Virtual Oud
Pluck and slide on the fretless strings of the traditional Middle Eastern short-neck lute.
Loop Recorder
Record up to 8 seconds of playing.
Not recording
✅ How to Play the Virtual Oud
- Plucking: Click or tap anywhere on a string. The vertical position of your click determines the pitch — higher up the neck produces higher pitches.
- Sliding (Microtones): Click and hold on a string, then drag up or down to bend the pitch continuously. This is how real Oud players produce the microtonal slides central to Arabic maqam music.
- Vibrato: While holding a string, rapidly wobble your cursor or finger back and forth along the string to produce expressive vibrato.
- Courses: The five paired courses sound with a subtle detuned chorus effect — click either string in a pair to trigger both together, just as a real Oud player does with a plectrum.
- Loop Recorder: Record a melodic phrase including slides and replay it as a loop — pitch bend events are captured too.
What is an Oud?
The Oud is one of the oldest and most widely played stringed instruments in the world, with a documented history stretching back more than 3,500 years to ancient Mesopotamia. Today it remains the central instrument of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Greek, and North African classical music traditions. The instrument has a distinctive pear-shaped wooden body with a deeply vaulted back, a short unfretted neck, and typically 11 strings arranged in 5 paired courses plus one single bass string — giving it 6 courses in total. The strings are played with a long, flexible plectrum called a risha (Arabic for feather), historically made from an eagle quill.
The absence of frets is the defining characteristic of the Oud, and it is what separates the instrument's musical vocabulary from anything in the Western tradition. Without frets, the player has complete and continuous control over pitch, enabling microtonal intervals called maqamat — Arabic modal scales that include quarter-tones (pitches exactly halfway between two standard Western semitones). These microtones are not simply out-of-tune notes — they are integral, carefully placed pitches that give Arabic and Turkish melodic modes their deeply emotional, expressive quality. The quarter-tone between E and F, for instance, is a specific and required pitch in several maqamat, and is simply unavailable on a fretted guitar or standard piano.
The Oud is widely considered the direct ancestor of the European lute. When the Moors brought the instrument to the Iberian Peninsula during the 8th and 9th centuries, European instrument makers adopted its design, eventually adding frets and developing it into the Renaissance lute. The word "lute" itself derives from the Arabic al-oud (العود), which means "the wood" — a reference to its construction. This etymological trail places the Oud at the root of an enormous family of plucked string instruments that includes the guitar, mandolin, banjo, and sitar.
This virtual Oud uses a dual-oscillator synthesis approach — a triangle wave for the warm fundamental tone and a square wave for the bright initial attack harmonic. A dynamic lowpass filter sweeps downward after each pluck, replicating the way a real Oud's high harmonics decay faster than its fundamentals. Sliding along the neck in real time modulates the oscillator frequency smoothly, allowing genuine microtonal pitch bending. The single bass string (C2) sounds noticeably deeper and longer-ringing than the upper courses — matching the real instrument's characteristic range.
Frequently Asked Questions
What tuning does this Oud use?
This virtual Oud uses standard Arabic tuning: C2 (single bass), F2, A2, D3, G3, C4 from lowest to highest course. This is the most common modern Arabic tuning, though Turkish Ouds typically use a slightly different arrangement. The single C2 bass string produces the deep, resonant low note characteristic of the instrument's full range.
What is a maqam?
A maqam (plural: maqamat) is an Arabic or Turkish modal scale — a set of pitches, characteristic phrases, and emotional associations that define a musical mode. Unlike Western major and minor scales, maqamat can include quarter-tones and have strict rules about which notes to emphasise, ascend, and descend through. Famous maqamat include Rast, Bayati, Hijaz, and Saba — each carrying its own mood and cultural associations.
What is the difference between an Oud and a guitar?
The most fundamental difference is the absence of frets on the Oud. Frets limit a guitar to equal-temperament pitches (12 fixed semitones per octave), while the Oud can produce any pitch continuously. The Oud also has a shorter scale length, a deeper body, and uses paired courses for most strings. Its tone is warmer and has a faster decay than a classical guitar.