However, they normally occupy different locations on the soundboard of Turkish kanuns compared to Arabic qanuns, and may also vary in shape, size and number depending on geography or personal taste.

[3] Qanun is played on the lap while sitting or squatting, or sometimes on trestle support, by plucking the strings with two tortoise-shell picks (one for each hand) or with fingernails, and has a standard range of three and a half octaves from A2 to E6 that can be extended down to F2 and up to G6 in the case of Arabic designs.

These small levers, which can be raised or lowered quickly by the performer while the instrument is being played, serve to slightly change the pitch of a particular course by altering effective string lengths.

[5] Levantine qanuns, prior to that time, remained rather inflexible and cumbersome to perform on (especially as demanding modulations/transpositions came into vogue that were increasingly emulating Western tonality and key changes), requiring the player to use the fingernail of the thumb to depress on the leftmost ends of the courses to achieve on-the-fly intervallic alterations.

This has subsequently led to the familiar interrupted and irregular pattern of mandals on the Turkish kanun becoming a visual guide for players, in facilitating modal and intonational navigation on an instrument which is ordinarily bereft of pitch markers.

[13] Likewise, the late Swiss-French qānūn performer Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss (1953–2015), who was critical of the tuning deficiency of Eurocentric octave divisions in approximating just intervals, is known to have conceived, since 1990, a number of prototypes that were entirely based on low prime-limit or simple integer ratio Pythagorean and harmonic intervals; which were once again built, on instructions from Weiss, by Ejder Güleç.