1980 - 1984 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.)

Die "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.

Angela "Angie" lived in a dilapidated but beautiful Spanish house in Whitley Terrace on the Hollywood Hills with a somehow stranded movie producer. The guy who opened the door after ringing the bell several times in a confused way must have been that producer. He politely asked us to come back in a couple of hours because he was on acid and this was not the right moment. "Okay, okay, we'll come back later..."

So Züli and I drove with our rental car to Hollywood to the parking lot of a liquor store. There we hung out with a few bags and just watched the people. That alone had already something LSD-like. A never-ending bustle of hectic characters in the form of fucked up, totally finished guys, convertible driving juppies, obvious drug dealers and break clowns, who seemed to drive in circles with their arschteur Ferraris and Lamborghinis all the time, so that everybody could see them. Just typical Hollywood. At some point we were fed up and went for a little ride and then we drove back to Whitley Terrace.

Dennis was the name of the supposed film producer and he was probably halfway down from his trip. And Angela was there, too. Yes, on the first floor was a free room with two beds where we could stay. They were also happy about the beer cans we had brought with us, because there was quite an emptiness in their fridge. Anyway, this Dennis seemed to be on his last legs financially.

We told him about our plans for Eddie and Dennis advised us to drive down to Sunset. There's a lot of guitar stores there. So we started to go, and we were standing in front of the "Guitar Center". We went in, and there they were, the Kramer guitars with our tremolos. We got into a conversation with one of the salesmen about that, "Yeah, yeah, Van Halen, wow! And the next thing he announced was that Eddie was expected here in a few minutes because he had to pick something up. And you wouldn't believe it, seven minutes later, we shook hands with Eddie Van Halen. And the man even spoke some German, because he was born in Holland (they usually can).

Then we talked a little bit and mentioned that we had a guitar for him in the car, a red and white painted starshape with Tru Tune tremolo. So we all went out to our car and unpacked the Starshape. Eddie, anyway excited about Tru Tunes, and so we took this nice photo on Sunset Boulevard. We had achieved everything we wanted out of nowhere. And even more ...

On the way back we bought a load of food and drinks and made ourselves comfortable with Dennis and Angela on the terrace. An amazing view over L.A. ... Every now and then a hummingbird swarmed up to the drinking station, which was specially installed for him on a terrace post, standing almost silently, wonderfully exotic in the air and sucking water out of the glass tube with its long, thin beak. Like a large moth or an oversized pigeon's tail. Where else can you ever see a hummingbird! These little propeller animals are just incredibly bizarre.

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!

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.

Mac Wonderlea

This Mac was a wonderful writer for the trade magazine of the time and our fan from the very beginning. (He also had a little crush on our accountant Gerda Maus during our first appearance at the music fair. Well, her last name was already part of the program ...) Apart from that, he liked our products, almost invoked our positive energy and loved our sometimes abstruse ads. And he was a guitarist, had a studio near Leverkusen and was a fan of Frank Sinatra. But unfortunately he was also a fan of hard drinks, which ultimately put him underground in the 90s. A real loss (and not only because he always wrote nice things about us).

1983 – Jörg Sürie

1984 The Tremolo-Stealing

Cult Catalogs

1983 – NAMM - and Buddy in Chicago