Everyone can hum it and almost nobody can name what they are humming. Hijaz is four notes, one of which is doing all the work — and its top half is not fixed, which is where the interesting part starts.
Written by M III D O · 19 September 2026
The word maqam gets translated as "mode" or "scale", and that translation loses the point. A scale is a set of notes. A maqam is a set of notes plus the way you are expected to move through them — where you rest, which note you lean on before you resolve, where you are allowed to leave for another maqam and come back.
The building block underneath it is the jins (plural ajnas): a fragment of three, four or five notes with fixed intervals between them. A maqam is built by stacking ajnas, and the Maqam World reference puts it well — a maqam is really a pathway among several ajnas.
That matters practically. If you learn hijaz as "the scale with the big gap", you will write the same three melodies forever. If you learn it as one jins that can be followed by different ones, you have somewhere to go.
The root jins is four notes, and the intervals between them are, in tones:
Jins Hijaz, written from D. The intervals are fixed; the starting note is not.
Half step, then a step and a half, then a half step again. That middle interval — the augmented second — is the entire character. It is a gap wide enough that your ear cannot hear the two notes as neighbours, so the second degree stops sounding like a passing note and starts sounding like a wall you have to jump.
This is why hijaz survives being played badly. Almost every other maqam needs intonation you cannot get from a keyboard. Hijaz is ½, 1½, ½ — every one of those exists in twelve-tone tuning, so it plays correctly on a piano, in a piano roll, on a guitar. That is both why it is the sound most people recognise as "Arabic", and why it is the only one most producers ever use. More on that here.
Hijaz does not continue in one fixed way. The scale starts with jins hijaz on the tonic, and then takes either jins nahawand or jins rast on the fourth degree. Those are two genuinely different scales sharing a first half.
Nahawand is, in western terms, a minor tetrachord. Every note here is available in standard tuning, and this is the version that turns up in film scores, in trap, in almost everything written outside the tradition. It is also the version closest to the harmonic minor scale, which is why the two get confused.
Now the sixth degree sits between B♭ and B. Not one or the other — between them. It cannot be played on a keyboard, it has no key on a piano, and it is the version you hear from an actual oud player. The bottom half of the scale is identical; the top half has left twelve-tone tuning entirely.
If you have ever programmed a hijaz melody, got the notes right, and still felt that it sounded like an imitation — this is often what is missing. Not the notes. The tuning of one of them.
The free packs here are written in harmonic minor rather than in maqam — which is an honest description of what they are, and part of why they sit easily in a western arrangement. Ghorba and Cairo Nights both have their melody stems separated, so you can solo a line and hear which intervals are carrying it.
Cairo Nights is the closer of the two to the tradition: its loops are written in hijaz and nikriz rather than transposed out of a western scale to sound eastern.
The structure of maqam hijaz and of the individual ajnas is read from the notation published by Maqam World, the standard online reference for Arabic maqam theory. The interval sizes quoted above are as that source notates them. What to do with any of it is mine.