“When musicians were looking for a specific sound or concept, they would come visit me at the factory. Jimi Hendrix was not pleased with the sounds he would get when he bit his strings, so I developed a gauge which he thought ‘tasted’ right. The .006 and .007 first strings that he used to bite gave him the sound he was looking for.

James How, Founder and Chairman of Rotosound, speaking in 1992

Lars Mullen talks to Jason How, Chairman of Rotosound about the early days of the company.

My dad James How pioneered all this back in 1958 and I have documents of him looking into making strings as far back as ‘53. He was certainly buying materials then, in reference to his collection of Austrian Zithers, which he was using as a musician, but couldn’t get strings, and with his engineering background decided to make them himself. He designed his own machine and started up in his shed, simple as that really.

Originally he called the company Top Strings, but he couldn’t copyright the name, so Rotop followed which evolved into Rotosound around 1965, derived from the Latin word roto, which means round. This of course tied in nicely with the company’s flagship and the now world renowned, round wound bass string. Bass players loved this new round
wound sound that cuts through the mix with more definition, as opposed to the flatwound string of that time, which was dull in comparison, and the only place to buy them was from James How at Rotosound.

Jason proudly talks me through the archive wall of fame as he individually points out the now famous pictures that adorn the office walls. “One memorable event for me, was when John Entwistle popped in for a photo shoot. It was literally just a month before he died, I got in all this booze for him and all he drank all day was tea, bless him, such a nice guy what a waste”.

“It was John who actually asked us back in the 60’s, for a louder, bigger sound from a set of bass strings, hence the round wound bass strings he started using around ’63. He thought, well I’m the bass player in The Who, but I can now compete with the guitarist, and as we now know the rest is history, and evidence that this was a totally unique product at the time, and none of the other companies had cottoned on to making round wound bass strings”.

New String Winding Machines
As we head downstairs, the walls are once again draped with many a famed bass playing fan of Rotosound strings. We entered an area where Jason feels totally at home, the workshop floor, noticeably proud of his whirring babies, he explains,“These new string winding machines are state of the art, but only a modern update of my dad’s original designs. I’ve strived to keep and maintain all the important aspects within character and specifications of the string being constructed by hand. We’ve maintained the core and wrap sizes throughout the string construction, so the strings sound exactly as before, but we now have a much higher consistency and quality with all the parameters under strict control.But having said all that, we still make the flat wound bass strings by hand, this is still an area of the hand made product that will stay that way for a while, so we are really an amalgam of new technology and old traditional skills.

Taking Over the Family Reins
Jason is the first to admit, it was a major task to take over the helm after the death of his father in 1994, as he explains,“Yes, that’s true, and what made it worse, for various reasons the company was in pretty poor shape, not helped by dad’s poor health and the lack of investment and competition from overseas. So it was a big step, I literally filled up the car with strings and went straight out on the road as a rep, I mean, this was literally do or die. We can now offer just about every aspect and string requirements to any bass player within our range, even double bass players are catered for. After all this time, the RS66LD swing bass set, is still our best seller. Acoustic players can choose between the Country Gold’s or Jumbo King sets, whilst all styles within electric guitar are on tap within nine of our famous Roto sets in the coloured coded packets, the Roto Orange Hybrids at 9-46 gauge is very popular. The longest running set is, can you believe, the Ukulele set dating back to the early ‘60’s, even back then we had household names endorsing the strings, including Humphrey Littleton and his band.