How many frets does a Uli Jon Roth Sky Guitar have?

There is no single fret count: there is one per model

The question “how many frets does a Sky Guitar have” has no single answer, because the Sky Guitars are not one instrument but a family of twenty-odd. The official UJR Sky Guitars catalog, consulted at sky-guitars.com in September 2026, documents figures running from 23 to 39 frets depending on the model — 23, 24, 30, 32, 35, 37 and 39, plus one spec sheet that gives “33 or 35” — along with three models whose spec sheet describes a range of “30-39”.

Anyone who hands you a single round number is simplifying. Here is the full list, spec sheet by spec sheet.

Frets by model in the current catalog

Model	Family	Strings	Physical frets	Top frets in whole tones	Semitones above the open string (our calculation)
Sky Super Strat	Aquila	6	23	Not stated	—
Dolphin Sky	Pegasus	6	30	Not stated	—
Excalibur	Pegasus	7	30	3	33
Sky of Lionheart	Pegasus	6	30-39	3 to 6	33-45
Sky of Lionheart 7	Pegasus	7	30-39	3 to 6	33-45
Mighty Wing	Pegasus	7	30-39	3 to 6	33-45
Rembrandt Sky	Pegasus	7	32	4	36
Sunrise Elite	Pegasus	6	33 or 35	4	37 or 39
Ebony Sky	Unicorn	6	35	4	39
Ebony Sky 7	Unicorn	7	35	4	39
Mahogany Sky	Unicorn	6	35	4	39
Emperor Sky	Pegasus	6	37	5	42
Bianca Sky	Aquila	6	37	5	42
Bianca Sky 7	Aquila	7	37	5	42
Raven Sky	Aquila	6	37	5	42
Zeno Sky	Aquila	6	37	5	42
Silver Sky 7	Aquila	7	37	Not stated	—
Infinity Sky	Pegasus	7	39	6	45
Sunset Elite 6 / 7 / 8 (nylon)	Unicorn	6 / 7 / 8	24	Not stated	—
Mighty New Dawn (double neck)	Unicorn	6 or 7 + 7 nylon	37 (electric) / 24 (nylon)	Not stated	—
Aurora Sky (double neck)	Unicorn	12 + 6 or 7	37 (electric) / 24 (12-string)	Not stated	—

Two notes on this table. The Aurora Sky appears in the catalog with a warning from the maker itself: not one has been built yet. And the Sky Super Strat, with its 23 frets, is the model with the fewest frets in the entire catalog, a 50th anniversary edition that reproduces the Stratocaster shape of Roth’s Scorpions years. If anyone tells you that “Sky Guitars have 38 frets”, that one instrument disproves the sentence on its own.

The 37-fret pattern: the top five count double

The specification that recurs across more product pages than any other reads, verbatim: “Number of frets: 37 (the top 5 frets are whole-tone steps, counting as 2 frets each)” (Bianca Sky spec sheet at sky-guitars.com). In plain terms: 37 frets, of which the top five are whole-tone steps worth two frets apiece.

That means the fingerboard has two distinct zones:

• Frets 1 to 32: normal spacing, one semitone per fret.
• Frets 33 to 37: whole-tone spacing, two semitones per fret.

The arithmetic is straightforward, and you can check it yourself:

semitones = (physical frets − whole-tone frets) + (whole-tone frets × 2)

(37 − 5) + (5 × 2) = 32 + 10 = 42 semitones

Forty-two semitones are exactly three and a half octaves (42 ÷ 12 = 3.5) above the open string. On a single string.

That figure only takes on its real size when you set it against what Roth himself said was holding him back. In an interview with NAfME he explained that the starting problem was “the somewhat limited three-and-a-half octave range of standard guitars”, and that “I often found myself literally running out of frets” (NAfME). Three and a half octaves is the range of an entire normal guitar, all six strings of it. The 37-fret Sky Guitar fits that same range onto the top string alone.

Applying the same formula across the rest of the catalog produces the figures in the last column of the table: 45 semitones on the Infinity Sky, 39 on the Ebony family, 33 on the Excalibur. To be clear, that calculation is mine, derived from the official spec sheet: the maker publishes the fret count and the counting rule, but never the semitone total.

Why the highest frets move in whole tones

The reason is physical, not aesthetic: above a certain point the frets sit so close together that there is no room for fingers. The documented solution is to skip the intervening semitones and space the bars twice as far apart.

Roth has also explained that the problem has a structural ceiling that is not up to him: “Because of the layout of the cutaway, there’s a limit to how high you can place frets”, he said of the teardrop body design (Yahoo Entertainment). The English Wikipedia records the two solutions used on the historical instruments: either the fingerboard runs out of frets above the 30th, or it switches to whole-tone spacing above the 27th.

Truth in Shredding confirms this independently: “Above the 27th fret, this scalloped-fret monster switches to whole-step fret spacing” (Truth in Shredding).

Physical frets and effective frets: the root of the confusion

This is where the knot is. On a Sky Guitar you can count three different things, and all three give different numbers:

1. Physical frets. The metal bars you can see and count in a photograph. This is what the official site publishes: 23, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39.
2. Effective semitones. How many chromatic steps there are between the open string and the highest note. On a 37-fret model, that is 42.
3. Effective half-step frets. A third way of counting that turns up in an April 2001 Guitar Player interview quoted on Wikipedia, where Roth spoke of “35 effective (half step) frets”.

That “35 effective” is the piece that reconciles half the arguments on the internet. If an instrument switches to whole tones above the 27th fret and adds up to 35 effective semitones, the arithmetic implies roughly four whole-tone bars above the 27th, which is to say around 31 physical frets. An observer counting bars will say “31”; the maker will say “35 effective”; a third party counting on some other basis will say something else again. All three can be looking at the same guitar.

And beware of one misleading coincidence: a Spanish-language blog headlined an article in 2011 with “42 frets” without explaining where the figure came from. That 42 happens to match the 42 semitones of the calculation above, but nothing suggests the author was doing that sum. Treating it as confirmation would be a mistake.

What each source says about the fret count

Figure	Outlet	Date	What it refers to	Link
29	Seymour Duncan Forums	No date found	Forum comment about the instrument	forum.seymourduncan.com
30	English Wikipedia	Accessed 09/2026	The Sky Guitar used on Beyond the Astral Skies	en.wikipedia.org
32	German Wikipedia	Accessed 09/2026	The Sky Guitar in general, plus 6 octaves of total range	de.wikipedia.org
32	Guitarristas.info	05/04/2008	Title of a Spanish-language forum thread	guitarristas.info
35 effective	Guitar Player, via Wikipedia	April 2001 interview	Effective half-step frets, not metal bars	en.wikipedia.org
36	Spanish Wikipedia	Accessed 10/2026	The 1983 Dolphin Sky, the first one	es.wikipedia.org
38	Guitar Player (Phil Weller)	26/06/2025	The first one, built in the spring of 1983	guitarplayer.com
38	Guitar World	No date found	The first one, spring of 1983	guitarworld.com
42	noiseinabox blog	01/2011	Headline, with no explanation of the criterion	noiseinabox.blogspot.com
23 to 39	sky-guitars.com	Accessed 09/2026	Every model in the current catalog	sky-guitars.com

Why every outlet gives a different figure

There are four causes, and none of them is that somebody is lying.

First: they are not talking about the same instrument. Between 1983 and 1991 the luthier Andreas “Andy” Demetriou built five different prototypes in Brighton, England. Then came a limited edition distributed by Dean, and after that the in-house UJR Sky Guitars catalog with more than twenty models, from a company the official site dates to 2017 and the UK company register incorporated on September 29 of that year (Companies House). Forty-three years of different instruments under one name.

Second: they are not counting the same thing. Metal bars, effective semitones and “effective half-step frets” are three different quantities, as we have just seen.

Third: Roth himself has described different configurations. Some versions with no frets above the 30th, others with whole-tone spacing above the 27th. Both descriptions are his and both are true, of different guitars.

Fourth: the figure gets copied without being checked. “38 frets” has hardened into textbook fact because it appears in two large outlets, and from there it is replicated by auto-generated pages that have never so much as looked at an official spec sheet. It is the most efficient way there is to manufacture a false consensus.

The first Sky Guitar: five figures for one instrument

The extreme case is the original 1983 instrument. Five numbers circulate for it:

• 30 frets, according to the English Wikipedia, referring to the guitar used on Beyond the Astral Skies (1985).
• 38 scalloped frets, according to Guitar Player (26/06/2025) and Guitar World, referring to the one built in the spring of 1983.
• 36 frets, according to the Spanish Wikipedia, referring to the 1983 Dolphin Sky.
• 29 frets, according to a Seymour Duncan Forums thread.
• 32 frets, according to the title of a 2008 Guitarristas.info thread and according to the German Wikipedia, which attributes that figure to the Sky Guitar in general.

No source adjudicates between them and none cites a primary document from the luthier. The likeliest explanation, and this is a hypothesis of mine rather than a fact, is that Roth used several versions of the instrument in those years and that each outlet is describing a different one. The current official replica of that first prototype, the Dolphin Sky, is sold with 30 frets and, unlike almost all of its siblings, does not have a scalloped fingerboard.

If you are after the fret count of the first Sky Guitar in order to cite it, the honest answer today is that it has not been established.

What remains unresolved

Three gaps this page cannot close, and which you should know about before citing anything:

• The fret count of the first Sky Guitar (1983). Five figures in circulation, zero documentary adjudication.
• The whole-tone steps on models whose spec sheet does not mention them. The Sky Super Strat, the Dolphin Sky, the Silver Sky 7 and the nylon-string models publish their fret count without specifying the spacing rule. Inferring it would be inventing it.
• The disagreement about total range. The German Wikipedia credits the Sky Guitar with 6 octaves of range and 3 octaves per string; the arithmetic on the official 37-fret spec sheet gives 3.5 octaves per string. The two cannot be reconciled without knowing which specific instrument each one is describing.

If you find a primary source that settles any of these three points, get in touch: this page will be updated with the fact and the link.