The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Grove's Dictionaries of Music, 1984. The neck is usually made of fir, and the teardrop-shaped resonator is usually made of a single piece of mulberry wood. Small soundholes may appear in the thin wooden soundboard, and openings may also be carved in the sides of the body. Alternately, there may be no soundholes.
Strings are either steel or brass, and are plucked by a long cherry bark plectrum.
The sounds created by the saz are metallic and buzzing. The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments. Oxford University Press, 1992. Lentin, Jean-Pierre and Randall Barnwell. Sadie, Stanley, ed.