Rossco Wright, master guitar-design engineer, has imagined and forged guitar designs so innovative and tough they could not be contained on earth. 

In fact, one of Wright’s “SoloEtte” Guitars traveled more than 376 million miles and orbited Earth more than 15,000 times.

The inventor is now turning the jazz guitar world on its pegs. But, we’ll get to that in a chord or two.

Wright, who started his career in St. Louis, Missouri in the late ‘60s as a full-time professional guitar-repair technician, said he tired of seeing hundreds of broken-off guitar heads as the fragile, head-heavy instruments fell and broke like dry spaghetti.

So, Wright tucked the tuning gears back on the other end, and it became shorter and so unbreakable that a “travel-guitar” was born. In 1993, his innovative SoloEtte Travel Guitar began to amass great popularity in elite circles due to its rugged and efficient design.

The quality of this guitar could not be ignored.

It caught the eye of Sharon Isbin, the Department Head of Classical Guitar Studies at Julliard School of Music in NYC.

She played it. She endorsed it, and she now travels the world with it.

The undeniable quality created a large demand. Wright went from selling a few guitars to selling 5,320 guitars which he built in his shop in Eugene Oregon with ten employees.

The Wright Stuff

Wright’s invention could not be contained. It literally left the planet. It took off!!

In 1995, Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield took a SoloEtte when they blasted off to the Mir Space Station. He gave it to guitar-playing Cosmonaut friend Thomas Reiter as part of a gift-giving with the Russians.

(Pictired playing “SoloEtte”) Thomas Arthur Reiter is a retired European astronaut and is a Brigadier General in the German Air Force currently working as ESA Interagency Coordinator and Advisor to the Director General at the European Space Agency.