1980 - Tru Tune Tremolo, Eddie VH, USA
1980 - TTT – TRU TUNE TREMOLO
Right from the start, product development was my main concern and I had just discovered the new, first Floyd Rose tremolo on Matthias Jabs' Stratocaster. A total insider tip: uncompromising clamping of the strings at both ends (saddle and bridge). Matthias, who often came in at the time, was rightly enthusiastic about it, but at the same time he criticized the idea: "If a string should ever get out of tune - which can happen with extreme string pulling - the clamping lock on the saddle had to be loosened with a time-consuming and awkward Allen key in order to retune it.
That's how I got the idea with the fine tuners: Clamping only on the saddle (which always caused a certain friction problem together with the tuners). Tuning the tremolo with fine tuners (which were already known from string instruments). The Rockinger TRU TUNE TREMOLO was born! It worked perfectly. And to take things to the extreme, we had developed a small Allen key holder which was screwed onto the back of the headstock to accommodate the necessary clamp keys. By the way, this key holder is still copied by several Asian companies today.
Shortly afterwards we had our first stand at the Frankfurt Music Fair - a real adventure! Harald, now a freelancer, had created a kind of Hawaiian feeling with artificial palms for the stand. Our neighbour was KRAMER-USA. Their boss, Dennis Berardi, saw our tremolo and was fascinated. Jawoll: The Americans were enthusiastic about our fine-tune-tremolos and the pickguards in "mint-green". In no time at all, a contract was drawn up and we had to increase the production volume considerably.
Dennis Berrardi was immediately able to enthuse Edward Van Halen (first Floyd Rose supporter) for it, and our Rockinger tremolo was then released in the USA as "Edward Van Halen Tremolo". All the other German guitar companies and of course the suppliers were in very bad shape because of the Japanese competition. The Hardware Company was all the more jubilant, because we were constantly submitting orders for hundreds of these tremolos, wonderful! That was a good year!
In life not everything goes smoothly (just as a warning, in case someone hasn't noticed it yet ...). Of course this includes missed opportunities. For example, I got hammered into a historically important conversation with Keith Richards and Ron Wood. Just in the moment when we shook hands, my business partner Ingo called me on his mobile phone that he was now standing at the backstage entrance of the hall and if I could get him in. So I apologized to the two Stones and said: "Just a moment, I'll be right back. It's much better if all four of us talk together." But that was the end of the matter. When I finally had Ingo in the Meet & Greet lounge, Keith and Ronnie were long gone. These things happen, and you can get angry about them in hindsight. It's like when the shaving brush fell into the toilet. But what the heck, you gotta be able to put it away. There are worse things than not talking to Keith and Ron. (But Eddie van Halen, I really wanted to meet him. Then I would also switch off my mobile phone first. I promise.)
The "grooves" Tele-Pickguards
Harald once had a keen idea for Keith Richards, who, as was well known, was not averse to drugs of any kind. So Harald came up to order brass Tele-pickguards from Müller & Sohn, in which there were several grooves, like the grooves in Strat tremolos of that time, in which the grub screws were guided to adjust the height of the individual saddless. But these grooves were probably eight centimeters long and of course deeper, so that you could sprinkle the cocaine on the pickguard and then drag it over the grooves with a check card or something similar, where it remained nicely in-line until the Keith or whoever from the Stones came with the straw to gleefully suck it up his nose.
We have launched these pickguards before the concert in the Niedersachsenstadium about the organizer to hand over, but unfortunately never received a response to it, too bad!
1982 – Rockinger USA – Bernard Ayling
Unfortunately also Mister Floyd D. Rose had not slept, but on his part - independently of us - developed a fine tuner tremolo. This came to our ears at an opening party of Musicians Place "MP", a music store in Hannover. Job, the bearer of bad news, was in this case called Frank Untermayer and was an employee of the Hamer company. And Job Frank followed suit: Kramer intends to discontinue his collaboration with Rockinger in order to do business only with Floyd Rose in the future." The world is small ... Züli and I immediately flew to New Jersey, USA, to Kramer to get to the bottom of the rumors. Of course, the Kramer family tried to deny everything, or at least to talk down. But by chance we discovered a clue on a pinboard about the upcoming Floyd offensive. It all sounds like a spy thriller, I know...
Coincidence: Also in New Jersey, and in Asbury Park of all places, right next to the Kramer Factory, was a hip vintage guitar dealer named Bernard Ayling, who had occupied part of our booth at the Frankfurt trade fair. He spoke fluent German because he lived in the Saarland for twelve years as the son of an American occupying soldier. We visited him without further ado and described our situation to him. And lo and behold, he immediately offered enthusiastically to take over the USA distribution for our Tremolos.
Eddie Van Halen
On a trip to L.A., we actually met Eddie in the Guitar Center, who just had something to pick up. Super nice and as a Dutchman even speaks German. And "Conan The Barbarian" had just had its movie premiere!
A little bit strange for me is that in an interview, which he had given not too long before his death, he claimed that he had had the idea for the fine tuners. Now that was definitely my idea. But that's how history likes to be bent!
Total sustain from half a pound of brass!
Even our Tunamatic Wrap Around Bridge has ended up on one of Eddie Van Halen's double-neck guitars!
Back in Germany
Back in Germany, everything continued on the road to success. Besides the Tru-Tune, I had developed other locking tremolos: the "Les Trem II (Les Trem I was without a fine tuner), which could be anchored in the tailpiece cases of a Les Paul or SG in the same way, without having to change anything. A new addition was a special roller bridge in the dimensions of a Tunamatic bridge, which already then had a lateral locking possibility as well as two grub screws to fix it. I still don't know what the company "TonePros" is supposed to have a "patent" on. Furthermore, I am absolutely of the opinion that a "normal" Tunamatic bridge, which moves with the tremolo, works much better.
Rollers rarely roll well. Mostly they tend to rattle or jam. But that was not the spirit of the times. A real challenge: Telecaster with tremolo: I didn't stop brooding ... With success: After some back and forth we had finished the prototype ("Tellybrator"). A locking tremolo, which fit exactly on a Tele. However, we first had to drill a hole with a diameter of 20 millimeters for the pressure spring under the base plate, which was not visible from the outside. With the Tellybrator and other parts, we naturally also boosted our USA business even more.
Made in Germany
My friend, the "Doc", alias Klaus Peter Reinicke, gave me the idea to include the Mercedes car brand in our advertising campaign. "For the Americans, Mercedes is the symbol for German craftsmanship par excellence!" That's how the saying "It's not only Mercedes which makes German products famous" came about. Züli and I posed - both with guitar - in front of our neo-classical town hall on the hood of a 1968 double-lamp Mercedes 280-SE and announced that we designed excellent tremolos in addition to sauerkraut consumption.
Our success was astounding, with Bernard Ayling receiving various letters from marketing and advertising agencies saying that "such an ad would not work at all". But - cheeky as we were - we had them on the hook, the Americans!
To pack the Tremolos and other hardware we had bought a skin-pack machine. You put the stuff on a cardboard about the size of DIN A2, pull a transparent foil from a roll over it, and while a heating element heats the foil from above, you switch on a vacuum pump that sucks the foil over the hardware onto the cardboard and glues it. We had developed a new design for the cardboard to emphasize our "Made in Germany" for the Americans - Hermann the Cheruscan with a Rockinger Rocket in his stretched right hand. Today rather doubtful...
With the Tellybrator and various other parts we have of course also boosted our USA business even more. See for yourself!
Tellybrator & Bass-Tremolo
And soon there was not only the Tellybrator with fine tuners and the invisible pressure spring under the base plate, but even at Henner Malecha's insistence a bass tremolo with fine tuners.
Tone Prost
Also pay attention to the laterally lockable bridge (see above), my idea, which decades later was praised by the company Tone Pros as their ingenious, revolutionary innovation!
Karl Gölsdorf
It should also be mentioned here that my great-grandfather Karl was an ingenious inventor of steam locomotives. Over the years, he designed no less than forty-five models for the Austrian State Railways and invented the so-called Gölsdorf axle, which, in the case of locomotives with more than two axles, allowed the additional axles to move horizontally in curves to adapt to the radius of the curve.
In Vienna's first district they named a street after him and today you can google your fan club on the Internet.
Trans-Tremolo!
But that's not all! Ned Steinberger had just released his headless trans-tremolo, which can be adjusted in various steps, on the market. I was simply fascinated by the fact that someone had an idea and was actually able to implement it technically. Although it was a technical innovation that I personally don't need at all, because I'm not into country music and those super-harmonic lapsteel sounds..jpg)
But it was simply the incentive to find other technical solutions. I felt “challenged”! I started with this abstruse construction of a two-part body, the two parts of which could be swiveled towards each other, with the rear part acting as a tremolo lever to change the sound. By pushing the horn down or pulling it up, you could play chords up or down! The ball ends of the strings were attached to six reeds under a bracket with six grub screws, which could be used to adjust the height of each string. In addition, a rotatable, turret-like stop for various rest positions in semitone steps. Perhaps not a bad idea, but off to the garage for discarded inventions! “Nobody's buying that!”
But now some technology...
Usually a professional stationary router (also called copy router) has a lowerable, high-speed motor with a chuck for milling cutters of different diameters and profiles. Centrally underneath is a chuck for interchangeable guide pins, also of different diameters. These engage in the milled recesses of the template bases so that the body can only be moved as far as the guide pin fixed in the table allows. Thus the shape of the stencil is copied cleanly 1:1 into the body. And should a milling - for whatever reason - be too small, simply replace the guide pin with a smaller one so that the milling cutter can be moved a little more.
On this machine we also milled the bindings. For example, you take a guide pin with a diameter of eight millimetres and a milling cutter with a diameter of twelve millimetres, which then takes away two millimetres all round. Look at the nice sticker that Horst has stuck on the milling motor (10 years of drunk driving)!
Opa Osburg:
Our magnificent fret saw was built by a certain Friedel Osburg. He was an old Russian fighter who was "lucky" to have been hit in the leg by a grenade ricochet. So he was able to limp home and escape the inferno of Stalingrad. Osburg - who died in the mid-90s - was a mechanic and had a workshop in the working-class district of Hanover-Linden. Well, he wasn't a normal locksmith, but much more sophisticated: two lathes, milling and punching machines and whatever else. A certain problem, however, was that you had to endure at least half an hour of Russian stories at the beginning of every visit. But at least in that wonderful Linden dialect: "The Russians also had women in the army, and they were tougher than the men. Always with the bayonet right in, like animals"! Russia or no Russia, Friedel Osburg was no Nazi and a resourceful man. He made everything for our machines: tons of start-up pins and rings for our copy mills, glue press tools for bodies and so much more. Simply wonderful! Plus a punching and bending tool for the trussrod gear adjustment of our first Duesenberg Metal guitars in the 80s. When he had a good idea for us, he used to say: "Let me make you smart!"
Just our fretsaw machine, a really ingenious monster! A thick shaft with 24 saw blades and mounted in front of it an extremely massive unit that could be swivelled by a chain gear and on which four different necks could be clamped. The neck then swung through the saw blades at the push of a button, all the fret slots sawed at once and done. However, we always had certain concerns about safety because this plunging of over 20 saw blades into the fretboard wood during this sawing process meant a killer force. Wearing a helmet was the order of the day. Once, while sawing, a bass neck was actually cut and some saw blade splinters flew through the room. Fear and horror including financial damage.
Painting with Sascha
At that time, most guitar builders and smaller manufactories had their guitars varnished by the Clover company in Recklinghausen. They did a great job, but this endless back and forth by mail or UPS was really annoying. And the painter we found near Hannover was also great. But we still had to do the driving. Bring it there, pick it up. Bring, pick up .... So we decided to take the painting into our own hands as well. We needed our own, official painter! And we actually came across our Sascha.
Sascha, born in Russia, and now far away from home, actually wanted to become an cosmonaut (like all Russians), logo. But then he miraculously completed an apprenticeship as a guitar maker in the Bavarian luthier's Mecca Mittenwald. But in the company there he had mainly painted (exploited, like most apprentices), so he knew everything about it! Bernd Röttger, always a man of action, had constructed and welded together the varnishing booth shortly before. We were prepared.
Production – come on!
After the big workshop rebuilding we really got going. Our machinery became more and more sophisticated, especially thanks to the loving help of grandpa Osburg. For example an ingenious fretwire cutter. Ingenious, simple with two about 15mm thick steel discs on one axis and outside holes with different diameters for different fret wire sizes. One buys fret wire in bulk on rolls. You put the wire through the two holes, pull one disc against the other with a long lever, and when the wire cracks, that's it! And a stop for the right length!
Winkelmann
Now also the carpenter Klaus Winkelmann started with us. He was responsible for the wood preparation, i.e. formatting, dressing, gluing, planing to thickness and shaping. And we had installed a gigantic extraction system for chips and dust, thick silver pipes running through the rooms.
