Historic Luthier Educator Hideo Kamimoto Interview
Hideo Kamimoto wrote the book on guitar repair! He built his first guitar in the late 1950s and soon discovered he had a true passion as a luthier. Within a decade he opened H. Kamimoto Instrument Repairs in Oakland, California. By this time Hideo was also repairing other string instruments including the violin. When music retailer Stu Goldberg suggested he write a book about repairs, Hideo began outlining some ideas. His first book, The Complete Guitar Repair, was published in 1974 and was among the very first books of its type. He continued to repair until he sold his shop, which by this time was in San Jose, to retire. He continued to repair and even invented a device to help cellists eliminate an unwanted drift note and called the product the Wolf Terminator!
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MusicTranscript
00:00When I was working at Eschau Violinshop, I was working mainly on violins there,
00:07more the student level violins because I was doing all the school instrument repairs.
00:13So that was a good learning experience because you learn to deal with lots of instruments
00:22and not necessarily the highest quality repairs,
00:24but basically getting the work done on instruments and doing a good job at it,
00:33but it wasn't the same thing as working on a $500,000 instrument.
00:42But while I was there, they discovered that I had this background in guitars.
00:48So when I was working on guitars, or violins, whenever somebody brought a guitar in,
00:54I would be the person to do the repairs.
00:57At that time, this is in the early 60s,
01:04it wasn't common to walk into a guitar shop.
01:07And in fact, there weren't that many guitar shops that actually did guitar repairs.
01:13The conventional wisdom was to go to a violin shop if you wanted your guitar repaired.
01:18So I learned both about guitar repairs and violin repairs.
01:24And the guitar repairs, even though I had gotten some training in the guitar shop at Baikal,
01:32it was pretty much on-the-job training where you sort of talk to the people you knew,
01:39and there's no literature to go through, no web, no books.
01:44So you scratch your head and think,
01:48well, what would be the best way to repair this instrument?
01:51So I developed a particular way of doing guitar repairs.
01:59And all the other people I knew who were doing guitar repairs were doing the same thing,
02:04because it's just word of mouth and on-the-job training.
02:09There's no such thing as a school or a book or any kind of reference.
02:15But toward the end of when I was working at the violin shop,
02:21a friend of mine, and I'll drop a name here, his name is Stu Goldberg,
02:26had opened up a small music store in San Francisco called Marina Music.
02:32He had developed his business into a pretty good going concern,
02:39specializing in folk music instruments.
02:45And he imported guitars from Japan, Germany, not from China.
02:53That was before the Chinese.
02:57He suggested that I write a book on guitar repair,
03:01because at that time there was nothing available.
03:04And I had done work for him on the guitars that his customers had bought him.
03:12So I thought, well, you know, I'll just do this as kind of an exercise.
03:17I started that about 1966 or so.
03:23I was still working in the violin shop.
03:26When I opened my own shop in 67, I still continued to work on it in the evenings at home.
03:32But it wasn't until 1973 that I was introduced to Dave McComiskey, who worked for music sales.
03:47He showed it to his bosses.
03:50We drew up a contract, and they published my book after many revisions in 1974.
03:58So that was a fun thing.