Oud Strings and Mzrabs

With a Najarian Electric, OU80 Strings, and Yissi mzrab. 

     Recently, a friend and oud playing brother, Rich Berberian, texted me and a few other oud players. He wanted to know which strings we might recommend for a Najarian Electric Oud. He has been playing about as long as I have. I realized that I was not alone in testing and using different string brands and gauges. The exchange made me think to blog about oud strings and picks which I shortly gave up on.
     A few days later, another friend, Elyse Semerdjian, Professor of History at Whitman College, texted me asking a similar question. She has an Arabic style oud and felt the strings on her instrument were too thick, too heavy a gauge that is, and thus not as comfortable to play as she might want. I gave a string recommendation but also suggested she use a lighter more flexible pick. I took her inquiry as a divine sign that I should write the bloggy bit I had previously shelved, so here we go.
     Since I was sixteen I have played the oud. It is a middle eastern instrument that is oval shaped with with six strings. The five higher pitched strings are double strings while the lowest pitched string is a single. The double strings, I am assuming, are for acoustic volume, while the lone bass string, is loud enough to be a single. The oud gets it famously mesmerizing sound from that fact that the face and soundboard of the instrument, often made from spruce, is unfinished and for most ouds the strings are tied directly to the bridge as opposed to having a separate bridge. Thus, a plucked string does not ring and linger like a guitar but is muted.
     Like all stringed instruments, the strings used to be made of gut. Literally, they were made from fibers found in the linings of animal intestines.  That was like over fifty years ago. Since then, they have been replaced by nylon. In the Armenian/Turkish tradition that I grew up in, I use a EABEAD tuning from bass to most treble. The bass E and A strings were octaves to the higher pitched ones and are generally hit to reenforce and enrich which was being done on the higher octave string. The higher pitched strings are nylon with the remainder of the strings having a multifilament nylon core that tightly wrapped with a fine gauge metal wire that is usual steel, nickel, bronze, or copper plated with silver or other alloy.
     When I first started playing, it was impossible to buy oud strings. They simply didn’t exist and if they did elsewhere in the world, they were unavailable in Detroit, Michigan. Instead, we had to buy two sets of classical guitar strings. I remember Savarez and D’Addario being amongst the brands I often used. The problem with using classical guitar strings was that classical guitars were tuned EADGBE. The G string was nylon and not the best choice for the higher octave E string on the oud. It just didn’t sound as good. I would either make do with the nylon E string or have to buy single strings and special order a special gauge wound string for the E. This was both a pain and more expensive. I am not sure strings were readily available in the Middle East back in the 1940s - 1960s either. I heard stories of Udi Hrant Kenkulian, the great Armenian oud master, coming to the US buying several difference gauges of fishing line, which he cut to an arm’s length, coiled, and enveloped them into sets of oud strings he would sell to other players on his return to Istanbul.
     Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, as programmable controlled manufacturing came to the wire and cable and thus the string industry, it suddenly became easy to run strings at various gauges whether they were pure nylon or wound. The great American born Armenian players Richard Hagopian and John Bilezikjian worked with the E. and O. Mari company that made LaBella and Daniel Mari strings to produce strings to their specifications. As soon as I heard that LaBella had oud strings, the OU80 model, I bought and tried them. I was astonished, impressed, and delighted to see Richard Hagopian’s photo on the back of the package. They were the only oud strings I have used for like 30+ years. I used them on all my ouds either electric or acoustic. When I bought a Cengiz Sarikus Iraqi style oud with a floating bridge, I bought La Bella OU80A strings; the A being for Arab tuning of EADGCF.
     The oud is played using an elongated plectrum or pick that is held between the thumb and forefinger. The plectrum is called mzrab or mzrap in the Armenian/Turkish tradition and rishi or risha in the Arab world. The length of the pick runs along palm at the knuckles and emerges out the other end of the hand. Sometimes, which is my style, the mzrab emerges out between the ring finger and pinkie. The old masters in the Armenian/Turkish tradition used eagle quills as mzrabs. The end of the

Part of my current inventory of oud strings

feather was flattened out, oiled, and trimmed. The style then was to have to leave a bit of the feather at the end, the part that was sticking out of the pinkie side of their hand. It was a nice bit of flair. The shape of the mzrab, how it is held, and the round belly of the oud effects the geometry of hand, mzrab, and string. It is different than using a guitar pick where the hand is more flat against the face of the instrument. I do believe the mzrab forces the player to strike the string differently. I did experiment using a guitar pick for a while. It did not take me long to return to a more traditional mzrab.
     These days mzrabs are made of celluloid, nylon, or teflon. The modern mzrabs are much better. The Arab rishis were made of cow horn that were cut, shaped, sanded, and oiled. The best Arab oud players I know still use and prefer cow horn rishis.
     And what was a more traditional mzrab in my early playing days? Certainly not an eagle quill as they were hard to come and requiring too much processing. I used what all the other oud players were using. We would take nylon cable straps of the proper thickness which we could cut to the desired length and tip shape. We would then tapper down the tip with sandpaper. It was very effective though I believed that my hand heat reduced what the called memory and resiliance. In the 1980s, I became aware of the Jim Dunlop company that developed and sold some excellent nylon guitar picks. These are the guitar picks I experimented with and liked them. I wrote the company and asked if they could provide sheets of their nylon that I could craft into mzrabs. As I suspected, their nylon guitar picks were molded and thus not available in sheets. The did offer me strips of another material, Tortex, the might be suitable. I loved them. Tortex had great memory and resilience. The came in red which is the smallest thickness, orange which is the medium gauge, and yellow, the stiffest of the three. None of the other oud players liked the Tortex mzrabs I gave them. The orange mzrab was all I used until 2010.

Growing collection of mzrabs and rishis

     In 2010, I went to Istanbul. I was there delivering a speech and course on Supply Chain Management. Needless to say I went to Cengiz Sarikus’s shop where I bought the aforementioned oud. It was there I tried a teflon mzrab. I fell in love with them and have mostly used them ever since.
     Certainly, when it comes to playing, the quality of the oud is first and foremost. There is no substitute with a well-crafted instrument with good action which is basically dependent on the distance from string to fingerboard and a great sound. The better the maker, the better the fits of the pegs, and thus the easier to tune. But, next come the strings, mzrabs, and the interaction of the two. For me it is a dynamic system. On any given day, I may want a stiffer or softer mzrab. It has something to do with how much I have been practicing and probably biorhythms.  At the start of most gigs, I will start with a softer mzrab and switch to a stiffer one as the gig progresses. I might even do that twice. With different strings, some are lighter gauge and some are heavier, I will use different thickness mzrabs to get the feel I like.
     Recently, this whole string-mzrab thing has gotten more complicated. For years, I have been able to buy LaBella oud string online. Recently, like in the past two years, the brands and sellers of oud strings online has exploded. Not only strings but now there are mzrabs and rishis available domestically and internationally. I kind of went crazy with the plectra basically because they were so cheap. Now, even the mzrabs are branded. I have gotten Yissi mzrabs from Pyramid mzrabs from Germany. Pyramid is a German based string company and, yes, they have oud strings which I have yet to try, but I will.
     I have used a site, juststrings.com, to buy oud strings. Lately, I have switched to stringsbymail.com which has lower prices and offers 27 different oud string SKUs and the full line of Pyramid Celluloid Oud picks. At any gig, I always have a few Pyramids and Yissis in my shirt pocket.
    Gotta love the flexibility of modern manufacturing and the creation of a global marketplace thanks to e-commerce!