What Is a Sky Guitar: Uli Jon Roth's Extended-Range Guitar

What exactly is a Sky Guitar

A Sky Guitar is an extended-range electric guitar: on almost every model the fingerboard carries on well past the 24th fret, where a conventional guitar stops, and reaches 37 or 39 frets. It is not a one-off model or a modified standard guitar, but a family of built-to-order instruments made today by UJR Sky Guitars — founded by Uli Jon Roth in 2017, according to both the brand’s official site and the UK company register (Companies House) — with the building done by master luthier Boris Dommenget, in Germany (sky-guitars.com).

Three traits set it apart from any other catalog guitar:

• The range. The fret count runs from 23 (Sky Super Strat) to 39 (Infinity Sky) according to each model’s official spec page. The highest frets do not advance a semitone at a time but in whole-tone steps, because that far up the board there is no room for a finger between one and the next.
• The electronics. The Mega-Wing III system is an active preamp fed at 18 volts, with hand-wound low-impedance pickups, a three-band equalizer and a gain control inside the instrument itself — something the official site describes as “a feature found on no other guitar on the market” (sky-guitars.com).
• The build. All of them are made to order, with an estimated 4 to 10 months depending on model and specification, a waiting list and a 50% deposit on ordering (sky-guitars.com).

It is worth pinning the entity down before going any further, because the term is contested. There is no dedicated “Sky Guitar” article on the English or the Spanish Wikipedia: only on the German one and on Wikidata (Q141016760). And “sky guitar” on its own also returns an instrument shop called Sky Guitars in Denton, Texas, a YouTube channel of the same name and John Mayer’s PRS Silver Sky, none of which has any connection to the instrument this page is about.

The musical problem Uli Jon Roth wanted to solve

The Sky Guitar came out of a specific limitation: Roth could not play a violin line without dropping it an octave. He put it this way himself in an interview with NAfME: “I wanted an instrument that enables me to play the exact part of a violin concerto, without having to transpose the melody down an octave” (NAfME).

In the same interview he puts a number on the starting point: what he found limiting was “the somewhat limited three-and-a-half octave range of standard guitars”, and he describes the practical symptom in terms any guitarist will recognize — he would literally run out of frets halfway through a solo whose own logic called for higher notes.

He told Guitar Player much the same about the trigger — he wanted the range of a violin, impossible on a normal guitar — and also where the idea that it could be done came from: a luthier told him so. On that account, the spark was discovering that someone could literally build him whatever guitar he could think up (Guitar Player, June 26, 2025).

The process was incremental rather than radical: Roth says he first tried adding two extra frets to his main Stratocaster and that it worked well. The teardrop silhouette came afterwards; he says that, sitting down, he began to see shapes, and that the first one was something like a teardrop.

That aim has consequences you can check on record. The repertoire that justifies the instrument is the two live volumes of Transcendental Sky Guitar (2000) and, above all, Metamorphosis of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (2003), a reworking of The Four Seasons with Sky Guitar, harpsichord and violinists. This is not a guitar with frets to spare: it is a guitar built for a repertoire that did not previously fit on the neck.

How much range it actually has

Several figures are in circulation here, and each one measures something different. They are worth seeing side by side:

Figure	What it refers to	Source
3.5 octaves	Range of a standard guitar, according to Roth himself	NAfME
Cello + violin	Range of the 7-string Sky Guitars, according to Roth	NAfME
More than 5.5 octaves	Range attributed to the original 7-strings with a low B	Edenwaith
6 octaves	Figure Roth gives in a September 2026 interview	MariskalRock, September 7, 2026
6 octaves	Total range, alongside 3 octaves per string	German Wikipedia

Our own calculation, not a quotation from a source: taking the official specification that recurs most often on the spec pages — 37 frets, of which the top 5 are whole-tone steps and count as 2 frets each — the arithmetic is 32 semitones + (5 × 2) = 42 semitones above the open string. That is 3.5 octaves on a single string. The working is auditable and comes from the official Bianca Sky spec page; no source publishes this number.

Who invented the Sky Guitar and who builds it today

The first Sky Guitar was built by luthier Andreas “Andy” Demetriou in Brighton, England, in the spring of 1983, from work that began just after Christmas 1982. That first instrument, the “Dolphin” prototype, is the one used on the album Beyond the Astral Skies (1985).

Stage	Who builds	When	What it adds
Original prototypes	Andreas “Andy” Demetriou, Brighton	1983-1991	Five unique instruments: Dolphin (1983), Emperor (1987), Mighty Wing (1989, the first 7-string), Rembrandt (1991, the first in mahogany), plus a second unit cited as Purple
Dean-distributed edition	Boris Dommenget, with Dean Guitars	Around 2010-2011	First commercial run, driven by Elliott Rubinson, CEO of Dean
Own brand	Boris Dommenget, in Germany	Since 2017 (company registered on September 29 at Companies House)	UJR Sky Guitars, founded by Roth after Rubinson’s death

Two important cautions about this chronology. First: the size of the Dean run is disputed. The official site states that the first limited edition was 50 Sky Guitars distributed through Dean and built by hand by Dommenget; the English Wikipedia says that in 2011 Dean produced 25 units to Roth’s specifications. Both figures were published by Dean itself: 50 on its model page in January 2010 and 25 on the same page in October 2011. No source says how many were made, so both appear here.

Second: the name of the fifth prototype is not settled either. The official site calls the last one built by Demetriou the Rembrandt Sky (1991); the Edenwaith fansite calls the fifth one Sky V “Destiny”. They could be the same instrument under two names, or two different instruments. There is no way to confirm it with the available sources.

And one point that is repeated wrongly all over the internet: Boris Dommenget has been the exclusive builder of Uli Jon Roth’s Sky Guitars since 2010, and all current Sky Guitars are built in Germany. The five originals from the 1980s are British and are not his work. All of this in detail in the history of the Sky Guitars and on the Boris Dommenget page.

What sets it apart from a conventional guitar

The measurable difference lies in the fingerboard, the electronics and the geometry of the neck. This table compares the official specification of a typical Sky Guitar with that of the industry’s two reference instruments:

	Sky Guitar (model-dependent)	Fender American Professional II Stratocaster	Gibson Les Paul Standard 50s
Frets	23 to 39, with whole-tone steps in the top register	22	22 medium jumbo
Scale length	25” or 25.5” depending on the spec page	25.5” (64.77 cm)	24.75” (628.65 mm)
Neck width	From 4.5-5.1 cm at the nut to 5.9-7 cm toward the bridge	42.8 mm nut	—
Fingerboard	Scalloped on almost every model	Flat	Flat
Pickups	2 humbuckers + 1 single coil, low impedance	3 passive V-Mod II single coils	Burstbucker 1 and 2, Alnico 2 magnets
Electronics	Active, 18 V from an external supply, onboard EQ and gain	Passive	Passive
Price	$12,000 to $49,000	Usual street price	Usual street price

Part of that difference is not an advantage, and saying so matters more than the marketing does. A scalloped fingerboard punishes chords: press too hard and the note goes sharp. The neck widens considerably more than a Fender’s. The electronics depend on an external 18-volt supply. And the instrument costs between $12,000 and $49,000 — official catalog price checked in September 2026 at sky-guitars.com — with a 4 to 10 month wait. It is a specialized instrument, not a universal improvement on the electric guitar.

The frets: why nobody gives the same figure

There is no such thing as “the” fret count of a Sky Guitar, and anyone who gives you a single figure is simplifying. The official spec pages give different numbers by model:

Model	Frets according to the official spec page
Sky Super Strat	23
Dolphin Sky	30
Excalibur	30 (the top 3 are whole-tone steps and count as 2 each)
Emperor Sky, Bianca Sky, Raven Sky, Zeno Sky	37 (the top 5 are whole-tone)
Infinity Sky	39
Mighty Wing	“30 – 39”

On top of that come the figures from the press and the encyclopedias: Guitar Player and Guitar World both repeat 38 scalloped frets for the first one from 1983; the English Wikipedia says 30 on the first and 35 “effective” semitone frets on the later ones; the Spanish Wikipedia attributes 36 to the 1983 Dolphin; the German one gives 32; and 29 and 32 turn up on the forums. The most plausible explanation is that Roth used several versions of the instrument and that each source counts in its own way — physical frets, effective frets or semitone steps — but no source spells this out. The full adjudication, source by source, is in how many frets a Sky Guitar has.

The scalloping is not the same on all of them

It is false that all Sky Guitars carry the same scalloping, and false that all of them are scalloped at all. The official spec pages document at least nine different schemes:

Scheme	Models
Deep from the 3rd fret	Sky Super Strat
Deep from the 6th fret	Infinity Sky
Medium from the 6th fret	Excalibur
Medium from the 7th fret	Bianca Sky
Medium along the whole neck	Emperor Sky, Rembrandt Sky
Deep throughout	Mighty Wing
From the 27th fret only	Ebony Sky, Mahogany Sky
Unscalloped except for the highest frets	Zeno Sky
Unscalloped	Dolphin Sky

The official replica of the first 1983 prototype, the Dolphin Sky, is not scalloped. What are scalloped, on the other hand, are all the fretted Sky Guitars the English Wikipedia discusses. Roth’s position is recorded by Edenwaith, in an excerpt from a 2001 Guitar Player interview: he prefers a scalloped neck for single-note work because it gives him far more control, though it remains a hindrance for rhythm playing. How that changes technique is covered on the scalloped frets page.

The Mega-Wing system

The Mega-Wing is the active pickup system specific to the Sky Guitars, and the original was designed by inventor John Oram. It had four coils and an 80 dB gain stage, and Roth sums it up bluntly: “You could blow up any amp with that – and I did!” (MusicRadar). Vox AC30s lasted half an hour, Fender Twins around an hour, and two EVH 5150 heads sounded good for about ten seconds before frying. The ones that held up were the old Marshall Super Leads and the Blackstar Artist.

The current system is the Mega-Wing III: a “Black Box” housing the electronics, John Oram’s equalizer and the gain control; two humbuckers and a low-impedance single coil hand-wound by Boris and Fiona Dommenget with a mix of ceramic and Alnico 5 magnets; an 18-volt supply from an external unit switchable from 110 to 240 volts, reaching the guitar over a stereo TRS cable; five controls (volume, treble, middle, bass and gain), a five-way selector and two humbucker-to-single-coil switches. It is also sold separately: $2,400 for the system and $850 for the power supply, official catalog price checked in September 2026 at sky-guitars.com.

There is one construction detail that explains half of what a Sky Guitar is: extending the fingerboard over the body leaves no room for the neck pickup. The solution was Demetriou’s — mount it under the fingerboard — and Roth went as far as having a pickup installed beneath the fingerboard level with the 24th fret. The breakdown of the system’s three generations is in Mega-Wing.

The catalog families: Pegasus, Aquila and Unicorn

The official catalog is organized into three families covering 10 series and 22 models, with prices from $12,000 to $49,000, official catalog price checked in September 2026 at sky-guitars.com.

Family	Character	Models	Price range
Pegasus	Warmer, darker woods, several 7-string models, improved access to the top register. The official site says some sound closer to a Les Paul	9	$24,000 – $49,000
Aquila	Direct descendants of the Stratocaster, alder body, clean and three-dimensional tone, versatile	5	$12,000 – $20,000
Unicorn	The most recent family, with a fixed bridge instead of a floating tremolo; better for chords. Includes nylon-string and double-neck models	8	$16,000 – $37,000

Two cautions about the catalog. First: the official site contradicts itself on the classification of the Dolphin Sky and the Emperor Sky, which the shop listing groups under Pegasus while their individual spec pages and the Sky Classic Series page place them in the Aquila segment. Second: the Aurora Sky appears in the catalog with a price, but its spec page warns that it has not been built yet, so any photograph attributed to that model would be a fake.

The full catalog, model by model, is on the Sky Guitar models page, and the prices with the date they were checked are in prices.

Where to go next

This page is the definition; the detail is spread across the child pages. If you arrived looking for something specific:

• The figure nobody settles → how many frets a Sky Guitar has, with every source set against the others and an explanation of the whole-tone frets.
• The electronics → the Mega-Wing system: the three generations, the low impedance and the 80 dB that fried amplifiers.
• The feel of the neck → scalloped frets: what it is, why it goes sharp when you press, and the nine schemes in the catalog.
• The chronology → history of the Sky Guitars, from Demetriou in 1983 to the brand of his own in 2017.
• Who builds them → Boris Dommenget, exclusive builder since 2010.
• The catalog and what it costs → the models page and prices; and if what you want to know is how commissioning works, how to order a Sky Guitar.
• The musician → Uli Jon Roth, because without his repertoire this instrument would make no sense.