h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We have a large Turkish population here and they have several clubs and societies, a football team (very successful) and a Saz band.

According to Wiki, the English name for this is Baglama (or, more correctly: bağlama )

I thought that wouldn't work. The "g" has a little "v" sitting on it. ("G with a cup" in Gnomon's Turkish entry)

h2g2 is still a bit iffy about unicode characters.

The frets on a saz are in very interesting positions! No equal temperament there!

Back from Istanbul now. I had a great time, and covered a distance of 30km in three days walking around and looking at the sights.

I had a look at a few sazes in music shops - I couldn't see what pattern the frets were spaced to. I can see that the modern Greek bouzouki is very much the same instrument as the Saz, but it has been adapted by taking features of the mandolins which were popular in Greece due to the Italian influence. The gut frets have been replaced with metal ones, the soundhole on the side has been replaced with one on the sounding board, the friction tuning pegs have been replaced with machine heads, much more suitable for the metal strings. The biggest change, though, is the fret spacing, which has forced Greek bouzouki music into a 12-tone equal temperament scale. In Cretan music, the fretless lyra (a sort of violin held vertically on the lap) still uses the more eastern sounding scales while the bouzoukis play along in equal temperament - presumably they'll sort this out in another 50 years or so.

The saz, on the other hand, is more restricted in what keys it can play in because it has half-tone frets (???) in certain places and not in others. I may investigate this at some stage.

The mixture of temperaments oddly enough needn't be a problem. Think of blues, where the notes are severely bent against a guitar chord backing.

A different matter, but a lot of the blues flavour comes from superimposing (say) a pentatonic scale in Eb onto chords in C.