Hi everyone,

Some of you know me from other tribes (though I don't post much), and some of you may have met me in person. I've had the privilege of playing with Carmine a couple of times, which really turned me on to playing Middle Eastern music. (I play a bunch of instruments, but have been focusing on violin and viola for the last couple of years.) I owe this cumbus purchase to Carmine's influence. :-)

I finally took the plunge and ordered one of the "scratch-n-dent" cumbuses from Lark-in-the-Morning. I've heard people have had issues with Lark in the past, but I've ordered a few things from them over the years, and all my experiences have been very positive. This was no exception. I was visualizing some road-kill instrument arriving, and was very pleasantly surprised to see that this cumbus had one little dent in it - that's all - and that dent saved me $100! Not bad. :-)

I have a tuning question: I tuned it up to D-A-D-f#-a-d (from low to high) (i.e., open-D), and was off the ground right away with being able to play things in D-Hijaz and some of the other "major" D-Maqams (is that the right word?), plus making improvising really easy - the "open" scales are lightning fast, and the octaves make it real easy to set up a rhythm. Another bonus is that this tuning makes it easy to play some of my bottleneck blues stuff (you want to hear some REALLY funky sounds, try playing Delta Blues on a cumbus with a slide! :-) ). Flatting the f# makes the minor scales easy, etc.

I've read through a bunch of other posts on tuning, and haven't seen anyone use these tunings. Am I getting myself in trouble, developing bad habits that will come back to bite me, etc?

Overall, this is one of the most fun instruments I've ever tried. Playing guitar helps a lot, as does playing other fretless strings - intonation seemed to happen very naturally, and shifting and vibrato follow also very naturally from violin/viola.

Thanks for turning me on to this, Carmine!

- Mike