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Anyone who believes the old say­ing "They don't make ‘em like they used to." probably has never seen the work of Lynn Dudenbostel. A master luthier whose beautifully crafted F5 man­dolins based on the classic Gibson Lloyd Loar instrument fetch $30,000. Dude, as he is universally known, has become a true legend in the world of guitar and mandolin construction.

And yet his skill and success have come despite the fact that he showed no early interest in woodworking or instru­ment construction. "I never took a shop class in my life. I never put a chisel to wood until I was well out of college," he says in his soft East Tennessee drawl. A fascination with bluegrass propelled him into the world of great flattop guitars, carved-top mandolins and other fine musical instruments.

As things tend to do, one thing led to another and as a professional engineer Dude was soon curious as to what made these instruments tick. He started hanging out with a luthier in Tennessee who hosted Saturday picking parties. Before long, he had the bug.

His first instruments were two dulcimers that he built for his wife, which he now slyly admits was more of an excuse for him to buy the tools and wood he would need for more advanced projects later on. "I got the basic wood-bending techniques down, and I could practice without messing up any expensive wood."

As a mandolin and guitar player, Dude's first impulse was to plunge head­long into building an F5-style mandolin. But the complexities of that design proved intimidating, so he built a guitar instead. "I finished that guitar in September of '89 and I was surprised anyone would want one," he says of the experience.

After selling that guitar, he began another, drawing knowledge from the few guitar-making books available at that time. He also began developing rela­tionships with a couple of well-respected luthiers living nearby, John Arnold and Ted Davis, who helped guide the young builder along the learning curve, as did Nashville legend Marty Lanham.

Dudenbostel's big break came when he was asked to serve as the "camp doctor" at Steve Kaufman's famous flatpicking camp in Dude's native Knoxville. Suddenly, he was immersed in doing instrument repair and set-up for virtually every wak­ing hour, broadening his experience and bringing him into contact with a host of fantastic vintage and contemporary instruments. With his laid-back, congenial nature and spot-on professionalism, Dude quickly became a camp fixture and developed a reputation among the elite corps of musicians attending the event as an outstanding luthier.

Orders skyrocketed, and when he was downsized from his job after 16 years as a safety specialist at the local Lockheed Martin facility, Dude drew up a business plan, talked it over at length with his wife, Amy, and then decided to go fulltime. That was February 1, 1998. He's never looked back.

Since that time, he's built 73 guitars and is finishing man­dolin number 50, bringing his total up to about 125 instru­ments. "It doesn't sound like a lot," he muses, "but it would be if they were all in the same room." Of course, his most famous customer is mandolin superstar Chris Thile, who played Dude F5, Number 5 as a loaner, then ordered his own. Today, Chris owns Number 14 and eventually purchased Number 5 as well, and uses those instruments for virtually all of his stage and recording work.

Blessed with the good fortune to have rising superstar Thile telling everyone how much he loved his Dudenbostel F5, coupled with the backlog of orders he took on during his five years as Kaufman camp doctor, Dude quickly found himself with a waiting list approaching ten years long.

It was great job security for an emerging luthier, but it also added immense pressure to fulfill customer orders, and left Dude with little time to build anything other than what someone already had ordered. He finally stopped taking orders and concentrated on culling as much of the waiting list as he could.

Today, he's reopened his list, at least for a short period, so anyone wishing to get a Dudenbostel before the middle of the next decade should act quickly.

Looking back at his career to date, Dude, who at one time studied photography under the great American landscape mas­ter Ansel Adams, says his knowledge and approach to build­ing instruments advances in two key ways. First, he says, are the "moments when the light bulb goes on," such as the day he realized he could save significant time without sacrificing quality by changing how he cut and fit the dovetail joint for his mandolin necks by attaching the neck before gluing the back on.

The other comes more gradually as he works through the intensive process of carving the graduations in his top and back, voicing the braces and other detailed handwork that makes his mandolins so special. Under Adams, he learned the photographer's legendary Zone System where, before a nega­tive is exposed, the photographer must carefully visualize how each section of the final picture will turn out.

That same process applies to his instrument building, he explains, influencing every decision he makes from selecting the wood to the final sanding and finishing to achieving the sound he feels his customer is seeking.

In a way, he says, it's a skill-building process much like learning to play guitar or mandolin. Each step forward gives him one more option, expanding his parameters as a builder like a virtuoso mastering yet another technique with the bow or pick, he feels.

Inspiration and advancement also come from areas that might seem less obvious, he adds. Not too long ago, he was helping a friend prepare several fine vintage mandolins for sale, and one Loar was simply not performing as well as Dude knew it could. There was nothing in its condition, the gradua­tions, bracing or any structural issue that should have limited the instrument, so he looked at its set-up. Using a replica bridge, he did a careful fitting and other adjustments, the strung the old F5 up. The Loar sprang to life, revitalized by just how the nut, bridge and tailpiece worked together.

Of course, the other area where his skill and expertise has grown exponentially is in understanding how to judge tone-woods and select just the right piece to obtain the sound he's seeking. He's narrowed down his top wood selection to three species of spruce: old-growth domestic Engelmann, the wood used in Thile's mandolins; Appalachian red spruce from stocks he's procured from Arnold and Davis, and a new entrant that he's using more and more, Carpathian spruce.

"I was at John Arnold's one day and saw this beautiful red spruce guitar top, and I asked John about it and he smiled and said it wasn't red spruce," Dude recalls. Intrigued, he gently pressed Arnold as to what it was and learned that it was the first piece of Carpathian spruce he'd ever encountered.

Following its source, Dude connected with a well-known wood broker specializing in tone-woods for violins, which typically use lighter, much tighter-grained spruce than used for guitar and mandolin tops. Given a sample of the kind of wood Dude was seeking, the dealer came back from Romania with a supply of spruce selected just for its hardness and stiffness, making it perfect for Dude's needs.

"I kind of think of it as red spruce on steroids," Dude says, chuckling a little at the thought. Providing the same deep, throaty voice and dry crackle as red spruce, Dude says Carpathian adds the extra dimension of "instant gratification." A red spruce top may take years to break-in fully and give the instrument its final voice, he explains. But with Carpathian he can achieve that decades-old tone virtually from the day the instrument is strung up, a feature many players crave today.

But lest anyone suddenly develop an inextinguishable lust for Carpathian spruce, Dude offers the following cautionary tale: choose your neck profile and nut width, the radius on the fretboard and the fret-wire size you prefer, the action that feels most comfortable under your fretting hand. "But leave the tonewoods decisions to the expert," Dude says. The best solution is to simply talk to Dude (or any other luthier, for that matter) about what music you play, the tone you're seeking and then let the builder select the best woods to suit your style.

As one of the world's premier builders of flattop guitars and f-hole mandolins, Dude says he has two favorite moments in the construction process, one personal and private, one he shares. The obvious one, he explains, is when his customer first picks up his beautiful new Dudenbostel and plays it for the first time

"But these days, I'm usually not there for that because the instruments get shipped out. I usually get a phone call a day or two later telling me how much they love it and that's still great," Dude says like a proud parent whose child has just gained admittance to Harvard. The other comes inside his tidy workshop, when he first strings up an instrument. "What was once a pile of wood not too long ago is now an instrument that hopefully people will enjoy for many years to come," he says, smiling at the thought that maybe Chris Thile's grandson could one day play the instruments Dude built.

The other moment he especially enjoys, he adds, is the unexpected joy of hearing his heroes play his instruments. He recalls a tape he got of Thile doing a mandolin workshop with David Grisman. Listening to it as he drove, Dude says at one point someone in the audience asked what it would sound like if the two mandolin legends switched instruments. "I about drove off the road when I realized I was hearing David Grisman playing my mandolin," he admits.

He was asked two years ago to teach the mandolin con­struction curriculum at the prestigious annual Mandolin Symposium hosted by Mike Marshall. Grisman himself came to Dude and offered to loan a generous portion of his legend­ary collection of the world's greatest vintage mandolins to the class so Dude and his students could pore over every detail and take precise photos and measurements for future use.

As his career has progressed and his reputation grown, Lynn Dudenbostel has gained international acclaim and respect. A used Dudenbostel almost never appears anywhere on the used market. His backlog has dropped to around four to five years, allowing him to occasionally produce an instrument for sale to the general public, including an OM-18 style guitar recently for sale at Cotten Music in Nashville.

Intent on making at least a portion of his output available to players longing for a Dudenbostel but unable to afford the $15,000 price of an A5 and the $30,000 tariff on the F5, Dude has just developed a new model, the A1, that will sell for a reasonable $8500.

The A-style mandolin features binding only on the top, eschewing the binding on the back, fingerboard and headstock his other instruments feature. Simple dots adorn the finger­board and only his name in pearl inlay decorates the head­stock. An engraved James tailpiece completes the understated, yet classic, look.

Inspired by his friend Will Kimble's work, Dude also is drawing up plans and preparing the fixtures and tooling needed to produce an H5 mandola.

At age 51, Lynn Dudenbostel hopes he has many years left in his career and that he can continue to refine the skills that have made his instruments among the most sought-after today. "I hope to do this as long as I can hold a chisel," he tells Mandolin Magazine. As lovers of fine mandolins, so do we, Dude. So do we.

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