Welcome!

Welcome to Learn the Oud! I hope you enjoy the content and choose to learn to play this beautiful instrument from a true master. Mousa Omron was my grandfather, and I couldn’t be more proud of him and his amazing skill. To more about Mousa and his musical background, click here.

I built this site and put together these DVDs from a training course Mousa and his son Edward created in 1989. In his later years, Mousa personally taught many students who wanted to discover the beautiful sounds of the oud. My grandfather always loved to teach and share his music with anyone who would listen.

After my grandfather’s death, I continuously ran into people who wanted to learn how to play my grandfather’s favorite instrument–the oud. I searched the internet to find any resource that someone could use to learn the oud. And I didn’t find much. So when I discovered my grandfather taught many students how to play the oud and even created a training course, I immediately thought to bring my grandfather’s expertise to the world.

After cleaning up the video and audio, creating the DVDs, redoing the lesson book, and building a web site, Mousa’s lessons are now available to the world. We also have notes to many Middle Eastern songs, since Mousa created all of his sheet music by listening to songs and then creating the notations on his own. Some of the notes that we have are from old and rare songs that would probably disappear soon if they are not preserved. Mousa always wrote his own music as well, and you can find examples of his work on this site.

Mousa was always worried that that the oud would be a dying instrument, and playing it would be a dying art. I hope this site helps prevent what he was afraid of and helps his art live forever.

I hope this site and DVDs serve as a tribute to my grandfather, and allow all of his family who never met him to know and understand why we loved him so much. Mousa’s dream was to create many oud courses so eventually anyone who wanted to learn the oud would have access to a teacher. Sadly, Mousa died before he could complete any more lessons. I hope you enjoy learning from a master.