“Vox AC30s lasted half an hour and Fender Twins lasted an hour. 5150s sounded great for about 10 seconds, then they were fried”: Uli Jon Roth’s struggle to contain his brainchild, the Sky guitar – and why he never played Jimi Hendrix’s black Strat

Uli Jon Roth.

In the 1970s Uli Jon Roth was a Strat-slinger with the Scorpions who loved to modify his guitar to sound like a violin. By the early 1980s he wanted more.

“Coming from the violin, a lot of the techniques in my head had the logic of that,” he tells Guitar World. “The leads were very demanding, coming up into cyberspace – traditional guitars could not do that.”