My model for this double headed Dutch or English style of lute, with 8 fingered courses and 4 on a stepped extension, uses the body form of the beautiful 11c lute by Sixtus Rauwolf, Augsburg, c. 1590. This style is the ‘French lute’ of Thomas Mace’s Musick's Monument, thought to have been brought to England by the virtuoso Jacques Gaultier in the 17C. The English, the Scots and the Dutch embraced it, but it seems to have been abandoned as a design by its inventors in favour of the 11c lute, certainly a simpler instrument to make and maintain.

It is, however, a very elegant style of lute, and was used in both D minor and transitional tunings. The stepped pegbox design solves very neatly the problem of obtaining a good tone from gut bass strings. It should be strung entirely in gut, and can be made to quite small sizes, as the many paintings of it and the few surviving instruments, show. The fingerboard is slightly cambered and the back can be made in maple or yew.