Egyptian Oud

Here are a few of my best Egyptian Oud songs. I got this oud about a year ago and have played it almost every day since. As it is a fretless instrument it took about two weeks of practice before I started sounding any good. You have to intuitively figure out where the notes are. Eventually your subconscious begins to remember where to put your fingers for the correct note.

This was one of my first oud playing videos. I like to use the top string as a drone to help me place the rest of the notes by ear to play within the key of the top string. As I got better on the oud I started adding additional instrument to accompany my playing. Here is a combination of a clay doumbek, shaker, jaw harp and of course the oud. This composition includes my aluminum doumbek, a shaker, tar drum and later on in the song I bring in my Turkish Baglama Saz. This composition combines my oud with a few tracks on my Roland Handsonic that are an array of different hand drums. Later on in the song I bring in my Gibson Les Paul for some electric guitar leads. This composition is pretty simple with improvisation on the oud and subtle synth drones added in the background to support the depth of the song. I played the synth via my plastic midi guitar and used the rapture synth by cakewalk. This song combine many different instruments with the oud as the lead track. There are a few tracks on my tar hand drum, a track on my hand pan, another track on my udu pot drum, and a click track on my Irish bones. Towards the end of the song I bring in my handmade partsocaster. This song is built around a maksum beat. Maksum means cut in half and is a 4/4 type of beat. I used some latin drums for the percussion as well as my jaw harp. To close out the song I added my partsocaster. This song is a bit strange starting out with a beat on an empty kombucha bottle. Later I added an oud track with a ton of reverb on it to create an ambient fill in the background. The rest of the tracks include the main oud improvisation as well as three tracks on my udu, a track on my doumbek and a shaker track. Towards the end of the song I brought in my G&L Fallout with an effect that has five different octaves per note played. Here is a little jam that started out as a multitrack drum beat in a malfuf format. The malfuf beat is a basic 2/4 groove with a strong doum lead and evenly spaced tek beats. I also added a tuned gong, some cowbells and a tambourine track in addition to the doumbek.

More oud tracks coming soon. Thanks for reading and listening :-)