Synthesizers will spoil you. That's one of the possible answers to today's pressing question. There are other possible answers.

I love microtonal music. There are many, many interesting tuning systems, and my piano, as lovely as it is, only does the one tuning we're all familiar with. I also like the idea of just being able to sit down and play. Composing and recording into the computer is mostly about sitting and thinking, it's not about being in the moment.

So I decided to buy a qanun. I've never played one. I've never even seen one, except in YouTube videos. But it arrived yesterday, and now I'm confronting it.

It's beautiful, and not too awfully expensive. ($1,500 delivered, including tax.) There are 77 strings, and that row of black things along the left side are the tuning pegs.

It's expected that tuning a qanun requires some time and effort. I don't mind that. The trouble is, the darn thing won't stay in tune. I tune it meticulously, and almost before I finish, a few of the strings are sliding flat. I'm hoping this is because the strings are new, and they're still stretching, but I'm not sure. A few of the pegs actually slipped completely loose while I was tuning it. I managed to bear down on them and get them to stay put, but the fact that that's happening at all suggests that perhaps the pegs are not being gripped quite hard enough by the peg block.

I'm going to tune it a few more times over the next couple of days. Maybe it will stabilize. I sure hope so. I wouldn't want to have to get in a wrangle trying to explain to Amazon customer service why it's defective and needs to be returned.

A more subtle issue, and not one that I would dream of complaining about if the tuning turns out to be okay, is that this is not the instrument pictured on the Amazon page. The top board is a different color and has different sound holes. I don't mind about the sound holes; these are pretty. The problem is, my eyesight is not that good. The one on the Amazon page has a deep red top board, so the strings are clearly visible. On this one, the strings are much the same color as the wood -- and they cast shadows. It's hard for me to see them clearly, and with this many strings, you really do want to be able to see what you're doing.

A qanun has a system of levers called mandals along the left edge. Flipping a mandal up or down changes the pitch of the associated strings by a quarter-tone, give or take. As a result, it will do melodic modes that you just can't play on a piano. It's an elegant system. This is a Turkish qanun, so it has quite a lot of mandals. That's one of the things I want to explore. But if the strings won't stay in tune, messing about with the mandals isn't going to produce pitch inflections that make much sense.

More will be revealed, I'm sure.