Tar

Belonging to the lute family, the tar appeared in its present form in the middle of the eighteenth century. The body is a double-bowl shape carved from mulberry wood, with a thin membrane of stretched lamb-skin covering the top. The long fingerboard has twenty-six to twenty-eight adjustable gut frets, and there are three double courses of strings. Its range is about two and one- half octaves, and is played with a small brass plectrum.

Setar

The ancestry of the Setar can be traced to the ancient Tanbur of pre-Islamic Persia. It is made from thin mulberry wood and its fingerboard has twenty-five or
twenty-six adjustable gut frets. Setar is literally translated as "three strings''. however, in its present form, it has four strings and it is suspected that Setar
initially had only three strings. Because of its delicacy and intimate sonority, the Setar is the preferred instrument of Sufi mystics