Restoration Station
This month Alex Bishop brings an Arabic oud back from the brink of musical instrument purgatory
Although people know me as a maker, repairer and educator of guitars, it’s not uncommon to see some unusual instruments pass through the workshop. Anything that has strings and requires plucking tends to qualify for my attention and this month alone I’ve already seen a couple of banjos, a mandocello and even a Turkish saz cross the workbench for some TLC, alongside the usual slew of six-string axes of both electric and acoustic varieties.
Understandably, you are unlikely to find specialists repairing such instruments (even in a big city like Bristol, where I am), and so it was that this week I found myself scratching my chin over an Arabic oud. It arrived in a desperate state, with the distinctive right-angled headstock broken off, scarred with splintered wood and chipped lacquer. A deep split in the soundboard and some missing binding indicated some kind of disastrous impact had been the cause: some serious restoration work was required.
The Arabic oud is the ancestor of the modern guitar, having originated in the Middle East many centuries ago. Its history is incomplete, but rather like the difference between dinosaurs and humans, it dominated its place in musical culture for far, far longer than its modern six-string counterparts. The steelstring guitar took form barely 100 years ago whereas the Arabic oud was described in the 11th century, and likely goes back centuries further. It is played with an unusually long, thin plectrum – traditionally an eagle’s feather – plucked close to the bridge for a biting attack.
The first step was to reconstruct the headstock join. Similar to a guitar, the headstock is grafted onto the neck shaft at an angle and further strengthened by the addition of a fingerboard spanning the join. The steep (almost 90-degree) angle of the headstock creates a very well-defined point at the nut, which in turn produces a robust tone across the open strings. After some careful fitting with a sharp chisel, I was able to use a couple of tiny G-clamps tucked inside the pegbox to reattach it, with a carefully fitted maple insert to fill a space that had been left behind by some missing wood.
In A Bind
Fitting the new binding was a challenging task. At almost 8mm thick, the rosewood surrounding the front of the oud looked impossible to bend, until I realised that it was made up of two pieces laminated together. I rooted around in my offcuts drawer to find a piece that was a close match, and then bent two pieces around a hot bending iron to closely match the pear-shaped outline of the front. A few strips of reinforced tape was all that was required to firmly hold the wood in place until the glue dried, which was followed up with some judicious cabinet scraping to bring the binding flush to the rest of the instrument. It blended surprisingly well and only an experienced eye would be likely to spot the repair.
Hiding the soundboard split was not going to be so easy, however. The oxidisation of the wood and exposure to UV light over time meant that the colour of the soundboard was much darker than the bleached, newly sanded areas. To get around this I used button shellac in my French polished finish, the amber tint at least giving an impression that these areas were of a similar age to the rest of the instrument.
All that was left to do was restring it, and with six courses of 11 strings crisscrossing the pegbox at the nut this was going to take some patience to do correctly. With each agonising tweak of the peg nudging the strings in and out of tune, I got there on the third attempt. Finally, I had a little test play to check how it sounded. I was struck by the timeless sound of the oud, the centuries of music unrecorded and the intertwining histories of musical cultures. Despite the generations of forgotten instrument makers and repairers, it was a thrill to play a small part in a musical legacy I know will continue for centuries to come.
“I was struck by the timeless sound of the oud, the centuries of music unrecorded and the intertwining histories of musical cultures”