The dranyen is held across the body, the neck rising to the left, the body against the right hip or on the lap. The right hand strums downward across the courses and plucks single strings; the left hand stops the strings against the neck, which has no frets, so the ear decides where a note is.
The common tuning, confirmed with a master player, puts the instrument in D major with the three open courses at La, Re and So, where So and La are re-entrant and sound an octave below the rest; other regions and players tune differently, and the first lesson is tuning by ear to a teacher’s instrument. The notation writer plays in this tuning.
This page is being written with a teacher of the dranyen. It will set out the posture, the tuning, the basic right-hand patterns of nangma and toeshey, the left-hand positions, and a first song to learn, each with a diagram and a recording.