Jins nahawand is built from the semitone offsets 0, 2, 3, 5 — a whole step, then a half step, then a whole step. That is the lower half of a natural minor scale, exactly. Of the five ajnas this site charts, nahawand is the one most likely to sound simply "familiar" the first time a guitarist, pianist, or violinist hears it, because their own training already contains this precise shape under a different name.
The maqam this jins anchors — also called nahawand — is often the first maqam taught to Western-trained students for the same reason: the destination sounds close enough to home that the ear does not need retraining before the theory can be explained. But familiarity is not identity. Maqam nahawand's upper tetrachord, and the ornaments a real performance layers onto this lower one, still carry the maqam's own melodic habits — a jins is a building block, not the whole building. Every one of nahawand's four tones does sit on an exact twelve-tone equal-tempered pitch class, though, which is exactly why — unlike rast, bayati, sikah, or saba — it belongs on this page at all.
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 four 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, 3, 5 |
| 2 | G (3rd octave) | 5, 7, 8, 10 |
| 3 | D (3rd octave) | 0, 1, 3, 10 |
| 4 | A (2nd octave) | 3, 5, 6, 8 |
| 5 | F (2nd octave) | 0, 7, 9, 10 |
| 6 | C (2nd octave) | 0, 2, 3, 5 |
As with every jins this site charts, courses 1 and 6 carry identical position sets — both are tuned to C, two octaves apart, so any tetrachord rooted on C always lands on the same twelve positions on both of them. That pairing is a fact about the C-F-A-D-G-C tuning itself, unrelated to which jins you are tracing.
Playing past the familiarity
Because this shape is so close to something most players already know by ear, the risk here is different from hijaz or kurd: it is not that the interval feels foreign, but that it feels TOO settled — a natural-minor tetrachord invites a Western player to treat it as a resting scale rather than a cell in motion. Practice moving through it deliberately: land on each of the four tones only briefly, treat the top tone as a hand-off point into whatever comes next, and resist the urge to let the fourth tone feel like an ending.
Where it sits
Set this tetrachord's four tones beside a tertian triad on C major on the oud — even where the raw pitches overlap with something familiar, the four-tone melodic cell and the three-tone sustained chord are built to be used in entirely different ways. Then run the daily drills to keep the left hand's positions clean regardless of which jins the ear is currently tracking.