We were lucky to catch up with Geoff Burghardt recently and have shared our conversation below.

Geoff, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

I was approached by a friend to do an art piece for him with some walnut that came from a tree on their family farm where he and his siblings grew up. When the tree had to be taken down many years ago, my friend’s brother saved the wood in many slabs and stored them. During the process of making this art piece my friend asked if a mandolin could be made from this wood. It had the qualities that made me believe it could. So, my second job with this wood was to build a mandolin for his brother as a thank-you for saving it. As it turns out there was enough wood to make 2 mandolins, so that job turned into a pair of mandolins– the one for his brother and now one for him. He shared with me a photo of the farmhouse on the property where the tree had grown and I was able to transfer that image onto pieces of pearl and inlaid those into the headstocks of the mandolins. Besides the very special pedigree of the back/side/neck wood on these mandolins they were otherwise very typical F style mandolins and sound very good. The brother wrote a song about the tree, the wood and then the mandolins and it’s an incredible tune that speaks of a tree, saved from the fire that continues to sing– he captured just about the whole history of this walnut tree and is able to play the song on an instrument built from it. I think that’s pretty incredible! About a year after I built the first two mandolins the brother asked me to build one more so that he can pass one along to each of his children as a legacy. And I got to do that for him/them and I get to tell that story. I have a bunch of cutoffs from those jobs so I try to make gifts for this family from that wood around the holidays. A couple years ago he asked me to make a turkey box-call from a larger chunk and I did. I have a feeling that tree will keep on giving for generations and I’m very lucky to have been a part of its story.

Geoff, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I built my first instrument in high school around the year 2000. It was an electric guitar I had sketched and carried the sketch around until a few things fell into place and I built a prototype and then the real thing. I was introduced to an electric guitar builder who helped me with the lutherie specific things (neck, frets, bridge, setup etc.). That got me hooked. Within a few years and being in college I built a couple lap slide guitars with very minimal tools in my spare time in campus housing.
I built my first mandolin as my oldest son was born in the fall of 2003. The best I can describe it was that I was completely fascinated by tone, tone production and the wide range of voices that come from mandolins.
I’ve been able to turn that into a semi-full time building business as well as a la carte services like setups, fret jobs, pickup installs, light repair and the like. I’ve been doing that for the last 10 years and each year my client list has grown, output has grown and I’ve been able to do this by word of mouth and direct referral. I gauge my growth partly by how many strings I need to order through the year and it seems that what used to last me a 12 months, 10 years ago, only lasts me a couple months now.
I’ve been doing a modal resonance and instrument measuring project on my own for the last 3 years and have a sizable database of about 180 mandolins (and 40 guitars, about 15 octave mandolins, and others as of October 2025) involving about 70 bits of data for each. I have a few data scientist friends who we check in here-and-there to see what the data is telling us. Mostly it points to things to investigate, so I’ve built a mandolin frame that can take bolt-on tops and backs. So far I’ve saved a lot of time with this by not having to make a new instrument for every iteration I want to test. I can turn it into an entirely different instrument in about 20 minutes! My general attitude about keeping records and paying attention is that if you can measure it, you should. I have columns in my data set that are waiting to find out how they fit into the overall scheme of tone production… or if they just don’t.
Through this data collecting I’ve been able to interact with a bunch of people who are deep into instrument research and learned a lot from them. I look forward to growing that part of my passion and eventually translating it into some sort of book or video or class. As far as I know there are only a handful of people doing this kind of investigation into mandolins, I personally have only been in contact with one, and that is a recent development. I’d love to see that set grow!

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Robert O’Brien has been an influence and an inspiration to me through my career and his passion for the craft. He taught guitar building at a local college and brought me on to be the mandolin building teacher there. I was there for about 6 years. Robert was making DVD’s back then, too, with voice over still photo videos on how to build guitars from start to finish. I think he included plans, maybe they were downloadable back then, I can’t remember. He did this for finishing, for setups, eventually for voicing. Eventually these turned into actual video classes that could be downloaded and we did a mandolin building class that ended up being about 14 hours of me building a mandolin and instructing it step-by-step. That was 2015 or so. Those courses then became internet downloads and he expanded to many other instruments. In the last few years he migrated it from his own guitar building website to something called the lutherie academy. There may be 40 instructional videos there, I don’t think there is a single craft with such a hub of instructional value. Robert also has a 7 day in person course where he guides a student or two to build a guitar from scratch in that time. He does that once or twice a month. He also has a youtube channel with “lutheir tips du jour” that he’s been doing for probably almost 20 years at this point with millions and millions of views! His passion, consistency and pushing the edges make him a stand out to me. I think about his impact when I feel stuck or frustrated about how my business is going.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think I’m foolish enough to think that I can contribute something unique and useful to the instrument building world. Whether it is a consistency of instrument that players can depend on; or a philosophy of tone that can be developed and expanded and shared; or a novel approach to process or tools that can benefit builders in efficiency or safety or both. It’s a broad feeling I have, I want to hit all those points but in a general sort of way. I don’t want to be the best necessarily at any specific thing, but I do want to be consistently better and to know this craft deeper and deeper and to benefit others as I am able.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.iiimandolin.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iii_mandolin/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iiimandolin
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@iiimandolin

Image Credits

Neil McClindon