About me
I was born in 1977, ie I’m pretty exactly the same age as punk music, though punk has never really been my cup of tea…
Music has been present all my life, and comming from a musical family, I managed to convince my parents I should start playing the violin by the age of five. The violin remained my main instrument until I tried the guitar. I started out playing my dads guitars, and when I was eight I got my first own acoustic, a steel string Landola F6. I still have the Landola in my possesion, in fact I’ve nevere sold a single guitar.
Of course, for a eight year old boy in 1985, playing coustic guitar was really not the final goal, and when not practising the guitar (or ocassionally, vioin which I still played until I turned eleven), yearning for an electric guitar took up quite a bit of my time!
My parents gave me the ultimatum that I had to save up for half of the electric guitar, while they would chip in paying the other half. Now we’re talking the eighties, meaning that guitars still were pretty expensive. My aim (or actually, my dads aim, since he knew way more about guitars than I did at the time) was a Fender Stratocaster. The Strat had sort of a renaissance, mainly thanks to a certain Swedish player named Yngwie. This led to the fact that Stratocasters were not that easy to find, at least not at the price that suited my budget. The budget was SEK 3500 (approximately €350, or by 2020s index approximately €750) and the number of Strats at that price was quite scarce. We did find one black, probably 70s, Stratocaster, but i got sold before I managed to lay my hands on it. I’m still sort of sorry about that loss…
In May or June (I think it was) 1988 I finally found my guitar. It wasn’t a Stratocaster, but a Ibanez RG530 in blue-burst finish, and I finally had my first electric guitar! After that moment, guitars has been my largest passion in life, closely followed by my (close to) obsession for tube guitar amps.
My first experience in building a guitar was in 1993. In the fall of -92 I had an idea I should by a moped. My dad, however, thought that was pretty much the dumbest idea he’d heard in… a long time (well, to be honest he was probably right). So he suggested I should look at buying a new guitar, rather than spending it on something as unnecessary as a moped. So I started looking for my next guitar instead. I was 15 years old at the time, but had been playing for seven years already, so I was very determined what I wanted: a fender style guitar (strat or tele), fixed bridge, flat wide neck with jumbo frets, dual humbuckers (preferably with coil splits). These preferenses made my selection limited, to say the least. There was a Yamaha Pacifica model wich kind of met most of my specs, but I don’t really think I knew about that model at the time. So I simply decided to build the guitar myself!