Watch a kanun player perform a taksim and you will see something no other instrument asks of its player. The right hand and left hand pluck the courses with small plectra held in rings on the index fingers. Then, between phrases — sometimes inside one — a hand darts down to the left edge of the instrument and flicks a few small metal levers up or down. The pitch of several strings shifts, not by a whole semitone, but by a fraction of one. The phrase continues in a different modal colour.

Those levers are mandals (Turkish mandal, plural mandallar; also written mendal). They are one of the most elegant mechanical answers to a musical problem anyone has devised: a way to let a fixed-pitch instrument play music that needs far more than twelve notes per octave, without stopping to retune. If you are new to the instrument itself, our complete kanun guide covers its history, anatomy and repertoire. This article is about the mechanism.

The Problem Mandals Solve

The kanun is a plucked zither — a trapezoidal soundbox with something like 72 to 81 strings, grouped in triple courses so that each note has three strings sounding together. Like every zither, its pitches are set when the instrument is tuned and stay there. There is no fingerboard to press against, no place to bend or shade a note with the left hand.

That is a genuine problem for maqam music. The maqam system is built on interval structures that equal temperament does not contain: neutral seconds and neutral thirds, the half-flat pitches that fall between the Western semitones and carry much of a maqam's emotional identity. Maqam Rast needs its neutral third. Maqam Saba needs its own distinctive shading. None of these notes exist on a piano.

Other instruments in this family solve the problem in their own ways. The oud is fretless, so its player simply places a finger wherever the note lives — infinitely flexible, and entirely dependent on the ear. The bağlama uses frets tied on with nylon, so they can be nudged along the neck to suit a repertoire. A standard fretted guitar, with its fixed metal frets, cannot reach these pitches at all — one of the deepest differences between it and the oud, which we cover in our oud vs guitar comparison.

The kanun's answer is neither fretless freedom nor fixed frets. It is a machine — a small one, repeated dozens of times.

How a Mandal Actually Works

A mandal is a short pivoting lever, usually brass or nickel silver, mounted in a bracket at the nut end of the instrument, just past the tuning pegs. In its resting position it sits clear of the string. Flipped into its engaged position, it presses the course down against a fixed stop.

That contact point becomes a new endpoint for the vibrating part of the string — in effect, a new nut, positioned slightly closer to the bridge than the original one. The vibrating length is now shorter, and a shorter string, at the same tension, sounds higher.

The relationship is direct: for a string of fixed tension and thickness, frequency is inversely proportional to vibrating length. Halve the length and you get the octave above. The intervals a mandal produces are far smaller than that, and the geometry is correspondingly fine. To raise a pitch by 50 cents — a quarter tone, half a Western semitone — the vibrating length has to shrink by only about 2.8%. On a course whose speaking length is around 60 cm, that is a shift of roughly 17 mm. A one-comma step, the finer unit Turkish kanuns work in, needs a movement of just a few millimetres.

Each mandal on a course sits at a slightly different distance from that original nut, so each produces a different, fixed increment. Engage one and you get one step; engage the next and you get a larger one. Because the levers are stacked in a row, a player can raise a course to any of several precise pitches within a semitone — which is exactly the vocabulary maqam requires.

This also explains why mandal work is a specialist job. The positions are set during making and regulation; a lever a millimetre out of place produces a note that is audibly wrong in every piece that uses it. Adjusting them is luthier work, not something to attempt with a screwdriver at home.

How Many Mandals Does a Kanun Need?

This is where the traditions genuinely part company, and where a lot of confusion lives — including the common assumption that more mandals is simply better.

Photographs and descriptions of nineteenth-century instruments show kanuns with few mandals or, earlier still, none at all. Players managed by retuning between pieces, or by choosing to play a maqam in a position that suited how the instrument was already set. The mandal system as we know it developed and standardised through the twentieth century, alongside the formalisation of makam theory itself.

Modern Turkish kanuns carry a lot of mandals — commonly around a dozen per course, sometimes more. This is because Turkish theory, in the Arel–Ezgi–Uzdilek framework, describes the octave in small units called commas rather than quarter tones. Each mandal is worth roughly one comma, so the player can shade a note in fine gradations. It gives enormous precision, and it is one reason Turkish kanuns look so mechanically dense along the left edge.

Modern Arabic qanuns take the opposite approach: typically three to six mandals per course, calibrated in quarter-tone steps, matching the Arabic convention of dividing the octave into 24. Fewer levers mean faster, less error-prone changes mid-performance — a real advantage in Arabic ensemble repertoire, where modulations arrive quickly and the player needs the change to be certain.

Neither system is more advanced than the other. They are optimised for different repertoires, and a player raised in one often finds the other awkward at first — not because it is worse, but because the muscle memory does not transfer.

The Left-Hand Choreography

For anyone who has not watched closely, what happens during a performance is surprising. Mandal changes are not improvised in the moment. A piece has a mandal plan: a starting configuration set before the first note, and a series of changes at specific points where the melody moves into a different modal area.

Learning a piece on kanun therefore means learning two things in parallel — the notes, and the sequence of lever movements that makes the notes available. Teachers describe this as the part that separates a competent kanun student from a fluent one, and it is why the first year or two of study includes drills that are purely about moving between mandal configurations quickly and without looking.

There is a second, subtler point. Because each bank of mandals affects only its own course, different octaves of the same note can be set differently at the same time. A player can leave one register shaded one way and another differently — useful in pieces that move between modal areas, and one of the things that makes the instrument feel less rigid than its fixed-pitch construction suggests.

The same ear that guides this work serves every instrument in the maqam family. A ney player finds the neutral intervals with breath and lip; the kanun player finds them with a lever. The mechanism differs; the musical target is identical.

Turkish, Arabic and Armenian Traditions

Turkish kanun. Dense comma-based mandal banks, tuned to the makam repertoire of Turkish classical and folk music. This is the instrument most Turkish conservatory training is built around, and the one most students in Turkey learn on.

Arabic qanun. Quarter-tone mandals and a lighter mechanism. Within the Arab world there is further variation — Egyptian practice places certain neutral intervals slightly differently from Levantine practice, and instruments are often regulated to suit. Players and ethnomusicologists have long noted these differences without treating any of them as the correct version.

Armenian kanun. A distinct tradition with its own calibration, reflecting Armenian modal practice, which shares a great deal with Turkish makam while differing in specifics. Armenian instruments are not simply Turkish ones with a different label.

For players who work across traditions — increasingly common — this matters practically. Some keep more than one instrument. Others commission a build calibrated for the repertoire they play most and accept a compromise elsewhere. It is worth being clear about which tradition you are buying into before you order, because it is not a setting you change casually afterwards.

What to Check Before You Buy

The mandal system is among the most important specifications on a kanun, and among the least discussed in general buying guides. Five things are worth asking about.

Kanuns and Accessories We Stock

Every instrument below is in stock, tuned and checked before it leaves us, and shipped worldwide from our Istanbul network. Returns are accepted according to our policy. One honest note that applies to every kanun everywhere: the tuning always shifts in transit. A kanun arriving after an international flight will need retuning before it sounds like itself — that is normal, not a fault.

$13–60 Learn the Mandals

If you already own a kanun, the cheapest useful upgrades are the things you touch: picks, rings, and a method book that drills the lever work directly.

$1,299 Choose Your Tradition

These are all handmade by Mustafa Sağlam in his Ankara workshop, at the same price and the same level of workmanship. The difference between them is not quality — it is which mandal tradition the instrument is built and calibrated for. Choose by repertoire.

Browse all kanuns

$249+ Going On Stage

Amplifying a kanun cleanly is its own problem — a contact pickup has to capture 70-odd strings without turning every mandal click into a thump.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a mandal actually do to the sound?

It raises the pitch of one course by a small, fixed amount — a comma on a Turkish instrument, a quarter tone on an Arabic one — by shortening the vibrating length of the strings. The tone stays the same; only the pitch moves.

Do more mandals make a better kanun?

No. More mandals give finer pitch resolution but also more levers to locate and move under pressure. Turkish repertoire benefits from the dense comma layout; Arabic repertoire is generally better served by fewer, quarter-tone levers. Match the instrument to the music.

Can I change a kanun's mandal calibration later?

Not casually. Mandal positions are set during making and regulation, and moving them is precise luthier work. It is far better to buy the calibration you need than to plan on converting an instrument afterwards.

Why does my new kanun sound out of tune when it arrives?

Because it travelled. Temperature, humidity and handling all move a kanun's tuning, and with 70-plus strings the effect is obvious. Every kanun needs retuning on arrival — plan for it, and use a tuning key made for the instrument.

How long does it take to get fluent with mandals?

Basic changes come within the first months. Moving between configurations mid-piece, accurately and without looking, is usually the work of the first year or two of serious study — which is why teachers drill it separately from the repertoire.

Is the mandal system unique to the kanun?

The kanun is where it is most fully developed, but the idea has spread. Some santoors are now built with mandal-style latches for the same reason: to give a fixed-pitch instrument access to microtones without retuning.

Notes and further reading: Signell, Karl, Makam: Modal Practice in Turkish Art Music, on the Arel–Ezgi–Uzdilek comma framework; Touma, Habib Hassan, The Music of the Arabs (Amadeus Press, 1996), on the Arabic quarter-tone convention and qanun practice; Marcus, Scott, Music in Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2007), on regional tuning differences; standard musical-acoustics references for the string-length and frequency relationship. Mandal counts and calibrations vary between makers and instruments; the figures here describe common practice, not a fixed standard.