Benju

A benju is a type of zither fitted with a keyboard, commonly used in the music of Balochistan and Sindh.

Construction and play

It is about 1 meter long, 10 –12 cm wide and the soundbox is about 5 cm high, with six strings. Strings 1 and 2, 5 and 6 are used as bordun (drone) strings and tuned to the tonic and the fifth or fourth. In relative pitch C and G or F. The middle strings 3 and 4 are tuned unison to F or G, and they are fretted and can be shortened by pressing down the metal keys. The scale is chromatic from G to A, B flat or B. The right hand plays the strings by using a wooden or plastic plectron, the left hand is fingering the keys.

The benju is played mainly as a solo instrument accompanied by dholak and tamburag. Sometimes it is combined with sorud.

Benju and Abdulrahman Surizehi

Players

Abdulrahman Surizehi song

gollark: I'm never going to write more than a few kloc.
gollark: Well, I'm mostly just using Markdown with minor syntax extensions.
gollark: Well, tens of milliseconds strictly speaking.
gollark: The caching is a horrible workaround because their renderer is slow; minoteaur doesn't need it because it renders hundred-kilobyte pages in milliseconds.
gollark: The language is an AWFUL UNPARSEABLE MESS.

References


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