Building a Qanun — The Plucked Zither with Microtone Levers

The qanun is a flat trapezoidal zither with dozens of string courses, plucked with picks on your fingers. Rows of little levers let you re-tune any course by a microtone in an instant to change the mode.

Build a shallow trapezoidal box with a thin wooden soundboard. On a real qanun part of the board is covered with fish-skin, over which the bridge stands.

Fit tuning pins along one slanted side and hitch pins on the other, and string the instrument in courses of three strings tuned together — a full qanun has around seventy strings.

Stand a long wooden bridge across the skin-covered part of the soundboard so all the courses press down on it, feeding their vibration into the skin and box.

At the tuning end, fit a bank of small metal levers (mandal) under each course. Flipping a lever shortens the vibrating length of that course by a tiny, fixed amount — raising it a microtone.

Tune every course to the scale with its pins, then set the mandal levers for the mode (maqam) you want to play.

Wear a pick on each index finger and pluck the courses, the two hands answering each other across the strings.

Mid-tune, flip a mandal lever to shift a course up or down a microtone. This is how a qanun player slides between maqamat without stopping to re-tune.

The qanun is a plucked box zither — the same idea as the langspil, but with many courses of strings across a wide trapezoidal soundboard, and plucked with finger picks rather than a hammer, which makes it the exact plucked twin of the hammered santur that shares its shape. A string's pitch depends on its length, tension and mass, and the qanun's mandal levers are a beautifully simple way to change one of these on the fly: each lever, when flipped up, presses down near one end of a course and shortens its vibrating length by a small fixed amount, raising that course's pitch by a microtone; flip it back and the full length returns. Because Arabic and Turkish music uses many microtonal notes and shifts between modes (maqamat) within a single piece, a qanun carries a whole bank of these levers, several per course, so the player can nudge individual notes up or down by tiny steps in an instant without ever re-tuning by ear. The bridge stands on a patch of stretched skin so the strings drive a membrane as well as the soundboard, giving the qanun its bright, ringing shimmer. Its cousins are the santur, the langspil and every box zither, and its lever trick is a mechanical relative of the harp's pedals and the guitar's capo — all quick ways to retune strings without turning a peg.