The first time I was involved in mandolin making and restoring was in 1992 when I met Alex Timmerman, who was at that time a guitar teacher at the academy for music in Zwolle in the Netherlands , and was already many years interested in the history of the Roman mandolins and the the history of the guitars in the period of  Antonio de Torres.

A good friend of mine, who was recorder teacher at the academy for music in Zwolle,  in his spare time he was a professional maker of recorders, he told me that mister Timmerman probable was interested in my way of guitar making.

At that time I only made classical guitars and restored occasionally American mandolins like the Gibson mandolins with flat backs and did repair jobs of steel stringed guitars, classical guitars and bowed instruments.                                                                  Through my whole Iife I have  seen lots of different instruments of many countries and stayed all that time interested in the history of the older instruments.

From that time on, we shared our interest in the older instruments and I  became more and more familiar with the Roman mandolins especially the mandolins of Luigi Embergher.

In the past years I met a lot of musicians who were interested in the Roman mandolins and occasionally they played on an Embergher mandolin.

I was very impressed by the instruments of Luigi Embergher, especially the models Three, Four and the Five, they had an appearance of a solitude instrument, an instrument which could not compared with other instruments, the design and the musicality was almost perfect, when an expererienced player played this instrument, the instrument  became larger in sound and became more projection and lots of power was generated by the player, no other instrument played on this level, for instance it was easy on this instrument as a soloist to play together with a much larger instrument like the piano, an Embergher could do this job with the right settings, strings and the right tuning.

When I became much more familiar with the instruments of Luigi Embergher, I experienced that the instruments had so many features  which were developed by Luigi Embergher, all these features were the cause that the instruments acted on a higher level than any other instrument, an other phenomenon was the playability of these instruments, when holding the instrument in playing position, with your left hand around the V formed neck, you feel that your hand is automatically in the right position to play, the curved fretboard with its compensated frets, with its extended fretboard over the sound hole and the narrow shoulders of the upper soundboard makes it easy to play fast tunes on the higher frets, combining several tunes is possible, because the frets and the fretboard are compensated above the 12 th fret.

The lightweight tuner machines don’t adds any extra weight on the head while playing, so it becomes more  easy to play in the ideal position.

My experience in restoring Embergher mandolins the past years, was a great help to build these mandolins in the tradition of Luigi Embergher, for me it is very important to make an instrument that is looking like an Embergher, but it is of course very important to catch the sound of the Embergher mandolin.

When I made this mandolin, I was in the position that I had an original Embergher 5 bis from 1927 for restauration and measured the whole instrument, every detail was drawn and measured, I have taken a huge amount of pictures to study, I have used a special device, which I made myself to measure the outside curves of the back from the original Embergher mandolin, I made a mold to work on, it took a lot of time to arrange all these extra tools, but although the extra time it cost, I was very happy with the result when the mandolin was finished.