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Ciftelia
Found in: Turkish musical instruments
The ciftelia (chiftelia) is an Albanian wooden, largely acoustic string instrument, with only two strings. It is also known in some areas by its original Asian, Turkish and Arabic names of dyzen and karadyzen. The ciftelia is played by Albanians at weddings, concerts and other occasions, its beautiful sound makes the music live. The size and scale length of various ciftelias may differ from one another. The ciftelia is often tuned to that of the same pitch as the two highest strings on the guitar, strings E and B. Usually the lower string is played as a drone, with the melody played on the higher string. The ciftelia is a fretted instrument, but unlike most it does not have one fret per semitone, but rather one fret per note in a seven note diatonic scale. Seven frets up is the octave of the open string.
Use
Ciftelia is commonly used by Albanian folk musicians, but is used also by many other modern musicians.
See also
Tanbur
Dutar
Baglama
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Ciftelia