Introduction to Rabab

Pakhair (Welcome),
Starting with a bit of my introduction, I am an engineer graduated from GIKI currently working at Engro Corporation. Besides my business card introduction, I am an avid photographer, a wanderlust traveller and a melting heart for art.
I started playing the Rabab a few months back and felt a lack of tutorials, videos and articles on the internet despite being in the 21st century. Efforts to spread its audience and increase the knowledge base haven’t been put in place as the west did for their instruments like the guitar, the drums or the piano. In this regard I’ll be sharing my knowledge to give a heads-up for the new-comers.
The first part is recognizing the strings and tuning them. Remember, there is no standard tuning for Rabab such as the EADGBE in the guitar, but there are a few rules for tuning.
Figure 1: Strings and Surrs

Figure 2: Strings on the Rabab

If you hold the Rabab in the playing position the top most string corresponds to the 1st string in the above fret board. The yellow lines are the “Shahtaar” while the red lines are the main strings.
The 1st main string can be tuned to any note you like but for starters I would recommend ‘E’. After it is tuned, the 2nd string must be tuned to the 5th fret note of the 1st string while the 3rd string will be tuned to fifth fret note of the 2nd string. For example, the 1st string is tuned to ‘E’ then the fifth fret will sound ‘A’ hence tune the 2nd string to ‘A’. The fifth fret of 2nd string will sound ‘D’ hence tune the 3rd string to ‘D’.
You can use an app tuner like “DaTuner Lite” to tune your strings to the appropriate note. The tuning of the shahtaars and the other 13 or 15 strings called “buchi” (blue strings in below picture) will be done at a later stage.
Figure 3: Main strings, Shahtaars and Buchi strings

This is it for the strings and its tuning on the Rabab. In the next blog I’ll share the first lesson and some good practices when playing the Rabab. I’ll also clear the Surrs present in Figure 1 above.
One thing I have learnt during my journey into the Rabab is that it requires patience, a lot of patience. You can’t just start playing Game of Thrones theme song or Qarara Rasha on the first go, but a practice time of 6 months will start revealing results and you will like it!
Till next time.

Khuday Pa Amaan (May God keep you in peace)!

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