Jins ajam is built from the semitone offsets 0, 2, 4, 5, 7 — whole step, whole step, half step, whole step. Five tones, not four, spanning a fifth rather than a fourth: ajam is a PENTACHORD, and saying so matters, because a jins is defined by how far it reaches as much as by the steps inside it.
Western-trained players will hear the first five degrees of a major scale, and that hearing is correct as far as it goes. Every one of ajam’s tones sits on a real twelve-tone equal-tempered pitch class, so the table below is not an approximation of the tradition — it is the shape drawn exactly. What the familiarity hides is the behaviour: maqam ajam does not treat these five notes as a key to sit in. The jins is a cell to travel through, handed off to a neighbouring jins at a shared tone, and the fifth degree is the hand-off point rather than a resting place.
Positions on every course, rooted on C
The table below is derived, not typed by hand: for the root C, every one of the jins’s five pitch classes is checked against each of the oud’s six courses, and its POSITION on that course — semitones above that course’s own open string, within the twelve-position board this fretless neck is approximated with — is recorded. Course 1 is the highest-pitched course, course 6 the lowest, the same numbering the chord and scale pages use.
| Course | Open note | Positions (semitones above the open course) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | C (4th octave) | 0, 2, 4, 5, 7 |
| 2 | G (3rd octave) | 0, 5, 7, 9, 10 |
| 3 | D (3rd octave) | 0, 2, 3, 5, 10 |
| 4 | A (2nd octave) | 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 |
| 5 | F (2nd octave) | 0, 2, 7, 9, 11 |
| 6 | C (2nd octave) | 0, 2, 4, 5, 7 |
Courses 1 and 6 carry identical position sets, as they do for every jins on this site: both are tuned to C, two octaves apart, so any cell rooted on C lands on the same twelve positions on both. What is new here is the density — five tones rather than four means five positions per course instead of four, and on courses 2 and 5 the extra tone lands where a tetrachord would have left a gap.
Hearing it against what you already know
Because the shape doubles as the bottom five notes of a major scale, play it that way first, on one course, without maqam vocabulary at all. Then change what you do at the top: instead of continuing up the scale, stop on the fifth degree and treat it as a new temporary root for whatever cell comes next. That hand-off is the entire difference between a pentachord in maqam practice and the opening of a scale, and it is a habit rather than a fingering — which is why no chart can teach it and this page does not pretend to.
Where it sits
Follow this pentachord’s five tones upward into C major on the oud to see exactly where the cell stops and a Western scale keeps going. Then compare it against jins nikriz, which spans the same fifth over a completely different interior, and keep the movement itself clean with the daily drills.