Buying Guide

Buying a Turkish Instrument Online: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Most advice on this subject is written in generalities. This version is written from numbers: what the entry price actually is for each instrument, what arrives in the box, and which promises you should insist on seeing in writing.

By Sala MuzikUpdated September 202614 min read

Twenty years ago, buying an oud meant going to Istanbul. Today it means a browser tab, and the difference is not only convenience — it is that the entire job of evaluating the instrument has quietly been transferred to you, at exactly the moment you know least about it.

Most guides to this problem give you a list of virtues to look for: reputable seller, quality construction, good customer service. All true, all useless, because every seller claims all three. What follows instead is built from figures you can check yourself in about ten minutes, on our catalog or anyone else’s.

First, the number that changes everything

Almost every article on this subject treats “Turkish instrument” as one category with one set of rules. It is not. The single most useful thing you can know before you start is the entry price of the specific instrument you want, because it varies by more than forty times across the family, and it dictates which buying strategy is even available to you.

Here is what the floor looks like in our own catalog, checked on the day this was written.

Read that table again with the classic beginner plan in mind — buy something inexpensive, find out whether you enjoy it, upgrade later. For the ney, that plan is not a compromise; it is what most teachers recommend anyway. For the bağlama and the oud it means saving to a real floor rather than hunting below one. For the kanun it does not exist. If you want a kanun, the first instrument and the serious instrument are the same object, and no amount of shopping will change that.

That is the whole reason generic advice fails here, and it is why the five mistakes below are framed as questions to ask rather than rules to follow.

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Mistake 1: Buying from a seller who cannot answer

The usual framing is specialist versus non-specialist, and it is roughly right — a shop that sells ouds between kalimbas and tin whistles is unlikely to know what it has. But “specialist” is a claim anybody can make on an About page, so it is not a test. The test is whether specific questions get specific answers.

Here is the standard, and it is a low one. Our short-neck bağlama listing publishes the bowl wood, the soundboard wood, the neck length, the fret count, the bowl width in centimetres, the scale length in centimetres, the total length in centimetres, what is in the box, and the country of origin. Our entry Turkish oud publishes bridge-to-nut length, bowl length, width, and the three woods used. None of that is exotic information. It is the minimum a seller should be able to produce on request.

One honest caveat, because it applies to us as much as anyone. Catalogs are written over many years by many hands, and description depth is uneven in every shop of any age, including ours. Some of our pages carry a full specification table and an FAQ; some older ones carry two lines. So the fair test is not whether every page is complete — it is whether you get a real answer when you write and ask. Judge the reply, not the page.

If you would rather do this in person, incidentally, it is still possible and still worth it. We wrote a separate guide on where to buy musical instruments in Istanbul for anyone who can make the trip.

Mistake 2: Trusting photographs

Product photography is the most persuasive and least informative part of any listing. Good lighting flatters an average instrument; bad lighting buries a good one. Neither tells you the thing you actually want to know.

What a photograph genuinely cannot show: string height above the fingerboard, which is the difference between an instrument that rewards practice and one that punishes it; the weight and balance in your hands; the true colour, which shifts with white balance and post-processing; and, above all, the sound. A photograph carries zero acoustic information. Not a little. None.

There is a simple, checkable substitute, and more listings have it than buyers realise: a recording. Here is the demo published on our $399 Arabic walnut oud, the AAO-108.

Thirty seconds of that tells you more than the entire photo gallery. It will not tell you about action height, and it is recorded by someone who plays well, so discount accordingly — but it establishes the instrument’s voice, which is the one thing you were actually shopping for. If a listing has no recording, ask for one. A seller with the instrument in stock can produce a phone video the same day, and a seller who will not is telling you something.

A photograph carries zero acoustic information. If the listing has no recording, ask for one — and treat the refusal as the answer.

For the oud specifically, our guide to the seven things to check before buying a first oud goes through the physical inspection in detail, and how spruce, cedar and walnut shape the sound covers why the soundboard question matters more than the bowl.

Mistake 3: Accepting a return policy with no number in it

This is where buyers are most often let down, and where the standard advice is least helpful, because the standard advice invents a benchmark. You will read that thirty days is the industry minimum. It is not a minimum, it is a number someone wrote down; policies across this trade vary widely, and a shop with a shorter window is not thereby disreputable.

What matters is that the policy contains numbers and conditions rather than adjectives. “Satisfaction guaranteed” is not a policy. These are the three things to extract before you pay:

• How many days, counted from what. From delivery, or from dispatch? Those can be a fortnight apart on an international order.
• In what condition. Almost every instrument return requires original condition and original packaging. Which means: do not throw the box away until you have decided.
• Who pays return shipping, and who owns transit damage. An instrument damaged by a courier is a different case from an instrument that is not as described, and the two are often handled under different rules.

For the sake of practising what this article preaches, ours: our product pages state 10-day returns from delivery, in original condition, alongside a one-year warranty with direct support from the workshop. Returns are accepted according to our policy, which is linked in the footer of every page — read it before ordering, as you should read anyone’s.

Ten days is a shorter window than the thirty you may have read is standard, and we would rather publish the real number than an attractive one. It is a decision window, not a trial period: unbox the instrument, play it, and if it is not what was described, tell us inside ten days with the packaging intact.

Mistake 4: Assuming the included case is a case

Nearly every instrument in this family ships with a case included, and that sentence has misled a great many buyers, because the word covers two very different objects.

Check the pattern in our own catalog. The $249 long-neck bağlama includes a soft case, plectrum and replacement strings. The $269 short-neck includes a soft case, plectrum and replacement strings. The $349.90 Turkish oud includes extra strings, a plectrum and a soft case. The $399 Arabic oud includes extra strings, a risha and a soft carrying case. The pattern does not change as you go up: a soft case is what comes in the box, at every tier we sell.

A soft case is padding. It keeps dust off, it survives a car boot, and it is genuinely adequate for carrying an instrument from home to a lesson. It is not structural protection, and it is not what protects the instrument in transit — that job belongs to the shipping carton, which is why our sazs go out in custom foam-cushioned boxes rather than relying on the case.

So budget for the case separately if you need one. A padded gig bag runs roughly $70 to $130 depending on the instrument, and a hard case for an oud or a kanun is around $149 to $199. On a $349.90 oud, a hard case is close to half the price of the instrument, which is startling until you consider what it is insuring. Our guide to choosing a gig bag covers the trade-offs, and keeping an instrument safe covers what happens after it arrives.

One more shipping point that is easy to miss: delivery estimates on any product page are estimates, and they depend on the carrier you select and where you live. Confirm the timeframe for your own order rather than reading a badge. If a date matters — a birthday, a recital — say so when you order.

Mistake 5: Letting price lead — and the exception

The familiar warning is that cheap instruments teach you to dislike the instrument. An oud with high action and a laminate top does not feel like an oud; it feels like a stubborn object, and beginners reasonably conclude the fault is theirs. That warning is sound, and it is why our oud range starts where it does rather than lower.

But it is stated far too broadly almost everywhere it appears, and the exception is important enough to have its own paragraph.

Our plastic ney costs $29.99, and it is one of the deepest-stocked items we carry — over a thousand units. It is not a toy and it is not a compromise made for the price-sensitive. A PVC ney is dimensionally consistent in a way that a natural reed is not, it does not crack in a dry flat, it survives being carried around, and it is what a great many students are told to start on regardless of budget. Buying one is not the cheap version of the decision; for most beginners it is simply the decision. We wrote about why plastic neys exist and what they are actually for separately, because the question comes up constantly.

Now the opposite end of the same principle. There is no cheap kanun. Our kanun range begins at $1,299, and a search below that price in the kanun category returns stands, gig bags, string sets and plectrum sets — no instruments at all. This is not a merchandising decision; it follows from what the instrument is. A kanun carries seventy-odd strings under tension across a large flat soundboard, with a bank of mandal levers that must each engage cleanly and repeatably. There is no way to build that cheaply that leaves you with something you can tune.

So the honest version of “don’t let price lead” is this: find out what the floor is for your instrument before you decide what you can afford, because in one direction the floor is $29.99 and in the other it is $1,299. If you are heading toward a kanun, what to look for in a Turkish qanun is the right next read, and our complete kanun guide explains the mandal system properly.

Between the two extremes sits the bağlama, where the decision is not about money at all — both formats cost about the same — but about which neck you want. The long-neck ASL-202 is $249 with 23 frets; the short-neck ASK-150 is $269 with 19. That $20 buys you nothing except a different instrument, and short-neck versus long-neck is the article that should decide it for you.

A note on exotic woods and customs

Instruments in this family are built from a wide range of timbers — walnut, spruce, mahogany, maple, ebony, wenge, juniper, and at the top of the range woods like cocobolo. International rules on protected timber species do exist, they apply to some of those woods and not others, and they have changed more than once in recent years.

We are not going to summarise them here, because a summary that is right today may be wrong by the time you read it, and because the rules depend on your destination country as much as on the wood. The practical instruction is short: if you are ordering an instrument in an unusual hardwood and shipping it across a border, ask the seller what the instrument is made of and how the shipment will be declared, and check with your own customs authority before you pay. For ordinary walnut-and-spruce instruments — which is nearly everything discussed above — this is not something you need to think about.

Import duty is a separate matter and is more commonly the surprise. Whether duty applies depends on your country and the declared value, and it is charged to you rather than to the seller. Look it up for your own jurisdiction before ordering anything expensive.

What we can and cannot promise

Since this article has spent two thousand words telling you to demand specifics, it would be poor form to close with vague self-praise. So, specifically:

We can tell you where our instruments come from. Sala Muzik has been working with Istanbul workshops since 2009, and our own workshop is in Üsküdar. Where an instrument is by a named maker — Mustafa Sağlam, Mehmet Caymaz, Mustafa Çopçuoğlu, Miras — the listing says so.

We can tell you what is in the box, and we publish it. Strings, plectrum and a soft case, on essentially everything.

We publish a return window and a warranty as numbers — ten days from delivery in original condition, one year of warranty — rather than as reassurance.

We answer technical questions. Scale lengths, woods, fret counts, what fits in which case. If a page does not answer your question, write and ask; that is the fastest route to a real answer.

What we will not claim: that every listing in a catalog this old is equally detailed, that a photograph shows the exact unit that will be picked from a shelf of thirty, or that any online seller can substitute for putting your hands on an instrument. None of those would be true of us or of anyone else, and a guide that pretends otherwise is not a guide.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest Turkish instrument worth buying?

The plastic ney at $29.99, without qualification — it is a standard student instrument rather than a budget substitute for one. Below that, in the string family, the honest answer is that nothing exists: the bağlama floor is $249 and the oud floor is $349.90, and there is no meaningful tier underneath either.

Is it safe to buy an oud online?

Yes, with the same conditions that apply to buying anything valuable at a distance: a seller who answers technical questions specifically, a return window stated as a number, and a demo recording rather than only photographs. The physical risk is transit damage, which is a packing question — ask how the instrument is boxed, and keep the box until you have decided to keep the instrument.

How long does international shipping take?

It depends on the carrier you choose at checkout and on your destination. Express and standard postal options differ substantially, and the estimate shown on a product page is exactly that. Ask for a timeframe for your own order, especially if you are buying for a date.

Does a hard case come with the instrument?

No. A soft case is included with essentially everything we sell, at every price. A padded gig bag or a hard case is a separate purchase — roughly $70 to $130 for a gig bag and $149 to $199 for a hard case, depending on the instrument.

Why is there no cheap kanun?

Because of what the instrument is. Seventy-odd strings under tension across a large flat soundboard, plus a bank of mandal levers that each have to engage cleanly and hold pitch, cannot be built down to a student price and still be tunable. Our range starts at $1,299 and a search below that returns only stands, bags, strings and plectrums.

What should I do the day the instrument arrives?

Unpack it carefully and keep the packaging. Let it sit for a few hours if it has come from a very different climate. Then tune it, play it, and check it against the specification you were sold — and if something is wrong, say so while your return window is still open. Ongoing maintenance matters more than most first-time buyers expect.

If you know which instrument you want, the category pages are the fastest way in: ouds (208 instruments and accessories), saz and bağlama (190), darbukas (96), kanun (29) and ney (20). If you do not yet, start with the instrument guides below.

Further reading

• The Oud: 5,000 Years of Sound — Everything You Need to Know
• Best Oud for Beginners: 7 Things to Check Before Buying
• Tips for Purchasing a Good Oud
• What Is a Bağlama? Complete Guide to Saz, Tunings and Buying
• Tips for Purchasing a Good Bağlama Saz
• Ney Flute: The Sacred Reed’s Physics and History
• Tips for Purchasing a Good Ney
• Kanun (Qanun): History, Mandal System, Sound and Buying Guide
• How to Choose the Right Darbuka
• Where to Buy Musical Instruments in Istanbul

Prices, inventory figures and specifications in this article were read from our live catalog in September 2026 and are quoted in US dollars. Prices change; the product pages are always the authority.