Spice Box
The BSM "Spice Box" is a faithful replica of the old MTC filter box for guitar installation used by Ritchie Blackmore since around 1978, now using modern selected parts because only the best is good enough. The treble bleed function is intended to clean up the tone with a tighter bass response, when the volume control is rolled back. Ritchie used this volume setting for soulful soloing as well. In order to get a sweet sound with this setting, the second feature of the BSM "Spice Box" was incorporated: a mid-filter, using a toroidal-coil with selected core. Compared to a standard tone control, the mid-filter creates more chime and high-end, resulting in a warm and sweet tone, but with a good portion of transparency to prevent it from getting muddy - one of the real secrets of the BSM "Spice Box" ! With the volume rolled back, Ritchie often used the MTC´s mid-filter function to sweeten up his tone when needed. You can put it under the tone pots of most standard routed Stratocasters. Now available from BSM!
Update from March 2026: 1.5 years after the untimely death of Bernd C. Meiser in July 2024 his "Spice Box" is finally back in production and can be ordered from now on; it’s now produced by the SINGLECOIL company with which Bernd C. Meiser from the BSM Company did the analysis and research of the original MTC modules back in 2013.
Under the hood the BSM Spice Box is sporting the exact same guts Bernd Meiser used that are mostly out of his legacy. The same 100% point-to-point production process without any PCB’s and pre-manufactured parts is used to build the "Spice Boxes" so there are absolute no differences to the units Bernd built. But we went one step further regarding tolerances and selecting parts and are now using capacitors with a tiny 1% tolerance and resistors with an even more tiny 0.1% tolerance. This ensures that all Spice Boxes are 100% identical regarding tone and performance.
Because of building much more "Spice Boxes" in parallel in comparison to Bernds process we were able to lower the price of each unit noticeably. The BSM "Spice Box" changed its name to "SINGLECOIL Spice Box ... à la Bernd" and will be available permanently from now on. We even use the original instruction paper that Bernd came up with including his hand drawn wiring scheme, supplemented by some drawings we added to the instruction papers.
Working with resin to seal the boxes was a new challenge for everyone here and our first attempts ended up as blem ware with some resin on the case that you can’t remove. Technically they are perfect inside, but the case is optically not perfect. We sell the blem units for a very low price if you don’t care about optical appearance of the case ... it’s hidden under the pickguard anyway.
