Mike's Oud Forums

Electric Oud on Ebay

Tony Harrington - 7-7-2010 at 07:03 AM

Anyone familiar with the electric oud($434.00 alday on ebay)made by tharwat saber? Thanks!

spyros mesogeia - 7-7-2010 at 08:19 AM

PICTURE?LINK?

Electric oud on ebay

Tony Harrington - 7-7-2010 at 11:00 AM

Here is the link to ebay with the picture.
Thanks!

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=electric+oud

spyros mesogeia - 7-7-2010 at 11:06 AM

Not my style.....

Tony Harrington - 7-7-2010 at 12:53 PM

I'm just learning about ouds so it would be helpful to me to know why it isn't your style. What kind of oud is your style? What kind of music do you play? Thanks again.

fernandraynaud - 7-7-2010 at 01:38 PM

The "toilet seat" school of electric oud design may be practical, but it sure isn't kind to the eyes. It reminds me of a totally tasteless Hellen Keller joke. There are some that look a lot less crude than this one. Maybe it plays ok but nobody here seems eager to confess to owning one! If somebody gave me one, I think that given a little time with a Dremel I could improve its line. It must in fact be very usable since Mehdi Haddab seems to have one, though he too has worked on its looks.

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?xl_blz_on=xl_blz_on&client=mv-goog...


Greg - 7-8-2010 at 06:50 AM

Tony, leaving aside the aesthetics of this instrument (which in my opinion are, at best, questionable), a very important aspect of any electronic instrument is the electronics.

At the very least, most electric ouds have a brand-name pickup with a pre-amp and a graphic equaliser. There is no mention of the type of electronics used in this instrument and the only obvious control is what I presume to be a volume pot.

I would also caution you about buying an oud (either electric or acoustic) with guitar 'machine head' tuners. They are quite heavy and tend to ruin the balance of the instrument. Your left hand and arm have enough to do without being employed to hold up the weight of 11 mechanical tuners.

My advice would be to avoid the possibility of a costly disappointment and keep looking.

Good luck.

Greg

fernandraynaud - 7-9-2010 at 04:30 AM

There are Yissi electric ouds that are more costly but look like a real oud, with a shallow and flat-back bowl, and decent electronics. They show up on e-bay now and then, the shop sells a number of different instruments and they seemed professional and OK. The (very) nice electric ouds were in the $800 range. Try to write to them or call them ?


fernandraynaud - 7-9-2010 at 02:19 PM

"An electric oud is a different beast, and does not have the same soul as the traditional oud."

I think that's a very good summary. You should think about whether you are after an amplified "real" oud, or an electric oud.

The purpose of an electric is to resist feedback like an electric guitar, and to be convenient to hold standing up. That most simply leads to a solid body and a bridge-only pickup. This factors out most of the sympathetic resonance, and all of the soundboard contributions and bowl interactions. You are down to the double strings on a board. When you think about it, that's pretty bare. That's why an electric oud feed has to be processed with delays and convolution DSP to reconstruct what the body would contribute, if it's going to sound like an oud. On stage, people usually do this with EQ, Chorus and Reverb. In the studio there are more tricks available. After all, if we can realistically simulate the effect of a piano pedal being depressed in mid note, "rebuilding the oud" is feasible as well, given a good sound engineer.

I would imagine something like the Yissi or a Najarian E-2000 semi-hollow ouds

http://www.oud.net/electric.htm

capture some of the body's vibration. But these are more expensive. People here are trying to alert you to the issues, so you don't buy the most inexpensive electric oud and find it doesn't sound like anything you might expect or like.