2012 Federico Sheppard "Camino" CD/MH

A 2012 "Camino" classical guitar by Federico Sheppard, with a cedar top and an extremely flamed, rare mahogany back and sides – lattice braced inside.

In the video above, Brendon Grabowski plays Scriabin's Prelude Op. 9 on this guitar.

Symbols of the Pilgrim Route

Shells, walking sticks and drinking gourds – the symbols that have marked the Camino de Santiago since ancient times – decorate the rosette, the tuners and the carved head, in the colors of the summer meseta and the Spanish poppy. Carrión de los Condes lies about midway between Burgos and León, right on the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela walked since the Middle Ages; the area is full of Romanesque churches and castles.

Lattice for Volume

Unusually for Federico, this guitar is lattice braced, which gives it added volume. Its singing, dark, mysterious sound suits virtually any style of music, and the flamed mahogany is really stunning.

Federico Sheppard: Luthier and Barrios Scholar

Federico Sheppard was born in Mexico City in 1955 and grew up in Pittsburgh. A geologist and later a sports-medicine chiropractor, he has built guitars since the late 1970s, and today he divides his time between Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Carrión de los Condes in northern Spain, where his workshop occupies a thousand-year-old church that is also a guitar school and concert hall; there he founded the Asociación Caminoartes. He writes and lectures for the Guild of American Luthiers, and one of his guitars appears in Sheldon Urlik's "A Collection of Fine Spanish Guitars".

The Guitars of Barrios and the Camino

Since 2005 Federico has studied the life and guitars of Agustín Barrios Mangoré. He has seen and measured the six main concert guitars Barrios played – two Simplicios, a "Morant", a José Ramírez I, a Sanfeliu and an Esteso – and builds replicas of them, inside and out. His "Camino" guitars draw on the art and pilgrim culture of the Camino de Santiago, which runs past his Spanish workshop.