singemonkey wrote:
A friend of mine plays the lute. It has nylon strings and tied nylon frets (each fret is like a guitar-string tied around the neck). I think it also has more strings than an oud, if I'm remembering right. Ouds are string with steel-strings in two courses, and no frets.
I don't know. I saw a duo playing lute and oud at Stirling Castle some years ago. The lute had eight strings in four courses, the out had more, but I can't remember how many and anyway the standards are not fixed (or not standard). The guitar didn't always have 6 strings - there's a 10 string guitar (5 courses) in the Bodleian museum. Made by Stradivarius. Gut frets.
But to cut to the chase. If you want something that sounds exactly like an oud then probably you need to get an oud. If you want to play Moorish sounding things then you probably have more options (one of them courtesy of the late D Graham esq.).
You can get in the melodic ballpark with a guitar in DADGAD. And, really, instruments end up being used for all sorts of things that we don't automatically associate them with. Like the Irish Bouzouki.
Some musicologists will tell you that most "Celtic" music is really descended from Moorish music. A while back I went to the nearest Look and Listen and asked if they had any Tinariwen albums. The guy said he did, but he hadn't listened to them yet and so I could buy them but I had to promise to go back and tell him what it was like - not just if I enjoyed it, but he wanted some sort of reference point.
So I did all of that and I went back and he said what does it sound like? And I said, do you know Martin Carthy? And he says yes. So I say, well it sounds a bit like him actually.
I hear quite a lot of similarities between Middle Eastern and North African music on the one hand and supposedly traditional Celtic folk music on the other, even "English" folk music because Carthy supposedly is English rather than Celtic in style and intent. I hear traces (or more) of Moorish stuff in Nick Drake, Carthy, Martin Simpson and He-whose-name-I-dare-not-mention-lest-I-be-accused-of-talking-about-no-one-else. Partly because the latter has a very broad stylistic palette and influences up the wazoo, but also partly, I think, because these things have a common root (oh... and Drake spent a lost weekend in Morocco getting stoned. Apparently he was a sort of ok guitarist before and after he came back he was something quite different and people started revisiting stories about Robert Johnson selling his soul to old nick as a fee for being able to play the guitar really well). After all, the bag pipes came from Persia originally.
Anyway, I think you can get into the ballpark on other instruments and certainly add those kinds of things to one's guitar playing.
There's a David Lindley/Jackson Browne acoustic show available on DVD, and Lindley, who is just the sort of man for this sort of caper, plays quite a bit of oud on that.