Necati Gurbuz

Necati Gurbuz has built ouds, classical kemence, and qanun in Izmir since the early 1980s — over four decades at a bench on 845 Sokak in Kestel, a street that has housed master instrument makers since Ottoman times. He came to the craft by an unusual path: born in Çimentepe and raised in Izmir, he trained as a technical teacher in Ankara before a chance encounter drew him into instrument making. He began with teknecilik — the shaping of the bowl, the structural heart of the oud — and made his name in it quickly, at a moment when Turkey’s classical music ensembles were forming and there were almost no makers to supply them.

His lineage runs through the great names of the tradition: the workshop knowledge of Marul Usta and Hamza Usta of Istanbul, carried forward and refined over a working lifetime. Where many makers spread themselves across dozens of instrument types, Necati chose to specialize — concentrating on the oud, the classical kemence, and the qanun, the instruments he has come to know most deeply.

His material choices reflect decades of listening. For soundboards he favors spruce — by preference the resonant Artvin–Borçka spruce of northeastern Turkey, the wood he considers truest for these instruments — alongside the European spruce used by makers worldwide. Necks are built with spruce and linden at the core; fingerboards are worked in ebony. For the bowl and detailing he turns to rosewood, Southeastern Anatolian walnut, and maple, with mother-of-pearl and silver filigree for ornament. On the qanun he selects horn or tortoiseshell for the plectrum mounts — materials chosen for acoustic reasons as much as appearance, because they do not build up static charge that would interfere with the strings.

Necati has always taught as openly as he builds. Luthiers trained in instrument making have come from as far as Greece to spend four and five years at his bench, and he has worked alongside gifted musicians — among them an Iranian player with an exceptionally fine ear — exchanging knowledge rather than guarding it. “If I hide the secret, the craft cannot grow,” is the principle he works by: he shows the process, the apprentice builds on it, and the tradition advances together.

Beyond his own workshop, Necati has long championed Izmir as a center for instrument making, contributing to efforts to establish a dedicated craft village in the region. He is a maker Tapadum knows closely — a master whose oud and kemence work sits at the highest level, and a generous teacher whose decades at the bench inform far more than his own instruments.