Special Guitars
Special Guitars at Tapadum are a curated category of hybrid string instruments — guitar-derived forms that integrate elements from Turkish, Persian, and Mediterranean string traditions into a familiar six-string format. These are not standard classical or steel-string guitars; they are luthier-built experiments in cross-cultural sound, born from the workshop conversation between Western guitar construction and Eastern microtonal practice.
Construction begins with traditional guitar geometry — a flat-back body, spruce or cedar soundboard, mahogany or walnut neck — but each instrument carries modifications that change how it speaks. Fretless guitar models remove the metal frets entirely, exposing the wooden fingerboard for fluid microtonal slides and the quarter-tone vocabulary of makam and dastgah practice. Sympathetic-string guitar models add additional resonating strings beneath the main course — drawn from sitar and Indian classical practice — that vibrate untouched as the played strings sound, creating a halo of resonance around each note.
Tuning typically follows standard guitar EADGBE or modal variants suited to the modified construction. The fretless models require careful intonation by ear and develop strong left-hand pitch control over time, while the sympathetic-string models reward delicate finger-style technique with sustained, layered resonance. Both formats sit comfortably in fingerstyle, plectrum, and hybrid right-hand approaches.
Special guitars suit players who already work in the guitar tradition but want access to the microtonal palette of Turkish and Persian repertoire — alongside the carved-body hybrid Caglama within the wider string instruments family. They also bridge naturally into world fusion, ambient, and contemporary classical work where guitar familiarity meets non-Western tonal systems.
At Tapadum, special guitars are built in-house at the Tapadum Strings & Percussion Workshop in Izmir, designed and overseen by our string instruments specialist Sertan Sarioglu. Each instrument passes individual quality control — fretless intonation linearity, sympathetic-string resonance balance, neck stability — before shipping from our Brisighella, Italy showroom.
