Fret Systems Compared: Fretless, Fixed, and Moveable

This site is called Between Frets because the pitches that define makam and dastgah music — the quarter tones, the Holdrian commas, the flexible intervals that give each mode its identity — do not exist on a standard Western guitar. They live in the spaces between its fixed metal frets. How an instrument handles those in-between pitches is one of the most fundamental choices in its design, and it shapes what that instrument can and cannot do in modal music.

Across the Middle East and Central Asia, instrument builders have converged on three broad solutions to the problem of microtonal intonation: remove the frets entirely, tie many frets densely to cover the pitch space, or tie fewer frets and move them as needed. Each approach carries real trade-offs in precision, flexibility, and learning difficulty.

Fretless: the oud and cümbüş

Established The oud and cümbüş have no frets at all. The player presses the string against a smooth fingerboard, and pitch depends entirely on the fingertip's position — guided by the player's ear, not by any physical landmark on the neck. This is the design that offers the most complete freedom: any pitch is available at any time, including the continuous slides and microtonal inflections that characterize Middle Eastern melodic phrasing.

Established The fretless approach is not an omission or a primitive stage that "hasn't yet" acquired frets. It is a deliberate design. The oud was the primary reference instrument for the foundational theorists of Islamic music — al-Farabi (d. 950) and later writers described intervals by specifying finger positions on the oud's strings, building the theoretical framework of the modal system directly on a fretless instrument.

Practice The cost of this freedom is a steep learning curve for intonation. Stable pitch on a fretless neck takes years of ear training and muscle memory. A beginner will struggle to land cleanly on a pitch that a fretted instrument provides automatically. There are no visual or tactile guides — the ear is the only map.

Dense tied frets: the tanbur

Established The Turkish tanbur takes the opposite approach: rather than removing frets, it adds a great many of them. The tanbur's long neck carries approximately 52 to 58 tied-on frets of gut or nylon, spaced closely enough to cover the comma-level intervals of Turkish makam theory. Where a Western guitar gives 12 pitches per octave, the tanbur's fret layout can provide upwards of 40, mapping the fine divisions that the Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek system describes in terms of Holdrian commas.

Attested An important reconstruction of the tanbur occurred at the end of the 17th century, when the instrument was redesigned specifically for makam study. The resulting long fretboard — necessary to accommodate closely spaced comma-interval frets — and the density of the fretting established the tanbur as the primary reference instrument for Turkish classical music alongside the oud. Dimitrie Cantemir documented the tanbur's fret positions around 1700, providing one of the earliest systematic mappings of makam intervals onto a physical instrument.

Attested Despite being tied on, the tanbur's frets are not routinely repositioned during performance the way a setar player might shift frets between modes. The density of the fretting means that most pitches needed for any given makam are already present on the neck. The number and exact tuning of the frets, however, remains a matter of individual practice and ongoing debate among players and makers — there is no single universally agreed fret layout.

Practice For a student, the tanbur's dense fretting offers a significant advantage: the frets physically mark where the comma intervals fall. This makes the tanbur an effective teaching instrument for makam theory, because the student can see and feel the interval structure rather than relying purely on ear, as the oud demands.

Moveable tied frets: setar, tar, and bağlama

Established The setar, tar, and bağlama all use tied frets — loops of gut, silk, nylon, or (on the bağlama) fishing line wrapped around the neck — that the player can slide to new positions. Unlike the tanbur's dense layout, these instruments carry fewer frets per octave, and the player actively repositions some of them when changing modes.

Established The Persian setar typically carries 25 to 28 tied frets. When a player moves from one dastgah to another, only two to four frets need to shift — the frets marking stable intervals (the octave, fifth, fourth) stay put, and only the frets carrying moteghayyer (mutable) pitches move. This adjustment is routine, not exceptional: it is how the instrument adapts its fixed pitch positions to the specific modal requirements of the music at hand.

Established Hormoz Farhat, measuring intervals directly from tar and setar fretboards prepared by reputable musicians, proposed a 17-tone unequal scale for Persian music — a framework grounded in the actual practice of fret placement rather than imported from Western theory. His measurements confirmed that the intervals of Persian music are not rigid but flexible, even on instruments with physical frets.

Attested The bağlama (saz) follows a similar principle in a different tradition. Its frets, tied with fishing line, are adjusted for the regional style and makam being played. Because the bağlama spans both Turkish folk and art music traditions, players may encounter different fret configurations depending on the repertoire — there is no single standard layout, and knowing how to re-fret for a given context is considered a basic skill.

Practice The moveable-fret approach sits between the oud's total freedom and the tanbur's dense mapping. It provides the physical landmarks that aid intonation without locking the instrument into a single fixed tuning system. The trade-off is that changing modes requires a pause to reposition frets — something a fretless oud player never needs to do.

The Western guitar: a fixed grid

Established A standard Western guitar has fixed metal frets set in 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET), dividing each octave into 12 identical semitones. This system is designed for harmonic versatility in Western tonal music — a guitarist can play in any key without retuning — but it cannot produce the microtonal intervals that makam and dastgah depend on. A whole tone on a guitar spans two frets. In Turkish makam theory, that same whole tone is subdivided into nine commas, with meaningful musical distinctions at each division. The guitar simply has no frets where those pitches would fall.

Attested Microtonal guitars — instruments with additional frets, moveable frets, or frets placed at non-equal-tempered positions — exist as modern solutions to this problem. These are purpose-built instruments rather than standard designs, and they have not displaced the traditional instruments in the modal music traditions they aim to serve.

Comparison

Why the fret system matters

Practice A student choosing an instrument is also choosing how they will relate to pitch. The fretless oud demands the most from the ear but imposes the fewest constraints. The tanbur maps the theoretical pitch system onto a physical grid the student can see and touch. The setar and bağlama offer moveable landmarks that teach the ear while still allowing the flexibility to adapt. The Western guitar, absent modification, simply cannot participate in this music on its own terms.

Established These are not just construction details — they reflect fundamentally different answers to the question of how an instrument should encode a musical system. A fretless neck says: the system lives in the player's ear. A densely fretted tanbur says: the system lives on the instrument. A moveable-fret setar says: the system is negotiated between the player and the instrument, mode by mode. Understanding these approaches is part of understanding why modal music sounds the way it does, and why the pitches that matter most are so often the ones that live between the frets.