Ronni Le Tekrø

Ronni Le Tekrø
Ronni Le Tekrø at Rockefeller Music Hall, Oslo Photo:Steinar Knudsen
Background information
Birth name	Rolf Ågrim Tekrø
Born	5 October 1963 (1963-10-05) Oslo, Norway
Genres	Hard rock, Heavy metal, Glam metal, Pop rock
Occupations	Musician, songwriter
Instruments	Guitar, Vocals, Sitar, Keyboards, Synthesizer
Years active	1982–present
Associated acts	TNT, Vagabond, Terje Rypdal
Website	www.ronniletekro.com/
Notable instruments
Hamburgerguitar Quarterstepper guitar, Fender Stratocaster(H-S), ESP Holocaster custom guitar

Ronni Le Tekrø (born Rolf Ågrim Tekrø on 5 October 1963) is a Norwegian guitarist best known for playing with the Norwegian hard rock band TNT and as a solo guitarist.

Born in Oslo Tekrø moved to Raufoss at a young age, and he has lived there all his life except between 1982 and 1985 when he lived in Trondheim.

The Le Tekrø sound

Le Tekrø plays with more emphasis on volume and hard attack on the strings than distortion. He often uses arpeggios, like in the solo in "Intuition".

He covered Alice Cooper's "Welcome to My Nightmare" in his solo album Extra Strong String. Le Tekrø has collaborated with the Norwegian guitarist and composer Terje Rypdal and has released three albums featuring the fruits of that collaboration. Le Tekrø's vocals tend to be deep, with emphasis on vibrato and falsetto. His inspirations as a guitarist include Steve Hillage, Brian May, Jimmy Page, Brian Robertson, Jimi Hendrix, and Ted Nugent.^{[citation needed]}. He also claims to have invented the "Machine Gun Style." *George Lynch of Dokken states Le Tekrø's solo for "Caught between the Tigers" is "a real face-melter. It's spine-tingling."^{[citation needed]}

• He owns his own studio located in the woods of Toten, Norway called Studio Studio.

Equipment

Le Tekrø's main guitar live is the so called "Holocaster". Originally a light pink ESP guitar from the early eighties. The head is signed by close friend Brian Robertson from Thin Lizzy and formerly Motörhead. Le Tekrø uses his black early seventies Fender Stratocaster as a back-up for live performances. On the "Atlantis" tour Tekrø uses a Epiphone 1959 or a Morgan strat on the opening song "Hello, Hello".

He is also known for pioneering the use of the Quarterstepper Guitar. This guitar has twice as many frets as normal guitar. Normal guitars have frets like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5..., but the Quarterstepper has frets of 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5... This guitar was invented by Bernie Hamburger of Hamburgerguitar and Le Tekrø himself. He used the guitar for the solo in Wisdom from the Intuition album, and several others recordings. Hamburger also built a 12 string hollow body that Le Tekrø has used on various tours and recordings.

In the studio Le Tekrø uses a wide range of effects and amps.

His trademark Fender Stratocaster is notably unusually set up, with a Rockinger tremolo bridge and a Seymour Duncan pickup at the bridge position, no middle pickup, and a custom made Italian pickup in the tail position.

For live performances Le Tekrø uses:

• OD-1 Overdrive
• BF-2 Flanger
• CE-2 Chorus
• Roland RE-150 Space Echo Tape Delay,
• Dunlop CryBaby
• Digitech Whammy II
• Marshall 2204 heads
• Marshall 1960 A cabinets

Wiccan witch

Le Tekrø has been practicing the nature religion Wicca since the 1980s, and he labels himself a witch. He even has a masters degree in Wicca witchcraft.^{[citation needed]}. He claims to know how to store energies in stones out in the forest and go out and charge up his batteries from them when he needs to.^{[citation needed]} He says in a Norwegian newspaper interview in 2007 that Wicca helps him deal with such matters as death and guilt and that he prefers this to "fairytales from the Middle East which have thrown an entire world into war".

Impact

Ronni Le Tekro has influenced many musicians over the years such as Zakk Wylde, George Lynch, Nuno Bettencourt and even Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne has a picture of Ronni Le Tekro hanging up in his home alongside Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen,and his close friend Randy Rhodes. He has been placed no 58 on the top 100 greatest Hard rock guitarists of all time. Also in May 2009 GuitarWorld Magazine Placed him on their list of top cult leader guitarists

Discography

TNT

Tekrø performing at Norway Rock Festival 2008.

• TNT (1982)
• Knights of the New Thunder (1984)
• Tell No Tales (1987)
• Intuition (1989)
• Realized Fantasies (1992)
• Three Nights in Tokyo (Live) (1992)
• Firefly (1997)
• Transistor (1999)
• Give me a Sign EP (2003)
• My Religion (2004)
• All the Way to the Sun (2005)
• Live in Madrid - CD + DVD package (2006)
• The New Territory (2007)
• Atlantis (2008)
• A Farewell to Arms (2010)

Solo and collaborated records

• Wonderland (Embee Normann) (1993)
• Dedicated to Thin Lizzy (Bad Habitz) (1993)
• Vagabond (Vagabond) (1994)
• A Huge Fan Of Life (Vagabond) (1995)
• Rypdal & Tekrø (Terje Rypdal) (RCA 74321 242962) (1997)
• Rypdal/Tekrø II (Terje Rypdal) (1997)
• Starfire (Jorn Lande) 2000- Guest on "The Day the Earth Caught Fire"
• Extra Strong String (2000)
• Magica Lanterna (2002)
• Under the Misteltoe (Evil Elf Band) (2002)
• The Radiosong (Terje Rypdal) (2002)
• Camouflage (Wild Willy's Gang) (2005)
• Gods Of Thunder - A Norwegian Tribute To KISS ( Covered Detroit Rock City by Kiss along with former band-colleague Tony Harnell. )
• Unlocking the Past(Jorn Lande)(2007)(guest on "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" rerecording)
• Kingdom of Norway (2007)
• Demonoir' (1349 (band)) (2010)
• Social Experiment (2011)

Literature

• Østbø, Stein Hekta : Ronni Le Tekrø : et liv i rock, N.W. Damm & Søn AS, Oslo (September 2007), 211 pages, ISBN 978-82-04-13130-0 (includes CD)