History of the Sky Guitar: from the Andreas 'Andy' Demetriou prototypes (1983) to Boris Dommenget

Who built the first Sky Guitar, and when

The first Sky Guitar was built by Andreas “Andy” Demetriou in Brighton, England, in the spring of 1983. It was the instrument known today as the Dolphin: super jumbo frets that get smaller toward the top end, a sycamore neck and — contrary to what is usually taken for granted — a fingerboard that is not scalloped. The official page for the replica gives it 30 frets, but that number is disputed and is treated as such below (source: official Dolphin Sky Replica page).

The date the project started depends on which source you read. The official site puts the beginning of development just after Christmas 1982; Guitar Player, in Phil Weller’s piece of June 26, 2025, dates the build to the spring of 1983. The two are not necessarily incompatible: the prudent reading is a development that runs from late 1982 into the spring of 1983.

The trigger was a conversation with the luthier himself. As Roth tells Guitar Player, Demetriou told him he could build him any guitar he wanted, and that opened the door to an idea that had been circling for a while: reaching the range of a violin, impossible on a conventional guitar. He had already tried something far more modest — adding a couple of extra frets to his main Stratocaster.

Demetriou is also behind the technical solution that made the instrument viable: mounting the pickups under the fingerboard, because extending the neck out over the body leaves no room for a neck pickup. Guitar World reports his argument, which is disarmingly simple: underneath there is only wood, and wood does not take sound away. That is the instrument Roth used on Beyond the Astral Skies (1985), the third Electric Sun album.

On the fret count of that first Sky there is no agreement: 30 according to English Wikipedia and the official replica page, 38 according to Guitar Player and Guitar World, 36 according to Spanish Wikipedia, 32 according to German Wikipedia and 29 in a thread on the Seymour Duncan forum. We go into it on the how many frets page; here it is enough to make clear that nobody has settled the number.

The five Andreas “Andy” Demetriou prototypes (1983-1991)

Demetriou built five Sky Guitars between 1983 and 1991. The official site dates four of them when presenting the Sky Classic Series replicas; the fifth, and the name of the second, are precisely where the sources part company.

No.	Prototype	Year (official source)	What it introduced
1st	Dolphin	1983	The first guitar with more than 30 frets, according to the official site; not scalloped
2nd	Purple (per edenwaith.com)	No published date	Six strings; no replica in the current catalog
3rd	Emperor	1987	Medium scalloping across the whole fingerboard
4th	Mighty Wing	1989	First seven-string Sky, with a low B
5th	Rembrandt (official) / Destiny (edenwaith.com)	1991	First one in mahogany; last one built by Demetriou

The discrepancy over the fifth instrument matters. The official site calls the fifth one the Rembrandt Sky and describes it as the last of Demetriou’s original prototypes and the second seven-string, successor to the Mighty Wing. The fansite edenwaith.com, which is the most detailed documentation in existence on the originals, lists Sky I “Dolphin”, Sky II “Purple”, Sky III “Emperor”, Sky IV “Mighty Wing” and Sky V “Destiny”. They may be the same instrument under two names — one from the workshop and one applied later — or two different guitars. No source clears it up, so both versions stay here.

The four replicas the brand currently offers of those prototypes are the most direct way to see what each one was like:

Current replica	Prototype it reproduces	Year of the original	Price
Dolphin Sky	1st Sky	1983	$24,000
Emperor Sky	3rd Sky	1987	$30,000
Rembrandt Sky	5th Sky	1991	$29,000
Mighty Wing	4th Sky	1989	$45,000

Official catalog prices checked in September 2026 at sky-guitars.com. This site sells nothing: the price in force is always the manufacturer’s.

2004: the 17th Street Guitars batch

In 2004, the workshop 17th Street Guitars built a run of custom Sky Guitars under Uli Jon Roth’s supervision. The claim comes from edenwaith.com and appears neither on the official site nor on Wikipedia, so it deserves the caution any single-source claim deserves.

It is a thinly documented stretch and, even so, decisive for understanding the confusion that followed: the same fansite mentions an edition of 50 units in 2004 associated with that workshop. As the next section shows, the figure 50 turns up again years later attached to Dean. Nobody has published a clarification as to whether these are two separate runs or one run counted twice.

The limited edition distributed through Dean: 25 units, 50 units or two separate editions

The sources do not agree on how many Sky Guitars came out of the Dean Guitars operation, and the gap is a factor of two. Here is what each one says:

Source	Figure	Year	Detail
Dean Guitars, model page (archived copy, January 2010)	50	2010	An initial run for “50 players or collectors world wide”
Dean Guitars, model page (archived copy, October 17, 2011)	25	2011	“Only 25 total Sky Guitars (6 & 7-Strings)”
sky-guitars.com (About us)	50	No year given	“The first Limited Edition of 50 Sky Guitars was distributed through Dean”
English Wikipedia	25	2011	Six- and seven-string versions
GuitarSite	25	Announced at NAMM 2010	Individually inspected, approved and named by Roth
edenwaith.com	50	2004	Attributed to 17th Street Guitars, not to Dean

The origin of the project, at least, is clear: it grew out of the collaboration between Uli Jon Roth and Elliott Rubinson, CEO of Dean Guitars. The official site adds that the first limited edition was hand-built by Boris Dommenget, which fits with 2010 also being the year Dommenget became exclusive builder.

Why the figure cannot be settled: both numbers come from the manufacturer itself. The model page on deanguitars.com, preserved by the Internet Archive, spoke of 50 units in January 2010 and was still doing so in the copy of October 4, 2011; by the copy of October 17, 2011, it said 25. English Wikipedia, which gives 25, cites that very page. Dean never explained the change and its official PDF on the model could not be opened during verification, so any single figure you read out there is choosing one version and staying quiet about the other.

What can be verified is that the units were numbered and named one by one: identified examples circulate on the second-hand market, such as a #9 “Black Velvet Sky” from 2012 listed by the dealer Ish Guitars. That numbering is, in fact, the best lead for anyone trying to reconstruct the real size of the run.

2010: Boris Dommenget, exclusive builder

Since 2010, Boris Dommenget has been the exclusive builder of Uli Jon Roth’s Sky Guitars, according to the official site itself. Dommenget has also built the signature guitars of Matthias Jabs, guitarist with Scorpions: his own website, not updated in years, presents the Mastercaster and the FireAxe as “MATTHIAS JABS signature guitars” (dommengetguitars.com).

One sentence that circulates in a misleading form is worth qualifying: every current Sky Guitar is built in Germany by Dommenget, but the five originals, built between 1983 and 1991, were made by Demetriou in England. Saying “they are all built in Germany” without the time qualifier is a demonstrable historical error.

The Dommenget era has its own dates documented on the official product pages, and they serve to date the evolution of the catalog:

• 2010: Roth’s personal prototype “Jeannie-Bianca”, the origin of the current Jeannie Sky Series (Bianca Sky and Raven Sky).
• 2012: a personal Roth prototype that gives rise to the Lionheart Sky Series, with the neck joint in the same position as the Mighty Wing.
• December 14, 2018: unveiling of the Excalibur prototype, today the most expensive model in the catalog.

Technically, the continuity with the original era lies in the pickup system: the Mega-Wing was designed by John Oram for the original Skys, and the current Mega-Wing III was developed by Oram himself in collaboration with Roth, with low-impedance pickups hand-wound by Boris and Fiona Dommenget. The official Dolphin Sky page is the only place a Mega-Wing II is mentioned (powered by 9 V batteries); the Mega-Wing I appears only in passing, as an option on that same page, on the Silver Sky Series page and on the Silver Sky 7 page, which describes it with a 9 V lithium battery; there is no official documentation of the specifications of those two versions, so any detailed generation-by-generation comparison you come across is filling in gaps. What is documented — the 80 dB of gain of the original system and the amplifiers it destroyed — is told by MusicRadar and covered in detail on the Mega-Wing page.

2017: a brand of his own, and its British company

Elliott Rubinson, CEO of Dean Guitars, died in early 2017, and after his death Roth parted ways with Dean and set up his own operation. The detail about the death comes from Guitar World, a secondary source, not from an official statement.

The company’s founding year now has a primary source. Companies House, the UK company register, incorporated UJR SKY GUITARS LIMITED, private limited company number 10988601, on September 29, 2017, and lists it as active (Companies House). That matches the About us page (“founded in 2017”) and English Wikipedia. The one dissonant note comes from Roth himself: in his MariskalRock interview of September 7, 2026, he says it was “in 2016” (en 2016) that he decided to set up his own company. Both are given here: the decision, by his account, in 2016; the legal incorporation, in 2017. Until October 2026 this page treated 2017 as a probable date, because the register entry had not yet been located.

One point of entity detail almost nobody mentions: the footer of the official site reads “UJR Sky-Guitars Ltd UK”, that is, the British company on the register, while manufacturing is German. It is consistent with a story that starts in Brighton and continues in Germany.

The current state of the project, according to the official site: 22 models spread across three families (Pegasus, Aquila and Unicorn), handmade production in Germany and an estimated lead time of 4 to 10 months depending on the model and specifications. The full list is on the models page.

The timeline in one table

Year	Milestone	Who
Late 1982 – spring 1983	Development and build of the first Sky Guitar (Dolphin, not scalloped; fret count disputed) in Brighton	Andreas “Andy” Demetriou
1985	The first Sky Guitar is used on Electric Sun’s Beyond the Astral Skies	Uli Jon Roth
1987	Third Sky: Emperor	Demetriou
1989	Fourth Sky: Mighty Wing, the first seven-string	Demetriou
1991	Fifth and last Demetriou Sky: Rembrandt (called Destiny by edenwaith.com)	Demetriou
2004	Run of custom Sky Guitars under Roth’s supervision (single source)	17th Street Guitars
2010	NAMM announcement of the signature model with Dean Guitars	Dean Guitars / Elliott Rubinson
2010	Dommenget becomes exclusive builder of the Sky Guitars	Boris Dommenget
2011	Production of the limited edition distributed through Dean (25 or 50 units: Dean itself published both figures)	Dean Guitars / Dommenget
2017	Rubinson’s death, the start of Roth’s own operation and the incorporation of UJR Sky Guitars Limited (September 29)	Uli Jon Roth
2026	Catalog of 22 models made in Germany, with a 4-10 month lead time	UJR Sky Guitars

What this page cannot claim

Three things remain open, and saying so is more useful than papering over them: how many units really came out of the Dean edition, whether Rembrandt and Destiny are the same guitar and how many frets the first Sky of 1983 had. In all three cases there are at least two sources in conflict and none of them settled by accessible primary documentation. There used to be a fourth, the year the company was incorporated, and the UK company register has closed it.

If the original 2011 Dean catalog, a press release from the brand or documentation from Demetriou’s own workshop ever surfaces, this page will be updated with the date of the change. In the meantime, any text that gives you a single figure without citing the contrary one is simplifying.