Mauro Pagani is truly one of our oldest friends, and we are doubly proud of this because—before we began working on his instruments (which is a great honor)—we were, and still are, his fans. We have done truly everything for him and with him: Mauro Pagani, in fact—for those who may not know—has a fabulous collection of instruments, many of which are vintage. And since those instruments are housed within Officine Meccaniche, the historic recording studio (it has existed since 1949!), they often need maintenance and setup to be ready for use in recordings. Having the responsibility of ensuring the perfect functionality of this glorious collection of instruments is a task that brings us joy and pleasure, and it has been a goldmine of information, contact with interesting and rare instruments, and experience for us.
Then there are Mauro’s personal instruments. A violinist by training, Mauro uses "small" instruments: mandolas, mandolins, and other short-scale plucked string instruments. We have often added a hexaphonic pickup to these instruments (which is used primarily for MIDI notation software) and amplified them, resolving various problems (sometimes even just finding the right strings was a task :-).
For Mauro Pagani, we have also built instruments that had to incorporate some of his specific needs: scale length, number of strings, and measurements. Two unique mandolins were the result: one with 5 strings and one with 6, both amplified and equipped with a hexaphonic pickup. Then a particular idea came up: a Telecaster with two necks, one of which was to be a mandolin neck. We started by building a prototype, taking a Telecaster body that we "widened" by cutting it and adding a center section, and then adding the second 5-string neck, which we took from a strange instrument we had found. Once we saw that the project worked, we started building everything from scratch "for real," which meant making a custom body and necks.