From Gary Moore’s broodingly romantic Parisienne Walkways to Rush's Xanadu and Jimmy Page ditching guitar picks for bows, guitarists have often tried to emulate the sounds of a violin. Uli Jon Roth, however, went to the extreme with his Sky Guitar.
For years, he’d been modifying his Fender Stratocasters to expand their scope. By the end of the ’70s, long before it became a cool thing to do, Roth was putting his electrics under the knife to fix issues he faced with them.
“The first thing I came up with was putting extra frets on the Strat because I was always running out of frets at the top end,” the former Scorpions shredder tells Guitar World in a soon-to-be-published interview. “Eventually, I had the idea to put two extra frets onto my main Strat, and that worked beautifully.”
His earliest modifications centered, mainly, around the Strat’s tremolo – “I kept breaking the tremolo bars,” he says. One early example can be seen on the album cover for the band’s 1975 LP, In Trance. That’s his white Strat the model is, err, straddling, and that’s no ordinary whammy bar.
But, as was the case with Eddie Van Halen and his love for modding, the bug left him wanting more. He’d soon go all out and have a guitar built from scratch. And the result, the Sky Guitar, laughs in the face of those measly guitars with just 22 frets.
“I wanted to have the register like a violin, basically, which is completely impossible on a normal guitar,” he explains. “With a Strat, because of the layout of the cutaway, there is a limit to how high you can place frets. You don’t want to jeopardize the position of the first pickup, which is vital.
“The idea came after the luthier, Andy Demetriou, [who did] such a great job of adding the extra frets to my Strat, said to me, ‘Look, I can build you any guitar you like.’ I said, ‘Really?’ It was like a lightbulb moment for me.”
He continues, “When I drove home afterward, I kept thinking, ‘Any guitar you like…’ and before that, I had never really questioned the Strat because it was perfect as it was. However, I had a secret penchant for the sound of a Les Paul, which you cannot get on the Strat. I kind of wanted it all.”
The Sky Guitar looks like something from a fever dream, but the oddball electric guitar is very much real. It features a whopping 38 frets and a dramatic cutaway to ensure access to its extended tonal range isn’t impeded, with Roth likening its silhouette to a teardrop. It shunned single coil pickups for humbuckers as he vied for a Les Paul tonality. But its creation was far from straightforward.
“The problem was the pickups,” he explains. “I think it was Andy’s idea to put the pickups under the fretboard. I said, ‘How is that possible?’ He said, ‘It’ll be possible because it’s just wood, and it won’t take away from the sound.’ Sure enough, he built the first one in the spring of 1983. It looked exactly as they do now, but the paint job was different.”
It's a genius solution. Looking at the guitar, one would assume it only had a humbucker in the bridge. But there was much more hiding beneath the surface.
As he told Guitar World in 2023, the guitar shaped the sound of his post-Scorpions career. He formed Electric Sun in 1978, and their back catalog is illuminated by what the guitar could do.
“I used that first one on Beyond the Astral Skies,” he says. “The versions after that were either fretless after the 30th fret or had whole-step spacing above the 27th fret. These guitars were designed to combine all the elements I wanted to connect, so I had Andreas add scalloped fretboards and humbuckers to give that hot sound.
“They've been a big part of me merging the world of rock music I was in with the classical sounds I wanted to create. I'm very proud of those guitars.”
His Stratocaster collection was dutifully left behind, and Roth became immersed in the boundless capabilities of the guitar. There were other teething problems along the way, which Roth’s imagination and Demetriou’s more scientific mind combined to solve, and the guitar stacks innovation upon innovation. It shows that even the craziest ideas shouldn't be dismissed.
Roth’s full interview, charting every detail of the guitar’s birth and evolution, will be published online in the near future.
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