There is an instrument
called an Oud. It is used in northern Africa and southwest Asia.
It seems at some point to have been modified into an instrument
called a LaOud, although I haven’t been able to find any
major references to it. I looked for one at NAMM in all the Middle
Eastern instrument booths and couldn’t find one. I’ve
only seen one. It is a short scaled 12 string acoustic instrument,
tuned in the key of B. Other than being tuned in B, it is tuned
like a guitar but with each set of strings tuned in unison. It
is played with normal guitar fingering. In other words, if you
play an E chord you are actually playing a B chord.
The story behind the Interlooud:
To start with, I made up the name
Interlooud so don’t look for it in any books.
A friend of mine named Mike Amatin who lives in Kagel Canyon,
where I live, came to me with what he called a LaOud that he purchased
in Spain. Many of the acoustic instruments from that part of the
world are very cool but not built very well and leave a lot to
be desired in the playability department. His was no exception.
So I pulled the frets, planed a slight back bow into the fingerboard
and then pounded in new frets. This was definitely an educated
guess operation. There’s no way of knowing exactly how much
tension 12 strings will put on a short little neck. It also started
with a forward bow. I got lucky, when the strings were put back
on and it was tuned up, the neck was straight as an arrow. Mike
took the instrument home and played it for a while. Then one day
he called me and said he liked it so much that he wondered if
it could be made into an electric. I thought about it for a while
and then decided to build one.
This is what I got myself into:
I decided to modify the tear drop body shape by adding a cut for
your leg so you could play it sitting down. That wasn’t
a problem. The problem was that no one makes a LaOud fingerboard
or truss rod. In fact the original doesn’t even have a truss
rod. So, I had to take a regular dual action StewMac truss rod
and cut it, rethread it and braze it back together. Next, I took
a 25 ½ inch scale fingerboard and lined it up against the
original LaOud’s finger board. I slid it back and forth
until the frets lined up as close as possible, then cut it off
at the proper points. Now I had a truss rod and finger board.
The rest of the building process was pretty basic for a set neck
guitar. Everything was just shorter.
This instrument records well and
makes for some interesting lead sounds. It will also draw a crowd.
I believe this is the only one in existence.
