About Between Frets

Notes on theory, history, instrument guides, and tuning systems for Turkish makam, Persian dastgah, and related modal music traditions — compiled as we learn, and the companion to meshk.app.

“Between Frets” refers to the microtonal pitches that live between the frets of Western instruments — the quarter tones, Holdrian commas, and flexible intervals that are the essence of makam and dastgah music. These pitches don’t exist on a piano or a standard guitar. They live between the frets, and this site is about understanding them: the instruments that produce them, the tuning systems that describe them, and the Turkish makam and Persian dastgah traditions built on top of them.

I started keeping these notes while building Meshk, and they outgrew what the app’s own /resources section could hold. Between Frets is what they turned into: a public research notebook, not a finished reference. Some domains below already have a full article; several are still empty, waiting on research time. That mix will keep shifting — this is a project in progress, not a completed encyclopedia, and it’s being built in the open.

Between Frets and meshk.app are two halves of one educational project. Meshk is the interactive practice tool — real-time audio, instrument simulation, pattern playback, ear training. Between Frets is where the research lives: theory, history, instrument guides, tuning systems, and repertoire notes, written for readers who want to understand why a makam or dastgah works the way it does, not only how to play it.

Every instrument, makam, and dastgah article here links to the corresponding practice feature on meshk.app (“Practice this in Meshk”), and meshk.app links back here for readers who want to go deeper (“Learn more on Between Frets”).

This subject area is unusually polluted with confident, fabricated information. Large language models routinely invent makam names, misattribute compositions, and generate plausible-sounding but false theory. I try hard not to add to that pile: every factual claim on this site is tagged with a confidence level, so you can judge its sourcing for yourself rather than trusting a claim just because it reads fluently:

Established

widely accepted, multiple authoritative sources agree

Attested

documented in a reputable source but not universally confirmed

Practice

derived from practitioner experience or pedagogical convention

Uncertain

speculative, contested, or insufficiently sourced

Every published article also carries a Sources list of the citations behind its established and attested claims, visible at the end of the article itself. That said, this is an independent research project, not a peer-reviewed journal — mistakes will happen. If you catch one, see Feedback, below.

Between Frets is a best-effort compilation of research — I love this music and I’m still learning it myself, so treat this as a work in progress rather than a finished, authoritative last word. If you find an error, a missing source, a makam or dastgah that deserves its own article, or an explanation that just doesn’t land, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

support+betweenfrets@bkuberek.com

Corrections especially welcome — that’s how this gets better over time.