The Roads - Oi Dromoi
Rembetiko music is not played using the standard Western scales. The groups of notes on the fretboard that are used during playing are known as the "roads". The Greek word for a road is dromos, plural dromoi. The roads are the result of adapting the Turkish scales called makams to the notes playable on the bouzouki. They have the same names as some of the makams, but are different, because the makams are microtonal in nature, and contain notes that do not appear in Western "well tempered" music. Of course, when rebetiko is being played on fretless instruments, like the violin and oud, the actual notes can be used. Some players actually have extra frets called moria to let them play these notes on their bouzoukis. The word moria also means a subdivision of a semi-tone.
In conventional Western music, some keys are associated with happy moods, and some with sad, particularly the minor keys. Roads in Rebetiko are a bit like that, only more so! Markos Vamvakaris, whom some called "The Howling Wolf of Rembetika" because of his extraordinary singing voice, said of the Rembetiko roads that they were much more than just scales, but rather less than melodies.
If you want to play Rebetiko, you need to learn some roads. This site contains the roads as they are played on trichordo instruments. They can also be played on tetrachordo bouzoukis, and often are, but the sound will not be the same, and the trichordo sound is very much preferred by most Rebetiko enthusiasts.
You can find thirteen of the roads in proper music notation of page 149 of Ed Emery's translation of "Songs of the Greek Underworld" by Elias Petropoulos. ISBN 0-86356-368-6. It's a good book, with a lot of interesting background information. There is also an excellent book called "Laiki dromoi" by H Pagiatis.
Instead of using musical notation, I have drawn diagrams to illustrate the positions of the notes in the roads on a trichordo fretboard and included the fingering for a scale suggested in "Greek Folk Scales" by H Pagiatis. See the bottom of the page for text versions if you are unable to see diagrams.
Each road also has its basic and secondary chords listed, but I do not give you any chord diagrams. I started to draw them, but they took up a lot of space, and it was a very slow process. Not only that, but they are already on the Internet, and beautifully done, at that. If you need to look up trichordo bouzouki chords, have a look at Han Speek's "Old Greek Bouzouki Chord Chart", which is available in plain text, Postscript and PDF. I could not have done it better...
What the diagrams tell you.
An explanation of the diagrams is probably a good idea. Here is one of the diagrams. They are seen as if by a right-handed player looking down at the instrument's neck. In other words, the top row of the diagram represents the side of the neck nearest your feet. In fact, as the top and bottom rows of strings are both tuned to D, they are the same in the diagrams. Of course, the bottom row of the diagram represents the strings nearest the player's head, which is a pair of strings tuned an octave apart. But I'm sure you knew that anyway, if you were interested enough to read this far...
The note to the left of the thicker vertical line at the left is the note you get when you are not holding the string down, that is to say, the open string. The dark-shaded notes are notes that are not used when playing in a particular road. The diagram does not show the whole neck of the instrument, as the letters would be too small if it did. The pattern repeats after the twelvth fret.
Most of the roads contain the same notes when the music is rising in pitch and when it is falling, but there are some roads that differ in their rising and falling scales. Where this happens, I have used two diagrams for clarity, as shown above. So in the road above, which is called Rast, you would use a C in a falling sequence of notes, but C# in a rising sequence.
The red numbers indicate the way to play a scale, from D to D, where the 1 is the index finger, and 2, 3 and 4 represent the other fingers, in a fairly obvious sequence. If you are Django Reinhart, do it any way you wish...
Rebetiko roads diagrams
| Diatonic minor | |
| Harmonic minor | |
| Hijaz | |
| Hijazkiar | |
| Houseini | |
| Huzam | |
| Kartzigar | |
| Kurdi | |
| Major | |
| Melodic minor | |
| Neveseri | |
| Nihavent | |
| Piraeus | |
| Rast | |
| Sabah | |
| Segah | |
| Susinak | |
| Tabahaniotikos | |
| Tsinganikos | |
| Usak |
What the diagrams don't tell you!
The situation is more complex than I used to think. Each road shown in the diagrams has further versions, produced by moving the pattern it forms along the bouzouki neck to a new starting position. The pattern I have shown as Houseini, for instance, is just the first in a series of roads. It is referred to as "Do Houseini", so moving the pattern two frets up the fretboard results in "Re Houseini", and so on.
This results in an explosion in the number of possible roads, but it is not necessary to be intimidated, as most of them are not used very much, if at all. Learning the basic patterns, and trying the effect of moving the most used ones up the neck is sufficient to begin with.
For those who are unable to see the diagrams...
I am only going up to the twelvth fret, as the pattern repeats after that...
Diatonic minor D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 Harmonic minor D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 Hijaz D strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 Hijazkiar D strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 Hijazkiar D strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 Houseini ascending D strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 Houseini descending D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 Huzam D strings - 0, 3, 4, 5,, 7, 9, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12 Kartzigar D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 A Strings - 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 Kurdi ascending D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 A Strings - 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11 Kurdi descending D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 Major D strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 Melodic minor ascending D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 Melodic minor descending D strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 Neveseri D strings - 0, 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12 Nihavent D strings - 0, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 Pireaus D strings - 0, 1, 4, (5), 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 (passing note in brackets) A Strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, (10), 11, 12 Rast ascending D strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12 A Strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 Rast descending D strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 A Strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 Sabah D strings - 0, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12 A strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12 Segah D strings - 0, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 A strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12 Susinak D strings - 0, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12 A strings - 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 Tabahaniotikos D strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12 A strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 Tsinganikos ascending D strings - 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 A strings - 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 Tsinganikos descending D strings - 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12 Usak D strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12 A strings - 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12