mbene085 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 08, 2021 5:25 pm
That looks great! How's it sound?
It sounds good! It's a nicely made saz from what I can tell. There is a scratch on the wood in the back, nothing I care about, and more concerning the bridge seems to be a little low. It seems like the very highest notes on the saz is a fundamental part of the instrument, and the strings are too low down there, and there's a sitar effect of the strings on the frets. So that's disappointing. I suppose I could shim it but getting another bridge would be the real solution.
No adjustable bridge, you know? No truss rod.
But I'll give it a little bit anyway. Maybe the top will change in the new environment here.
I play a lot of instruments to some degree or other, and this one is very different. For one, the main melody strings are in the center of the three courses. Maybe this should have been obvious, but the top strings have the deep bass string (for this instrument, anyway), and the lowest strings (the course of three) has a slimmer wound/bass string.
The center course has two thing strings that are the same gauge. So that's where a lot of the magic can happen, or at least so I seem to think so far. The outer two course can function a bit as the pedal tones while the middle course is good for sliding notes around and such. It can give that ghostly sound that this instrument can have there.
This instrument loves dissonance. It's built into the instrument to an extent that it's like nothing I've seen before, and it handles it well. Some of those frets on there are
quarter tones, to start with, but even some of the half steps sound more dissonant somehow.
But it's nice, actually. So far I suck, of course, and I'll talk about that a little bit more. But I've been finger picking on it since I'm cumbersome with the picks, and I did a little thing that was a nice, wholesome, consonant chord, and it sounded something like a banjo roll. But then I throw in some quick dissonance there and slide into another consonant note, and it just
works.
It seems to me that this is what this instrument is designed to do, give you a way to quickly resolve dissonant notes. It works here in a way that I have never found it to on the guitar or whatever. Not sure how to describe it, but it really seems to me that playing dissonant notes and then resolving them in some way is a fundamental part of the design of the saz. It wants you to do that. The guitar will do that, if you want it to, but the guitar prefers to play beautifully. The saz wants to be dissonant. That's what it does.
Now, I thought I would be able to do a little more on it than I am so far, so bear all that in mind. The layout of the frets doesn't make any sense to me. I guess it will some day. The spacing of the frets isn't spaced out in a way that my mind can make sense of yet. I mean, the distances between any two frets bears no relation to the distances between any other two frets. It's just, this is this, and that is that. I play something and it's wrong and I have to make a very conscious effort to think of what would be right, or even what right really means here.
That being said, it's very easy to play. The action of the saz is designed to be very, very low, and the strings are very, very light.
However the pick is vexing me, but now I realize why it's so thin and flexible, because otherwise you will be digging into your top all the time and you'll destroy it.
It's also incredibly awkward to hold. I guess I'll get used to that.
Don't take too much into this... it took me a couple hours just to figure out how I wanted to tune it, and I may not have really found the tuning that's best or anything. This is all just first day total novice stuff from a person who isn't at all familiar with the instrument nor the musical culture it comes from. I'm just bullshitting my way through this.
Oh, and friction tuning pegs are quite a trip. I had no idea.
Back in those days, everyone knew that if you were talking about Destiny's Child, you were talking about Beyonce, LaTavia, LeToya, and Larry.