This beauty is build entirely to my wishes.
It's body size and shape are chosen for optimal sound, comfort and beauty. It was fitted with an tailor made adjustable bridge, which will allow me to experiment with string gauges and tunings.
Johan came up with a great solution for my soundport-wish. He made a soundchannel from the regular soundhole to the soundport, thus prefenting the loss of soundpressure within the body.
It has a small neck with a low profile resembling a mandolin.
I asked Johan for a zero-fret, to prefend to difference in sound of tones coming from bone vs tones coming from steel, when playing open chords.
Johan helped me a lot with chosing the right woods to get the melody-style sound I wanted for this mandola. The Mangeo that's used has a tone in between rosewood and mahogany, but has a lot more bite and attack. The dubble-X bracing gets me a firm and rich sound.

Overall, this easy playing and beautiful sounding tenor mandola, the "Taupo", is the result of the skills of a gifted luthier and his ability to go byond the usual woods like rosewood and mahogany. Johan will introduce you to new woods with all differents and refined shades of tones, temperaments and character.

Besides mandolas and bouzoukis, Johan van der Gaag also makes extaordinary guitars. Being half Dutch / half Kiwi, he'll have no problem understanding and communicating in English.

We have documented the build of Taupo.

You can visit the van der Gaag Guitars website here.