Good evening, my name is Julio, I’m Spanish, and a friend and I want to start a rebetiko band… sorry for the spelling mistakes… I lived in Greece, but I never paid much attention to spelling… it was enough for me to learn to speak, which took me quite a lot of effort as it was.
While I was living in Greece, I fell in love with the country and rebetiko. My friend experienced the same thing after he came here, and since then the two of us have been listening to this music
We don’t have a bouzouki, but we found a Turkish bağlama… could we use it?
On the other hand, we had this idea… to make a Greek baglamas ourselves from a broken guitar; we just don’t have the baglamas’s measurements… could you send me a plan with the baglamas’s measurements?
Perhaps I’m asking too much, as I’ve only just joined the forum, but I haven’t found any other solution
A Turkish baglamas, what do you mean? In Turkish, the word baglama refers to a different instrument, the saz. The instrument we call a baglamas in Greece is exclusively Greek. But of course, Turkish instrument makers may also make Greek baglamades.
So, if it’s a Greek baglamas, it makes no difference whether it was made by a Turk. It fits perfectly. It’s one of the classic rebetiko instruments, perhaps even the most classic of them all.
If it’s a Turkish baglamas—in other words, a saz—well… you can still make it work, but the songs won’t come out the way you’ve heard them. They’ll come out as arrangements.
Hi Pepe, brilliant — I couldn’t remember the word, haha. We have a saz; we want to make a Greek baglamas.
We also have a guitar, which I’ve seen in tavernas as well as the bouzouki.
Next time I go to Greece, I’ll certainly have to buy some good instruments, but who knows when that will be, since we don’t have much money to spare around here.
Classic rebetiko is bouzouki-guitar, or bouzouki-guitar-baglamas. And baglamas-guitar, without bouzouki, can work perfectly well on its own.
My opinion:
Anyone who knows how to play guitar, mandolin, banjo or almost any stringed instrument (as long as it isn’t ancient, mediaeval, exotic, etc., but a standard Western instrument) can learn to play the Greek baglamas very easily. The saz, however, is a different matter. It is played in a very particular way, and it isn’t easy for someone who doesn’t live in a country where such instruments are common to figure it out on their own.