Doing Things Wrong

Other Guitars

Instruments with non-standard tunings.


This body is maple plywood over a hollow pine core, double-bound. It came out very lightweight, too light to balance even a guitar neck. This was originally going to be the 12-string, but I realized that it would never balance. So I shuffled parts and bodies between some other projects - a planned six-string got canceled and became the twelver. That left this body free. I thought about it a while and decided it would make a good mandolin.


The commonest form of pickup combination is parallel wiring. This is absolutely simple - a two-pole switch [OFF-BOTH-OFF] disconnects either of the pickups from the output. The [OFF-BOTH-OFF] switch is actually kind of a rare thing. You won't find one at the hardware store.

Parallel wiring is easily extended to more pickups, although three is usually the limit.