Please visit the Don Rickert Musician Shop.
Flat-Top Flatiron-Style Mandolin by Don Rickert Design (now Don Rickert Lutherie) and available from the Adventurous Muse Store is of the general type known as either "pancake" or "flariron". It has that mellow, yet still loud and powerful sound sought by Celtic (both Irish and Scottish) players, as well as many Old-Time mandolin players.
The ancestor of the Flatiron was a mandolin made by Gibson during the WWI years, known as the Army-Navy (or simply A-N) mandolin. A soldier or sailor could purchase one for $12 and the general public paid $15. This was considerably less than the A1, which sold for about $50, the A4 about $80, F2 about $100 and F4 about $125. The F5 (the original Lloyd Loar model that Bill Monroe played during most of his career in Bluegrass) came out in 1922 for $250, which was a lot of money back then.
The A-Ns were durable instruments made to withstand the rigors of trench warfare and the sounded pretty good, to boot. They were suitable, and indeed used, to play all genres of music. The World War I Gibson Army-Navy models became the basic design for the late Flatiron "pancake" mandolins later built in Bozeman MT during the period when Flatiron was an independent manufacturer, and later when Gibson bought Flatiron.
Gibson Flatiron mandolins were made well into the 1980s, after which they were owned by Weber Mandolins for a period of time extending into the 1990s. The F-Style mandolins of today (actual Gibsons and their imitators, such as “The Loar” mandolin that we sell...Loar Mandolin LM 500 VS (AKA Golden Age Mandolin)) were developed for the kind of playing and sound that Bill Monroe wanted for his jazz-infused Old-Time music, later, and still, known as Bluegrass. It is noteworthy that the new Loar Mandolins are named after Lloyd Loar, who, while working for Gibson for several years, designed Bill Monroe's famous mandolin.
You will rarely see a Bluegrass mandolin player using anything but an F-Style, with the occasional A-Style non-conformist.
Comments