Wenzel and Roger Rossmeisl
Wenzel Rossmeisl (born June 28, 1902 in Kiel , † April 3, 1975 in Munich ) was a jazz guitarist and had learned the guitar making trade in Mittenwald . He and his son Roger Rossmeisl (* 1927 in Kiel, † 1979 in Berlin) produced the first electric guitars made in Germany .
life and work
Father and son Rossmeisl built striking guitars and Hawaiian guitars in their joint workshop , which were shown at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1947. Father and son were pioneers in Germany in the field of electrical sound pick-up. Roger Rossmeisl built an electromagnetic pickup for jazz guitarist Coco Schumann around 1946/47 . Its electrical components such as coils and magnets came from headphones and other pieces of equipment of the German Wehrmacht . At the end of the 1930s, Wenzel had sent his son to Mittenwald for traditional training , a center for making string and plucked instruments. Wenzel Rossmeisl sold his products under the brand name Roger from the late 1930s, as one of very few strike guitar manufacturers in Germany, until 1962. He also sold guitars from the Italian manufacturer Eko in Germany.
In September 1953 Roger Rossmeisl closed his company in Berlin and emigrated to the USA . After a short time at the guitar manufacturer Gibson in Kalamazoo , Michigan , he worked for the Californian manufacturer Rickenbacker , whose company founder Adolph Rickenbacher came from Switzerland. At Rickenbacker, Roger Rossmeisl played a key role in the development of new product lines. A well-known design by Roger Rossmeisl is the Rickenbacker 325 electric guitar model, first presented in 1958 . In 1962 he moved to Fender , where he was responsible for the development of archtop guitars and semi-resonance guitars in the style of the Gibson ES-335 . The distinctive shape of the guitar top is characteristic of Rossmeisl's designs for Rickenbacker and Fender : While the top of traditional archtop guitars has a uniform curve similar to violins and cellos , Rossmeisl's instruments have a strong bulge on the edge of the top and an almost flat surface in the middle of the top . In the English-speaking world, this design feature is still referred to as "German Carve", alluding to the origin of the inventor . After the striking guitars designed by Roger Rossmeisl for Fender remained commercial failures, he returned to Germany in 1973. He gave up building guitars and died in 1979 at the age of 52.
literature
- Rainer Kordus: Roger Guitars - Success Story of a German Luthier Family , in: Electric Guitars; Special issue of the magazine Guitar & Bass on the history of the electric guitar, pp. 112–115. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 2004. ISSN 0934-7674
- Carlo May: Vintage. Guitars and their stories. In it: Chapter Everything Roger? - The Rossmeisls and their guitars, pp. 68–71. MM-Musik-Media-Verlag, Ulm 1994. ISBN 3-927954-10-1
Web links
- Rossmeisl and Roger guitars on schlaggitarren.de
- Peter R. McCormack: The Rossmeisl Guitar Legacy - Roger to Rickenbacker on rickresource.com (English)
- Philip Kubicki: Rossmeisl Guitars - Father and Son Operation on vintageguitar.com (English)
- Photo gallery with a typical Roger strike guitar on vintageaudioberlin.de
(all accessed on September 9, 2011)