Mustafa Gezerdag

Mustafa Gezerdag is one of Izmir’s veteran luthiers, working out of his Karabaglar atelier with more than forty years at the bench. His workshop builds across a wide instrument family — Turkish ouds, Arabic ouds, silent ouds, electro-acoustic ouds, and lavtas — yet his most distinct contribution is unusually deliberate: he treats the beginner and intermediate oud as a serious instrument, not a stepping-stone.

The lower and mid tiers of the oud market are crowded with instruments built down to a price — uneven materials, weak voice, fragile construction. A player picking up a first oud often does so on a borrowed budget and limited information, and a poorly built instrument can quietly end the journey before it begins. Gezerdag’s workshop is one of the few in Izmir built around solving exactly this: producing a series of ouds that are affordable but honestly made — straight neck, true intonation, body that breathes, and tone that gives a learner a real reason to keep playing.

Alongside the production line, the workshop also builds standard Turkish and Arabic ouds for advancing players, silent and electro-acoustic models for performers who need low-volume practice or amplification, and lavtas on request. The thread running through all of it is the same craftsman’s instinct: the instrument should respect whoever plays it, regardless of where they are in their journey.