Tapadum Workshop · Strings & Percussion

Tapadum Workshop is the production arm of Tapadum Ethnic Music Store, the Italian-based retailer of Anatolian, Persian, Arabic, Greek, and broader Mediterranean musical instruments. The brand operates a retail showroom in Brisighella (Ravenna province, Italy) — a small medieval town in the hills above the Faenza valley — and two production ateliers in Izmir, Turkey: a percussion workshop and a strings workshop. The Italian showroom serves as the European-facing demonstration and direct-sales space; the Izmir ateliers handle in-house instrument production alongside curation of work from independent master luthiers across Turkey, Persia, and the broader region.

Tapadum is led by Turkish musician Özgür Yalçın, founder of the Kara Güneş music project — an Ankara-rooted ensemble active since 1997 that continues to perform in Italy under the Yeni Kara Güneş name. Yalçın is credited as a songwriter on Kalan Müzik’s 2013 album Mevsimler Geçti, and the project has appeared at Italian festivals including Suoni Controvento (Costa di Trex, Assisi, 2024) and the Castel Raniero Folk Festival in the Ravenna province. The store and workshops grew out of his decades inside ethnic-music performance and his network across Anatolian, Persian, and Mediterranean instrument-making circles. That musician-led perspective remains visible in the catalogue: each instrument is selected by people who play the same repertoire it was built for.

The Izmir ateliers are anchored by named masters and collaborators — among them percussionist Gürkan Özkan, a tabla maker who studied under Okay Temiz and Engin Gürkey and has collaborated with John Scofield, Ibrahim Maalouf, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Natasha Atlas, and whose 2016 An Introduction to the Art of Tabla is the first Turkish-language book on the instrument; strings luthier Mitre Sertan Sarıoğlu, whose own custom-instrument practice runs in parallel as Mitre Custom Gauges; and multi-instrumentalist Volkan İncüvez, a ney player with Jerusalem Jazz Festival appearances. Beyond these in-house anchors, Tapadum curates and resells the work of independent master luthiers profiled in the Luthiers section — Necati Gurbuz (oud, classical kemence, qanun), Yildirim Palabiyik (Turkish oud), Feramis Aktas (Turkish and Arabic oud), Ahmet Tashomcu (darbuka, udu), Behrad & Zolani (chromatic santur), Ali Riza Acar (Turkish woodwinds), and others — each profiled with the lineage, materials, and acoustic signature that defines their work.

The catalogue spans Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, and broader Anatolian and Mediterranean traditions — handpan, darbuka, oud, baglama, santur, setar, kanun, ney, qanun, kemence, kaval, mey, duduk, zurna — across strings, percussion, bowed, and wind families. Tapadum ships across the European Union directly from the Brisighella warehouse and maintains presence on independent marketplaces alongside its own catalogue. The model combines the production capacity of two Izmir ateliers with the retail and brand presence of a small Italian artisan town: an Anatolian production network with a European front door.