Roger Rossmeisl

Roger Rossmeisl (1927 in Kiel – 1979 in Berlin) was a German luthier who designed electric guitars in the 1950s and '60s for the US companies Rickenbacker and Fender.

Roger's father Wenzel Rossmeisl (June 28, 1902 in Kiel – April 3, 1975 in Munich) was a German jazz guitarist and had learned luthiery in Mittenwald.

Meanwhile, electrical components such as coils and magnets came from headphones and other equipment of the German armed forces (Wehrmacht) [1] In the late 1930s Wenzel sent his son for traditional luthiery training in Mittenwald, a center of violin and guitar making.

Save for the enduring Telecaster Thinline, many Rossmeisl-designed Fender guitars proved to be commercial failures that were phased out by the turn of the decade amid the epochal resurgence of Gibson's solid-body models.

Although Rossmeisl was assiduous in cultivating personal relationships with the likes of Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass, his archtop Fender Montego I/II and LTD lines (designed to compete with Gibson's upscale, jazz-oriented Citation and Super 400 as both the culmination of Rossmeisl's oeuvre and Fender's most expensive electric guitars of the era, notably exemplified by the hand-carved LTD) did not garner any prominent endorsers during the incipience of jazz fusion (which hewed close to rock's contemporaneous predilection for solid-body models) and could not compete with the more accessible price points of such Gibson hollow-body mainstays as the ES-175.