ULI JON ROTH

Ulrich (Uli Jon) Roth, a German virtuoso guitarist, started out in the early 70's with his band Dawn Road which also had Rudolf Schenker, Klaus Meine, and Francis Buchholz. Schenker and Meine convinced Roth and Buchholz to reform the band Scorpions again [Note: Scorpions had broken up shortly after Michael Schenker, Rudolf's younger brother, left Scorpions to join the band UFO]. Ulrich Roth went on to be the lead guitarist for Scorpions from 1973 to 1978. He recorded four studio albums and one live album with Scorpions. By the time of the fourth album, Taken By Force, he started to have conflicting ideas where the band should go. He left the band in 1978 to form his own band Electric Sun. Electric Sun went to make three albums, Earthquake(1979), Firewind(1981), and Beyond the Astral Skies(1984). While the first two albums were similar to his work he had done with Scorpions, the third album began to show his love for classical music by combining the soaring sounds of his Sky guitar and classical music. After that album he pretty much disappeared from the musical world for the next 10 years until he released Prologue to the Symphonic Legends in 1996. The only significant appearances he made between those two albums was the Spirit of Jimi Hendrix concert in 1991 and the Symphonic Rock for Europe concert in 1993 which features many of the songs which would later appear on Prolgoue. In May and June of 1998 he played with Michael Schenker (another former Scorpions guitarist) and Joe Satriani on the European leg of the G3 tour.

About the Sky 7-string guitar: Ulrich Roth has or at least has had at least five Sky guitars and they are made by a British luthier, and the guitarist from Fair Warning also uses Sky guitars. The first three Sky guitars were like this: One had 36 frets, another had 42 frets, and a third one is fretless which was used on the Beyond the Astral Skies album. At least two of the guitars had 7 strings. Here is what Uli had to say about his Sky guitar: "Back when I was with the Scorpions, a guitar builder in Brighton offered to make me my own guitar any way I would like, and I thought, 'What a concept!'. I questioned everything that had come before and tried to improve on it. I wanted more range, so I came up with a body shaped like a teardrop, but it wasn't visually appealing, so I added an S shape to the teardrop to give it more balance. I had the builder put as many frets on the neck as he possibly could. On my current Sky guitar, the frets above the 24th fret are placed in whole tones because it is too difficult to play above there with the frets placed so closely together. I didn't want to lose the warm sound of the neck pickup, so we mounted the pickup under the fretboard," he continues. That actually worked and sounded good. My pickups are made by John Oram, who figured out how to make a pickup that provides full-sounding tone and great sustain in the guitar's highest range. The next step was to add more range in the bass end, so I came up with the idea of a seven-string guitar."

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