Let me introduce myself, the owner of Nuupalan Accordions and maker of Super Swinger. My name is Marko Aho. Originally I was trained as an ethnomusicologist, and worked as such for a good decade and a half. In the later years of my scientific career turned to musical instruments and the tacit features involved in the playing of musical instruments. Before long I felt I needed to get back to my teenage hobby, the building of musical instruments. Things got more serious and I finally desided to enter vocational traing to become a trained professional musical instrument builder. Although I was a guitarist myself, I went for accordion building. The sole purpose of this decision was that I wanted to build instruments for others, not myself, and I feared that building guitars, I would never really cease to unintentionally build the guitars according to my own taste and needs. This I need not fear if I chose to build accordions, instruments which intrigued me and the players of which I always envied for their possibility to have a whole little orchestra in their hands! But there was also other instruments, close relatives of both accordion and harmonica, which faschinated me: it was the family of keyed harmonicas, which we have come to know with the name of the first one manufactured: that is, the melodica. My workshop is situated in Sastamala, Finland.
