kane If you have bookmarked this page in the past and now viewing it without buttons or means of navigation, click here and the frames version of this page will reload. From now on, please bookmark our entrance page, if you wish to do so. What is an oud? Oud is an short-necked, half pear-shaped, plucked lute of the Arab world, the direct ancestor of the European lute. Oud's name derives from al-oud (branch of wood). There are five pairs of strings on an oud, each pair tuned to the same pitch, and a single string which is also the thickest and known as the bamteli in Turkish. The most common way to tune the oud is to tune each string a fourth apart. The most common Turkish tuning with D being the highest open string is DAEBF#C#. There is also an Arabic variant of this tuning where the intervals stay the same but the pitch of each string is dropped down by a full step; CGDAEB. Some other tunings are CGDAGD, GDAEDA, DAEBAE, GDAEDA. "Known both from documentation and through oral tradition, it is considered the king, sultan or emir of musical instruments, 'the most perfect of those invented by the philosophers' (Ikhwan al-Safa: Rasa'il [Letters] (1957), i. 202). It is the principal instrument of the Arab world, and is of secondary importance in Turkey (ud), Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan. It plays a lesser role in Greece (outi)." (Stanley Sadie: The New Grove Dictionary of Musical instruments, vol. 3, p. 687-688). It also plays an important role in north African countries, such as Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Sudan. You can click here to see a real picture of an oud, and a detailed drawing of another one.  above miniature: The garden of Husayn Baygara (detail), source: UNESCO: Iran-Persian miniature Click here to see the awards "Oud Home Page" has won!