Author: Navid

There are not that many tutorials out there teaching Persian Oud style. However, the Oud has become rather popular in the last 20 years in Iran. There are a lot of great young Oud players in Iran nowadays. One classic album is “Koohestan” by Hossein Behroozinia with whom I studied Oud with. One famous piece from this album is the fiery Aziz Joon, the title of the piece on the…

As you develop as an Oud player you are going to learn more and more repertoire from old masters and composers. Little do we know it at the time but we are slowly integrating their music into ourselves.  With that, we can integrate the modulations and melodies used to inform our own taqasim practice as we advance in our playing. In other words, you’ll learn modulations that you can use in…

Jins Rast is like a super-interchange on the highway of maqams. I approach modal music in some ways the way a linguist would approach language. In the same way, my personal theory of modal music is that there exists a proto-mode from which all modes originate. I believe the proto-mode is Rast or the tetrachord Rast. In response to a question, I wrote the following on MikeOuds Forums some time…

I used to think maqams had 7 notes, like Western scales… and I used to think they were very rigid.  But now, I see maqams more like a mosaic, or like a tapestry… This tapestry has been built on for thousands of years, added to, destroyed and lost, adapted, and sometimes simplified or reduced, but they are connected and webbed together by common threads.  Today I want to show you the…

The other day I received this very good question from a student from the Step-by-Step Taqasim program: “Hi Navid, I noticed that on the first page of this Taqsim, all the B’s in the bass part are B quarter flats. Yet the Bayati scale and key signature shows the B to be a simple Bb. Could you say why the quarter flat is used here and not Bb? With a…

Struggling to understand how maqams work? Can’t seem to figure out how they work together in a piece? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who is mystified by the world of maqam. In fact, that’s one of the biggest challenges for Oud learners and other Middle Eastern musicians. But it’s also an indicator that your understanding of Arabic music is coming to a mature level, so you should give…

These days you hear the term “minimalist” in describing one’s interior design, fashion or lifestyle, but what about Oud playing? Some Oud players like to keep their pieces simple highlighting a few robust techniques, and others prefer to sneak in technical arrangements in every phrase that they play. So today, I want to compare these 2 Oud pieces and see what you think. Have a listen to both, and try…