Boris Dommenget: the luthier who builds the Sky Guitars

Who Boris Dommenget is

Boris Dommenget is the master luthier who has built Uli Jon Roth’s Sky Guitars since 2010. That is the central fact, and it is published on the brand’s official home page: “Since 2010, Boris has been the exclusive builder of Uli’s iconic Sky Guitars” (sky-guitars.com).

Let’s start with what we do not know, because it is more than it seems. The luthier’s own websites — dommengetguitars.com and guitarmaker.de — return an SSL certificate error when opened over https. The http version of dommengetguitars.com does load, but it is an old site that has not been updated in years, and only one specific fact is taken from it here: the one about Matthias Jabs’s guitars, further down. That means you will not find his date of birth here, nor his training, the year he opened his workshop or the specific city where he works today. Versions of all that circulate on forums and aggregators, but none could be checked against a current primary source, so none is published.

What is documented, and it is quite a lot, is his role within the Sky Guitar project: since when he has built it, where, which part of the instrument comes out of his hands and which engineering problems he inherits every time he starts a new one.

2010 and 2017: two dates that get confused all the time

Two different years hover around this story, and almost every secondary source mixes them up. They do not mean the same thing.

Year	What exactly happened	Where it is recorded
1983	Andreas “Andy” Demetriou builds the first Sky Guitar in Brighton, England	The year, on the Sky Classic Series page and the Dolphin Sky page (“Spring of 1983”), and in Guitar Player (“spring of 1983”); Brighton, on Edenwaith
2010	Boris Dommenget becomes the exclusive builder of Uli Jon Roth’s Sky Guitars	sky-guitars.com home page
2010–2011	Limited edition distributed through Dean Guitars, handcrafted by Dommenget. The official site gives no date; Guitar Site reports the announcement at NAMM 2010 and Wikipedia places production in 2011	About us, Guitar Site and English Wikipedia
2017	Uli Jon Roth founds the company UJR Sky Guitars, according to the brand itself, after the death early that year of Elliott Rubinson, CEO of Dean. The company was entered in the UK company register on September 29	About us and Companies House

Put another way: when the current brand was born, in 2017, Dommenget had already been building the instrument for seven years. If you read somewhere that he “started in 2017”, the luthier is being confused with the company.

One instrument with a specific date confirms it. The official Bianca Sky page states that “The JEANNIE-BIANCA SKY prototype was built by Boris Dommenget for Uli in 2010” (product page), which places the start of his era exactly where the home page says.

Where Sky Guitars are built

In Germany. The About us page on the official site states it without qualification: “All Sky Guitars are built in Germany by Master Luthier Boris Dommenget” (sky-guitars.com/about-us).

There is an important nuance here that many pages skip and that is worth pinning down: “all” refers to the current Sky Guitars, not to the instrument’s entire history. The five original Sky Guitars — Dolphin, Purple, Emperor, Mighty Wing and the fifth, which the official site calls Rembrandt and the Edenwaith fansite calls Destiny — were built by the British luthier Andreas Demetriou in England, between 1983 and 1991. Saying that “all Sky Guitars are built in Germany” without that clarification is a historical error you can spot in five minutes.

The current location of the workshop does not appear in any up-to-date source. If someone gives you a city, ask for the source.

What else Boris Dommenget builds

The signature guitars of Matthias Jabs, guitarist with Scorpions. It is not the Sky Guitars site that says so, but the luthier’s own: its electric guitars section presents the Mastercaster and the FireAxe as “MATTHIAS JABS signature guitars” (dommengetguitars.com), and the Mastercaster has a page of its own (Mastercaster). Since that site has not been updated in years, it confirms that he built them, not that he still builds them today. It is a neat detail: the same luthier has built instruments for Uli Jon Roth and for another Scorpions guitarist, from the band Roth left in 1977.

Beyond that, the rest of Dommenget’s own catalog has not been checked against a current source, for the reasons explained above about his websites.

Boris and Fiona Dommenget wind the pickups by hand

Dommenget’s work is not limited to the wood. The low-impedance pickups of the Mega-Wing III system are wound by hand by Boris and Fiona Dommenget, and are tuned specifically to interact with the system’s EQ and gain stages (official Mega-Wing category page).

The division of responsibilities within the Mega-Wing III is quite clear in the official documentation:

• The EQ was designed by John Oram, whom the brand itself calls “the Godfather of the British EQ”; he developed the Mega-Wing III system in cooperation with Uli Jon Roth.
• The low-impedance pickups, with a mix of ceramic and Alnico 5 magnets, are Dommenget’s.
• The complete system is powered at 18 volts from an external supply switchable from 110 to 240 V.

The Mega-Wing III is also sold on its own: $2,400 for the system and $850 for the power supply, official catalog prices checked on September 12, 2026 at sky-guitars.com and subject to change without notice. This site does not sell or broker anything: the only official channel is the maker’s website.

Why a Sky Guitar is so hard to build

Because the extended fingerboard breaks, one after another, the assumptions an ordinary electric guitar is built on. Five problems are documented, almost all of them with a quote from Uli Jon Roth himself. They arose when the first instruments were being built, but the solutions are structural and still shape every instrument that leaves the workshop today.

1. The extended fingerboard leaves no room for the neck pickup

If you extend the fingerboard out over the body to the 30th or the 37th fret, the space where the neck pickup would go simply no longer exists. The solution was Demetriou’s, and it is counterintuitive: mount the pickup under the fingerboard. His argument, as Roth recounts it, was that “It’ll be possible because it’s just wood, and it won’t take away from the sound” (Yahoo Entertainment).

It worked. Roth confirms it in another interview, in which he talks about having “one of the pickups mounted under the fretboard at the 24th fret” (Edenwaith). Wikipedia records it the same way: one of the guitars has an Oram pickup hidden under the 24th fret.

2. The longer the neck grew, the harder it was to house the Mega-Wing

The line that sums it up best is not Roth’s but the journalist Phil Weller’s, written in his own words in his Guitar Player article of June 26, 2025: “the longer the neck grew, the more difficult it was to house the Mega-Wing” (Guitar Player). The active pickup system is not a discreet circuit that fits into any cavity; it needs room inside the body, and every fret added to the fingerboard eats into that room from the other side. The design of the guitar is a permanent negotiation between neck length and space for electronics.

3. The cutaway puts a physical ceiling on the last fret

Roth says it bluntly, speaking of the Strat that started it all: “With a Strat, because of the layout of the cutaway, there’s a limit to how high you can place frets” (Yahoo Entertainment). Wanting more frets is not enough: the hand has to be able to reach them. Hence the teardrop silhouette with its extreme cutaway, which is not an aesthetic decision but the only way to make the top frets accessible.

4. The top frets end up so close together that they cannot be played

This is the most elegant one. Above a certain point, the distance between consecutive frets is so small that there is physically no room for a finger. The documented solution comes in two variants: from the 27th fret, the spacing switches to whole steps — each fret jumps two semitones instead of one — or the fingerboard is simply left fretless above the 30th. The result, according to a 2001 Roth interview in Guitar Player cited by Wikipedia, is “35 effective (half step) frets” (English Wikipedia).

That is why the official spec sheets for the current models say things like “the top 5 frets are whole-tone steps, counting as 2 frets each”. It is not marketing: it is the direct consequence of an anatomical limit.

5. It sounded good acoustically and bad amplified

The fifth problem is not about woodwork. The instrument sounded superb unplugged and disappointed once it was plugged in, as Roth himself tells it: “It sounded beautiful when I was playing it unplugged; it was alder, just like the Strat. But as soon as I plugged it in, it was less than convincing” (Yahoo Entertainment). That forced a complete electronic redesign with John Oram, and it is the origin of the whole Mega-Wing line. It also explains why the luthier cannot stop at the wood: on a Sky Guitar, construction and electronics are designed together or they do not work.

Problem	Solution adopted	Visible consequence today
No room for the neck pickup	Mount it under the fingerboard	Pickup hidden at the 24th fret
Housing the Mega-Wing in an ever-longer neck	Redesign of body and electronics	Body sized around the active system
The cutaway limits how high the last fret can go	Teardrop body with an extreme cutaway	The instrument’s characteristic silhouette
Top frets physically unplayable	Whole-step spacing above the 27th (or no frets above the 30th)	The top frets count as 2 each
Good acoustic sound, poor amplified sound	Mega-Wing active system with John Oram	18 V preamp, EQ and gain on board

Four to ten months per instrument

The official site puts current production time at “approximately 4–10 months, depending on the model and selected specifications” (About us). The same page records the other two conditions of an order: a 50% deposit when ordering, the balance before delivery, and a waiting list for every model. It also states that “Left-hand versions of all models can be produced on request.”

That range of months is the best possible summary of everything above. This is not an instrument that gets assembled: it is one in which every decision — where the fingerboard ends, where the cutaway begins, how much room is left for the electronics — depends on all the others.

What is in dispute

The units in the Dean edition. The Sky Guitars About us page states that the first limited edition was of 50 Sky Guitars distributed through Dean and handcrafted by Dommenget: “The first Limited Edition of 50 Sky Guitars was distributed through Dean”. English Wikipedia speaks of 25 units produced in 2011, and the Guitar Site headline of 25 units announced at NAMM 2010 (Guitar Site). Both figures actually come from Dean itself: its model page spoke of 50 in January 2010 (archived copy) and of “Only 25 total” in October 2011 (archived copy). There is a third piece that may explain the muddle: Edenwaith also mentions an earlier batch of 50 units around 2004, built by 17th Street Guitars, which is neither the same series nor the same builder. No source says how many were made, and Dean’s official PDF is not accessible. We are not picking a figure here.

The company’s founding year, no longer. 2017, the year on the About us page, is confirmed by the UK company register: UJR SKY GUITARS LIMITED was incorporated on September 29, 2017 (Companies House). Roth himself told MariskalRock in 2026 that he decided to set up the company “in 2016” (en 2016): the decision would date from 2016; the legal incorporation is from 2017.

The workshop. Germany is confirmed. The city is not.

The biography. As long as the only direct source is the luthier’s own old website, which fails over https and has not been updated in years, any biographical detail about Boris Dommenget you read — including the date he started building guitars — should come to you with a linked source. If it does not, treat it as what it is: an assumption.