Meet the Maker: James Condino

by Roger Alan Skipper

Originally published in American Lutherie #105, 2011



James Condino has lived and traveled in forty-three countries in his forty-four years. The instruments of this extreme outdoor adventurer have accom­panied him to highest mountain peaks and through raging rivers. He’s an author with a pair of books in the works, one concerning the mandolin, and the other on the double bass. He’s also a lutherie teacher, previously at the college level, and now one-on-one in his shop. He’s landed, for the moment, in Asheville, North Carolina, where he builds mandolins and double basses, and specializes in repairs on vintage guitars and the plywood basses he digs out of the Appalachian hills and hollows that surround him.

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James, teaching is interwoven with your building. Let’s start with the school of lutherie mentioned on your website.

Beginning when I was nineteen, I spent almost six years in the Air Force; I got out just after Desert Storm. Then I went to school at Oregon State University. It’s an old-school land-grant institution, and still had a nice public-access woodshop. When I built a flattop steel string guitar there in 1995, they approached me about teaching a lutherie class. I was busy with field expeditions just then, so I didn’t have the time. The following winter, though, I taught a very popular ten-week course in solidbody electric guitars. That morphed into a three-academic-quarter, nine-month class in building acoustic steel string guitars. I taught there for four years, and I learned as much as the students during that time. That experience also allowed me to home in on what I wanted to teach and how to approach it.