Special Guitars

Special Guitars at Tapadum is a small category for guitars built outside the standard fretted design. Today it holds one instrument: the Left Handed Fretless Electric Guitar, handmade by Tapadum’s luthiers in Turkey for left-handed players who want to work with microtones.

A fretless neck has no metal frets, so the fingertip on a smooth, polished fingerboard sets the pitch. This opens the quarter-tone intervals of Turkish makam and Arabic maqam, slow glides between notes and a vocal-like sustain. Side markers show the traditional fret positions without interrupting the playing surface.

The guitar pairs a mulberry body, a tonewood long used in Turkish lutherie for its warm midrange, with a laminated walnut and Afromosia neck and a custom Ers humbucker voiced for the fretless sound. It is built left-handed from the start, not a right-handed model turned over, so the contours and controls sit where a left-handed player expects them.

It suits intermediate and advanced guitarists who already play a fretted instrument and want to move into Turkish, Arabic or Persian modal music, jazz fusion or ambient work. For the same microtonal vocabulary on an amplified traditional instrument, see our electric oud range and the wider string instruments family. Current price and availability are shown on the product page.