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Most mandolin makers arrive at their career in luthiery by a less than straight path. Lynn Dudenbostel was downsized out of a position as a safety engineer. Will Kimble chose to build mandolins over a promising career in public relations. Bill Davis was a machinist in the aerospace industry. But few in my experience have pursued employment on the opposite end of the planet in one of the highest, wildest places on Earth while on their trek to mandolin building.

James Condino has a restless energy and the wild streak of outdoor extreme sports passion that could have led him into any number of professions less sedate than crafting elegant, modern mandolin family instruments, guitars and double basses. He has, in fact, excelled at outdoor pursuits. He has years of experience guiding expeditions to the highest mountain range on the planet, the beautifully foreboding Himalayas, spending half the year outdoors before returning to Oregon to craft mandolins and other stringed instruments.

"Building instruments is very intense, solitary work. So it's nice when the sun is shining to be able to get out and enjoy the world on a larger scale," he explains.

Enjoying the grand scope of the world has been part of his life since the time he grew up in Watertown, New York, an upstate town located close enough to the Lake Ontario shore that James recalls the ferocity of the frequent "lake effect" snow squalls that would dump dozens of inches of snow at a time in his yard. "When I was a kid, I couldn't wait to get out," he admits now. So when he turned eighteen, he joined the Air Force and did a six-year tour that took him to numerous locations.

Although no one in his family played - aside from a great-grandfather whose picture he had seen playing in a mandolin orchestra - he started badgering his parents for a guitar at the tender age of four. By age seven, they relented. "I think it was because they used to watch Hee Haw and I thought it looked like fun," Condino says today. "I've been playing music ever since."

He first developed an interest in mandolin when taking, of all things, an advanced jazz guitar lesson in the mid-1990s. His instructor, a multi-faceted musician who played numerous instruments, was explaining a complex jazz construct on guitar when, in mid-lesson, he put down the guitar and grabbed a nearby mandolin and showed Condino the same thing he'd been explaining on guitar.

"It was like a Duke Ellington tune, and I said 'stop right there, please show me how to do that.' That thing put a smile on my face," Condino says using a phrase he incorporates into much of his everyday language.

The grandson of a former Hughes Aircraft test pilot and engineer (his other grandfather was a patternmaker), Condino always was skilled at making things with his hands. He built an electric guitar from scratch - no parts or pre-fashioned components - when he was 14. He played that guitar for the next several years, then sold it for $400. Using the famous David Russell Young text as a guide, he built his first acoustic guitar at age 18.

During his Air Force tour of duty, he also had the good fortune to live near another famous individual who helped shape the path of many luthiers and repairmen, Don Teeter, author of two enormously influential books on instrument set-up and repair. Condino eagerly soaked up knowledge, especially since Teeter's background as a machinist enabled him to explain acoustic instrument principles in a very logical, straightforward manner.

"He was very inspirational. He could work on instruments and give you quantitative, numerical reasons why something worked or didn't work. When he reset a neck, he'd have his calipers and feeler gauges and have it dialed in to a few thousandths of an inch, rather than doing it by feel as a lot of other people did back then," Condino explains.

After his discharge, he moved to Oregon, home to many fine instrument-makers. He enrolled in Oregon State University at Corvallis and discovered they had a superb woodworking shop on campus. At first, he started building instruments on his own there, but soon was asked to start a program teaching guitarmaking to students.

He wound up teaching for four years, discovering that the most beneficial thing he could teach students wasn't the particulars of building a guitar body, but giving them the knowledge to do necks, fretwork and setup that would make their creations comfortable to play and mechanically stable.

To escape the coastal rains, he moved to Oregon's high desert, where he split his time between expedition work for Outward Bound and other companies and building instruments. He also became acquainted with Kim Breedlove, and soon found himself building mandolins for the company using Breedlove's contemporary designs.

"I was the sole person doing that," he says, adding that he's personally responsible for about 100 of the company's mandolins. "I loved working with Kim, but it was true production work using Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. They had a very trick setup for building mandolins, and I'd do two a day in the morning. Then they'd go off to the spray booth, and in the afternoons I'd do setup work."

Looking at his mandolins today, it's easy to see that his experience at Breedlove helped shape his sense of line and proportion, as well as his willingness to explore beyond the boundaries of conventional mandolin design.

"On the West Coast, you're exposed to people who are not as conservative as those in some other areas of the country. Also, I have a real strong Asian approach to design, structure and line. I lived in Japan for three years, and it helped me bring a different aesthetic to my work on how lines come together.

"Imagery is very important to me. It all has to make sense, even the binding work or the inlay. It doesn't make sense to include anything that distracts from the visual flow," he stresses.

Condino learned much from a variety of other luthiers in the Pacific Northwest, including some of the leading classical guitarmakers in the country.

Another luthier Fred Carlson in Santa Cruz, California, also inspired him tremendously, he says. "He builds instruments that only come to you in a dream, 50-string harp guitars for example," he explains. Another huge advantage living in the northwest gave him was access to some of North America's most respected and eclectic timber dealers. "It's like the way it was when Stradivari went to Venice and went to these warehouses where the old wood was kept," he points out.

In his case, Condino often combed through timber dealers' stores of some of the world's most exotic and fascinating woods, such as stripped ebony, which many dealers had accepted in trade for regional woods such as big leaf maple.

As a result, Condino developed a strong affinity for woods outside the spectrum of what many builders consider conventional for mandolins. He'll build mandolins using striped ebony, African blackwood and other unusual tonewoods, but also offers buyers more traditional maple options.

His tops mostly favor varieties of spruce, including Adirondack red spruce and European spruce, which he acquires from a friend who lives in northern Italy not far from the famous violinmaking center of Cremona.

"My family came from a small village nearby that has my last name. This friend has an old family mill that has been harvesting spruce from the northern mountains for several centuries. They are fanatically old school. They only cut trees during the November full moon, just as they used to in the old days."

Condino doesn't build with Engleman spruce. "It has a visual aspect that does not work for me and it is a bit quirky when you French polish."

Construction details also display his penchant for looking at his instruments as problems needing the best solutions, rather than blindly relying on designs and techniques that have come to be considered standard. He employs titanium truss rods, which offer the Getting relief; James burns an "impossible" mandolin - the fate of 4 out of 155. strength of steel with significant weight savings. And he feels free to try carbon fiber-reinforced braces and tone bars if that technique will improve an instrument's tonal response or better serve its structural integrity.

A strict believer in keeping his instruments functionally and structurally sound, he eschews plastic binding and uses wooden bindings which expand and adjust at a similar rate to the wood used in the instrument, even though fitting wooden binding is a much more labor-intensive task. Every Condino mandolin incorporates rabbit-hide glue construction techniques and comes with a French polished varnish finish using techniques he learned from high-end classical and Flamenco guitarmakers.

Most of his instruments have been rounded, A-style bodies, but his keen eye for clean design and powerful line led him to develop a unique, sweeping headstock that beautifully accents the minimal lines of the body. F-style models also are available, he says.

Like some modern archtop guitarmakers, he often builds instruments with strategically placed round soundports in the top, rather than conventional f-holes. And in what he sees as an advance in helping the player more clearly hear the instrument, some designs offer reinforced sideports along the top side of the instrument to direct some of the sound directly to the player.

Even his pickguards offer gorgeously figured woods and convey an elegance and style unique to Condino.

As a builder, James Condino says upfront that he is not trying to build instruments for hardcore bluegrass players. His customer base, he reckons, lies within the cohort of mandolin players who may love Bill Monroe and enjoy playing in that style, but who also move through the musical genres of Miles Davis, Django Reinhardt, fiddle tunes and Celtic music.

"What I'm looking for is someone who does not identify himself as a bluegrass musician, but someone who as a musician wants to communicate in a variety of styles," he elaborates. "I want a commanding presence in my instruments, but also one that is clear, concise and balanced in the tonal spectrum.

"I strive for crispness and sustain, a lot of sustain," he says of his creations. Noted jazz mandolin expert Ted Eischliman recently reviewed Condino's instruments for his popular website and enthusiastically praised the luthier's work.

A Condino A6 model starts at $3,600 for an instrument with standard features, and his F-style mandolins begin at $5,000. Adding an elaborate inlay, he notes, would be reflected in the final cost.

Condino's skill also extends to building guitars, ten-string mandolins and acoustic basses, which he says has added tremendously to his skills making mandolins. "If you can bend a nine-inch wide piece of fiddleback maple into an upright bass C-bout by hand, you can do amazing things to a mandolin," he contends.

In addition to making instruments, Condino continues his career as a teacher through The Cascade School of Lutherie, which offers everything from short-term individual instruction to nine-month workshops. "I get back ten times from my students what I give them," he says.

A talented writer as well, Condino's contributed articles to the Guild of American Luthiers' magazine, American Luthier, and to Fine Woodworking magazine. A Condino book is in the works, The Modern Mandolin: History, Design and Construction, which should be available next May.

In the end, James Condino seeks to fulfill his philosophy of life in what he does, through his rock climbing and passion for cycling, and most definitely in his time at the workbench.

"Everything I do is hand-built. There's no CNC machinery. It's all very low-tech. I can't describe how peaceful it is to carve a top by hand instead of hearing a router running," he says, adding with an eye to the future, "I'm making instruments for people not born yet. Fifty years from now, I hope when they play it, it will put a smile on their face."

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