We propose a method to reduce the bandpass of soft x-ray multilayer Bragg reflectors. It consists in etching down to the substrate a multilayer mirror having a large number of bilayers in order to get a lamellar grating with a multilayer bar width representing only 10&percent;–30&percent; of the grating period. The grating is used at the zeroth diffraction order. Once designed, this monochromator was tested with theL&agr;,&bgr;spectra of iron and copper. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.