The Mega-Wing system: the electronics that define the Sky Guitar sound

What the Mega-Wing system is

The Mega-Wing is the active pickup system used in the Sky Guitars, and it was designed by the inventor John Oram, whom the official Sky Guitars site calls “the Godfather of the British EQ”. It is not an accessory bolted onto the guitar: it is half of the instrument. The extra-long neck solved the problem of the upper register; the Mega-Wing solved the problem of making that instrument sound like anything once it was plugged in.

Uli Jon Roth describes it as an idea that came before the circuit. In MusicRadar he puts it like this: “I had a dream of an active system which we called Mega-Wing. It had four coils, and originally it was able to switch from power humbucking to perfectly clean”. Four coils, and the ability to go from power humbucking to absolutely clean.

The reason for the electronic redesign is documented, and it is distinctly unglamorous: the first Sky Guitar sounded wonderful unplugged and disappointed through an amp. In the Guitar World piece carried by Yahoo, Roth sums it up as “It sounded beautiful when I was playing it unplugged… But as soon as I plugged it in, it was less than convincing”. Hence the commission to Oram. In the same interview Roth reckons that developing the entire system took about three years, with a cautious “I think”: it is his recollection, not a documented date.

The 80dB that blew up amplifiers

The original Mega-Wing had an 80dB gain stage. That figure appears both in MusicRadar and in Phil Weller’s article published in Guitar Player on June 26, 2025, and on its own it explains the rest of the story. Roth’s line is the one quoted everywhere: “It had a gain stage of 80dB. You could blow up any amp with that – and I did!”.

This is not interview hyperbole. Roth names specific amplifiers and specific survival times from the testing.

Amplifier	How long it lasted
Vox AC30	About 30 minutes
Fender Twin	Around an hour
EVH 5150 (two heads)	About 10 seconds
Old Marshall Super Leads	Survived
Blackstar Artist	Survived

On the two 5150s, the verbatim quote in MusicRadar is withering: “They sounded great for about 10 seconds, then they were fried!”. In the same conversation Roth describes what the instrument feels like to play with an image that has stuck to the Sky Guitar ever since: “The guitar is like a spaceship; like a Formula 1 car”.

It is worth noting what survived, because that is the useful detail: the old Marshall Super Leads and the Blackstar Artist. Roth names them as the two that held up, but he does not explain why; none of the sources consulted offers a technical reason, so none is proposed here.

The other problem: where to put the electronics

The longer the neck became, the harder the system was to house. That is how the journalist Phil Weller sums it up, in his own words rather than Roth’s, in his Guitar Player article of June 26, 2025: “the longer the neck grew, the more difficult it was to house the Mega-Wing”. That is a woodworking constraint rather than a sonic one, and it shapes the design of the whole instrument.

The solution for the pickups was every bit as unorthodox. Once the fingerboard extends over the body, the classic neck-pickup position disappears. In the Edenwaith archive, Roth explains: “I even have one of the pickups mounted under the fretboard at the 24th fret”. One of the pickups sits under the fingerboard, level with the 24th fret. The English Wikipedia entry corroborates that detail, describing an Oram pickup hidden beneath the 24th fret.

The three generations: Mega-Wing I, II and III

The only thing that separates the three generations in documented form is how they are powered. It is worth stating that bluntly, because forums and auto-generated pages circulate technical comparisons between versions that no source supports.

Generation	Documented power source	Where it is documented
Mega-Wing I	“battery powered” on the series page; “9-volt lithium battery” on the Silver Sky 7 page	Silver Sky Series category page and official Silver Sky 7 product page
Mega-Wing II	9-volt batteries	Official Dolphin Sky product page
Mega-Wing III	External 18-volt supply, switchable from 110 to 240 V	Official Mega-Wing III System product page

On the Silver Sky Series, the official site does say something comparative about the Mega-Wing I: it has less gain than the premium models, but “substantially higher than that of any other guitar on the market”. And it describes those models as “fully-fledged Sky Guitars in their own right and play just as well, but they offer less frills”.

What is not known about the Mega-Wing I and the Mega-Wing II

No official specifications have been published for either of the first two generations. No coil count, no controls, no frequency response, no transition dates between versions. If you come across a table comparing the three generations in technical detail, be suspicious: it is almost certainly invented, or extrapolated from the Mega-Wing III.

Development of the current system, according to the official Mega-Wing III System page, began in the late 1980s. It is credited to John Oram in cooperation with Uli Jon Roth.

What exactly the Mega-Wing III contains

The Mega-Wing III is sold as a complete system and its make-up is set out on the official product page. Here is the list, item by item.

Item	What it is
Black Box	The brain of the system. The official page describes it as “the brain of Mega Wing – the electronics, gain and EQ”
Pickups	2 power humbuckers + 1 single coil
Power	18-volt supply, switchable from 110 V to 240 V
Controls	5: volume, treble, mid-range, bass and gain
Selector	5 positions
Switches	2, humbucker to single coil
Connection	Stereo cable with TRS connectors
Magnets	A mix of ceramic and Alnico 5
Winding	By hand, by Boris and Fiona Dommenget

The EQ in the Black Box was designed by John Oram. The gain control is the element the official site singles out as unique: it describes it as “a feature found on no other guitar on the market”. And that is not empty marketing once you grasp what it implies: the saturation point of the preamp is set from the guitar, before anything reaches the amplifier.

On some model pages, such as the Infinity Sky, that fifth control is named “master gain”. It is the same function labeled two different ways across pages of the official catalog.

Phantom power down a stereo cable

The Mega-Wing III carries no battery inside the guitar: the current arrives through the cable itself. Truth in Shredding describes it as “The electronics run off of phantom power via a stereo 1/4 inch input cable from a proprietary power source”, and that fits exactly the two items that do appear on the official site: the stereo cable with TRS connectors and the external 18-volt supply.

In practice this makes the power supply part of the live rig. In the listing of Roth’s gear compiled by Equipboard, the Mega-Wing III power supply appears on his pedalboard, alongside the two BluGuitar Amp1 units and the rest of the pedals. Treat that with caution: Equipboard is a crowd-sourced listing, not an official source or a manufacturer’s note.

What “low impedance” means and why it changes the sound

The Mega-Wing III pickups are low impedance. The official page calls them “specially designed low impedance pickups” and specifies that they are wound by hand by Boris and Fiona Dommenget and tuned to interact with the EQ and gain stages of the system’s sound engine.

Put in plain terms, and explained as a general principle of electric guitar pickups rather than as a claim made by the brand:

A conventional electric guitar pickup is a coil with thousands of turns of very fine wire. Lots of turns means lots of output, but also a lot of impedance: several thousand ohms. That large coil behaves like a filter. Together with the cable, the potentiometers and the amplifier input it forms a circuit that rolls off the top end and, above all, makes the sound depend on which cable you use and how long it is. That is why a long, cheap cable dulls a passive guitar.

A low-impedance pickup does the opposite: fewer turns, less resistance. The signal leaving it is weaker, but much flatter, with more top-end extension and without that parasitic filter. And it is far less sensitive to whatever comes next: the cable stops coloring the sound.

The price you pay is that a weak signal like that is no good for driving an amplifier directly. It needs a preamp. That is where the Black Box comes in: it amplifies, applies Oram’s EQ circuit and hands the amplifier a signal whose gain and tonal shaping have already been decided at the guitar. That is the real reason a Sky Guitar sounds different from a passive guitar before a note is even played, and also the reason it needs power to work at all.

The magnets: ceramic and Alnico 5

The humbuckers combine ceramic and Alnico 5 magnets, according to the official Mega-Wing III System page. The site does not explain how they are distributed between the coils or on what basis, so the only thing that can be stated with confidence is exactly that: both magnet types coexist within the same system.

What the Mega-Wing III costs on its own

The Mega-Wing III System is sold separately for 2,400 dollars, and the Mega-Wing III Power Supply for 850 dollars, the official catalog price checked on September 12, 2026, at sky-guitars.com. These figures are in US dollars and, according to the About us page, exclude VAT or sales tax, import duties, customs fees and local taxes; the cost of shipping is not stated.

This site sells nothing and has no connection with the manufacturer: the binding price and the only route to ordering are those of sky-guitars.com.

Which catalog models carry the Mega-Wing III

The 18-volt Mega-Wing III forms part of the standard specifications of the current catalog, alongside the 12-LED position light system, the 24-carat gold-plated plates and the Tronical Powertune self-tuning machine head. It appears explicitly on the pages for the Bianca Sky, the Raven Sky, the Emperor Sky, the Infinity Sky, the Mighty Wing, the Ebony Sky 7, the Sky of Lionheart 7, the Sky Super Strat and the electric half of the double-neck Aurora Sky.

The two documented exceptions are the Dolphin Sky, the official replica of the first Sky Guitar of 1983, which carries the Mega-Wing II running on 9-volt batteries, and the Silver Sky Series, which the official site credits with the battery-powered Mega-Wing I (the Silver Sky 7 page specifies a 9-volt lithium battery), with the Zeno Sky contradiction noted above.