Mr.Dusan Papic and his brother in 1959

Damir Besic

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The Promat contribution for spreading the sound of Country and Western, and promoting the pedal steels in Central Europe.The founder, Mr Dusan Papic was born in  The Yugoslav Kingdom in 1935, in the city of Novi Sad, where he graduated  on the Technical University. He spent his career  working on demanding managerial posts.His love towards Hawaii music was born in 1948, and he formed, from simillar music addicts, a semi-professional band in 1951, where he played the Hawaii guitar, while their repertoar consisted of Hawai and country- western music. He became the member of the Music Artists Union in 1956. The same year he came across the first pedal steel guitar, on the pages of an American music magazine, which was very rare, in the American Culture Centre in his hometown.  From that moment on, he didn't stop wishing to have his own pedal steel guitar. In 1975,  he managed to order his first PSG, a Fender-800, through a German company, and soon after, an Emmons SD-10. He took a huge effort, and signed in to the ''Pedal Steel Guitar Monthly'' –learn to play steel guitar by mail - By Jeff Newman where he received periodicals, and music learning audio casettes, and sent back to Jeff recordings of his advancing, for evaluation. He has studied books by Jeff Newman : Music to back-up by, Pedal Steel Guitar by Ken Albert and Jimmy Crawford, all the instructional publications published by Buddy Emmons, Herby Wallace, Lloyd Green, John Huey and Hall Rag.He decided to build a literary a copy of an Emmons P-P guitar in 1982, but wasn't satisfied with the results, and discarded it into the shed. After studying and analizing deep the principals of the P-P guitar, and trying to overcome the missfortunes of the push-pull mechanisam, by changing the dimmensions of some cruical elements, and by implicating new materials,  he managed to build his own good sounding D-10 P-P guitar. The success of the guitar drew attention of a regionally famous Stell guitarist Davor Rodik, who liked the conception of the Papic guitar, and ordered one for himself. After being built, in 1986, Rodik took to play the guitar to Germany, where it amazed the experts, and gained high opinnions.Mr Papic  has built several custom P-P guitars of various types, developed them to perfection, and later sold to gratefull musicians in Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia. They are still proud owners of them.The Promat workshop was estabilished in 1988, by Mr Papic and his sons, as a machine shop for making spare parts for vehicles. When  Mr. Damir Besic Showed up, for ordering him a guitar, like many others did before, and by enabling communication made easy by the internet, they came  together on an idea of  giving the guitars the name by their workshop and making the guitar building a public bussiness. Mr. Besic took the guitar to Nashwille, and he showed it at once to Mr Bobbe Seymour for evaluation. Soon the interest began to rise.The Promat workshop would like to express it's gratitude to all the people who made possible the sound of the Promat-make, to rise for the last 50 years, and for the recognition of their work. all the estabilishers or the steel guitar, and the great players in the USA, and world. The publishers: Bata Stepanovic             Geza Borbelj, September  2005