Niyazi Sayın (1927-) is a ney flautist and music educator from Doğancılar, district of Üsküdar in Istanbul. He learned ney at the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Istanbul. From 1956 to 1969, Sayın became a member of the performing ensemble of the Istanbul Municipal Conservatory. Following this position, he was appointed as a teacher and president of the Wind Instruments branch of the State Turkish Music Conservatory at Istanbul Technical University in 1976. He has performed ney and played religious and mystical music works on the occasion of the annual ceremony of Mevlana. In 1980, Sayın served as a visiting scholar of Turkish Music for a year in the Ethnomusicology Department of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.

Necdet Yaşar (1930 - 2017) was a tanbur lute player and teacher, from Nizip, a small town near Gaziantep, Turkey. He graduated from the School of Economy, Istanbul University in 1953. As a student he first played bağlama before switching to tanbur. He played tanbur as a soloist or in a group in many foreign countries: United States, Canada, England, France, Holland, Belgium, Finland, South Korea and Israel. From 1972 to 1973 and 1980 to 81, Yaşar was a resident artist of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, where he gave lectures on the makam system of Ottoman Classical Music. Yaşar also performed as a tanbur artist and an ambassador of Turkish Classical Music with small or large ensembles including his own "The Necdet Yaşar Ensemble" in Europe, East Asia and North America. Yaşar is noted for his command of the Turkish makam melodic modes, his influential tanbur techniques, and the construction of his taksim improvisations.