Hajid,
I´ll be looking forward to Miroslav Vana´s website and for soundclips.
I´ve been at the Festival at Laroche sur Foron in France the other day (they had great mandolins there, Wayne Henderson, Krishot (Eduard Kristufek), Giacomel, Hervé Coufleau, Jan Pals, Duff, Novotny, Lebeda a couple from a french board member - forgot his name, sorry - and others) and got to talking to Czech people about builders there.
In our conversation I asked about Miroslav Vana but it did not ring a bell with the Czech folks yet. I am well aware that he sold some instruments over the Cafe website. I have been watching his sales on the classifieds. As far as I understand he works a daytime job and builds his mandolins "on the side". This apparently is the way quite a number of now wellknown builders got started behind the iron curtain because back then you had to build your own instruments in order to get a decent quality. So I did not expect to see a Vana mandolin at the festival or to hear rave reviews about him all over.
What I would like to mention though is, that I really like the appearance of the instruments shown on this thread(as opposed to many other instruments I have seen over the years). It would really be a shame if this great impression would not be heavily underlined by a builders website (SOON!) and soundbytes. I think that a builder that does not want to fly under the radar (like possibly Adrian Minarovic aka HoGo on this board if I´m not mistaken) and that possibly wants to get into building fulltime or at least to some extent needs to represent his work.
Tomas, Hajid or Nagomi, what´s the going price for one of the F models these days?
By the way, the Henderson mandolin at the festival was good though certainly not up to the hype that I hear about. The Hervé Coufleau mandolin on the other hand was a steal at about 3.500 EUR (aprox. 5.000 USD). It had tone bars a reddish sunburst, Elite tuners, it played like butter and at about one month old sounded really nice. If I was mandolin short - which I am not at the moment - I would have jumped at the mandolin. Though now I would only jump at a mandolin if it was so exeptionally great that it would be insane to pass it by (like a Gilchrist F 5 tone bar D-log at 9.000 USDor an instrument of similar qualities for an appropriate price). I´d have to play it first though. Until then I´ll stick to my Duff 5 (yeah, ggggrrrrreat sound) and my Strad-O-Lin (can´t never ever beat the value of this one, it sounds highly professional).
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Originally Posted by Hajd
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