Studio Marmalade

I’ve been interested in electronics since I was around 10 years old. For many years my understanding of electronic circuits didn’t extend much further than connecting a battery to a small electric engine… but eventually I got in to the magic world of tube amps.

Before that, I used to fiddle around with various passive circuits, and when I was 15 I built my very own guitar, in wood craft i school. Yep, that’s actually the truth. I found a old, dense & dry piece of mahogany in the school wood supply basement (possibly old Honduras Mahogany, I’m not sure, but it must have been lying there for ages already when I discovered it in 1992). I realised building the neck was way over my skill set, so I bought the neck premade, in a music shop in Stockholm, most likekly some time late 1992. My father made a trip to London in autumn -092 or if it might have been early -93, and since guitars & parts were way cheaper in England than in Sweden at the time, I sent dad to buy me pickups, tuners, bridge and a few more small parts for my guitar. As I was determined to get as much out of my new guitar as possible, I figured out a way to not only coil split, but actually select all possible (almost) combinations out of the two DiMarzio F.R.E.D. pickups, so that each pickup was connected to a 4-way rotary switch selecting between either single coil separate, or both coils in parallel or serial. Together with the 3-way LP-style pickup selector switch, the guitar could produce no less than 24 different pickup configurations. About a year later, I added a phese inverter for the neck pickup, adding another 16 combinations, resulting in 40 (!) different combinations between the two pickups. Ridiculous one might say, but I still use the guitar very much, and the possibilities to easily switch between a LP & tele-type sound, is indeed very useful.