FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2009
INTERVIEW: Bumblefoot
Ron
Thal, better known as Bumblefoot, is a busy dude right about now. In
addition to his solo career – including his latest album Abnormal, now distributed here in Australia by Riot Entertainment
– he finds time for projects such as playing guitar for metal queen
Lita Ford and being lead guitarist in a little band you may have heard
of, Guns ‘N’ Roses. Thal’s workaholism verges on the humbling, and when
I first called for our interview he was baled up in band rehearsal.
When I called back later it was pretty late for Bumblefoot but I found
him as animated and excitable as his playing.
How ya been?
Good,
good! Been insanely busy, but I always seem to be like that. I never
know how to say no to things, at the sacrifice of sleep and sanity.
Who were you rehearsing with today?
I
have a new band that I’m starting up. I don’t want to say anything
about it until the line-up is exact. We’re just waiting to see who our
bass player is definitely going to be, but it’s going to be heavier
than a lot of the other stuff I’ve done. It’s gonna be interesting. A
lot of fretless guitar. I’m really looking forward to recording and
touring and getting it out there really quick.
Is it going to be under your name, or are you gonna do a Chickenfoot?
It’s
gonna be a different one. Actually I saw Chickenfoot last night. I got
to hang out with Joe Satriani a little bit and catch up. They have such
a great vibe, so down to earth and just having fun. Picture the
Hagar-era Van Halen with Chad Smith, Chilli Pepper grooves and
impeccable, ass-kicking guitar every time. It’s just a great thing.
Now, my first question was submitted by my mate and fellow Aussie guitarist Chris Szkup (www.cs-songs.com)
Chris Szkup! Wonderful guy!
Yeah! He's putting out a CD soon.
He’s a great guitar player, and such a super-sweet human being.
His first question was, what are your memories of Australia on the Guns ‘n’ Roses tour?
Oh
man, let’s start off with the flight to Australia. At first I was
dreading the flight because it was a good 14 hours, but it was the most
comfortable flight I’ve ever been on. It was the first time I actually
had a full comfortable night’s sleep on an airplane in my entire life,
so it’s the first time I ever experienced that. So it was off to a good
start. I think we landed in Sydney then shot all the way over to Perth.
Then we drove up to Fremantle and visited Bon Scott’s grave, paid our
respects. Just the little things you remember. I remember being on a
train and there was a young girl who had part of her face painted – she
was going to a football game and the way it looked was something
different to what you see in America. She had a little flag painted
under her eye. It’s the little things like that. I remember those
things more than the shows. Just the normal, human moments. Those are
the things that really stand out. Y’know, the view from the hotel in
Sydney overlooking the Opera House and the bridge and everything.
Walking around with my wife, Sebastian Bach and a couple of guys from
his band, and suddenly some guy in a trenchcoat comes running up to us
going “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and he opens his coat up and pulls out Axl’s
microphone. It turns out that the night before, when Axl through his
microphone out, that’s the guy that caught it. Oh what else… I remember
also in Sydney eating in a really nice restaurant along the water at
night… just the nice moments like that. The shows are always… how do
you even describe a show? It starts and your brain is in this other
mode, and next thing you know the show is over and it’s more like one
of those hazish dreams: “Did I just play, or didn’t I?” So unless
something very significant happens in the show, I don’t really remember
the show in a very clear way. But it’s everything after. Going back
afterwards and meeting Chris Szkup and his girl, hanging with them. I
can still picture seeing them and this nice drawing they gave me in a
frame, which is hanging in my living room right now. It’s hanging over
my wife’s head as she’s sitting on the couch right now watching Hell’s
Kitchen on TiVo. So it’s little things like that. No matter what
happens, good or bad, those are the fond memories that make it an
endearing experience you cherish. The dinners, the hanging out.
One
thing I thought was really cool was the bio on your site. I’m so tired
of reading really stuffy bios. Yours is more like a real autobiography.
You started playing from a pretty early age?
Yeah. It was
the whole KISS thing. A lot of people from my generation heard the KISS
Alive album for the first time and it got them so psyched up that they
felt like they needed to experience that themselves – then spent the
next 20 or 30 years working towards it. It’s the same kind of story. I
was 5 years old and all the older kids in the neighbourhood got KISS
Alive. Where I grew up there seemed to be two ages of kids: all the
kids that were my age, and all the kids that were two or three years
older. And the younger ones seemed to get exposed to a lot of the
culture of the ones who were a little bit older. So I was five, six,
seven years old and going out buying Boston’s first album, Yes’s ‘Going
For The One.’ Blondie’s ‘Parallel Lines.’ Ramones’ ‘Rocket To Russia.’
Really getting exposed at a much younger and maybe even more
impressionable age. And KISS and the Beatles, those were my two
favourites that made me really wanna make music. KISS made me wanna get
up on a big loud stage and put on a crazy show, but the Beatles made me
truly love music. That’s what made me want to lock myself up in a
studio, splice up tape, turn it backwards. All that kind of stuff. That
was the creative inspiration.
That’s
cool! For me my first hero was Mark Knopfler and I started playing when
I was about 7, but then I saw Steve Vai in David Lee Roth’s ‘Just Like
Paradise’ video when I was 10 and I was like, ‘That’s so cool! I’ve
gotta do that!’
Yeah! The whole Van Halen, Steve Vai,
Satriani thing, all those guys, they’re the ones that took everyone
into guitar and showed them a whole other realm out there. They just
make you rethink everything and start challenging yourself.
Let’s talk about Abnormal. It sounds so energetic and powerful and freaking awesome.
About
five years ago I got an old house. I don’t live there, I just use the
place to make a lot of noise and piss off the neighbours. When I got
this house I started slowly renovating it and turning it into more of a
studio than a house. That’s the Batcave, a place to get away from home
and just have a place where there’s no internet, no phones, no cable,
no TV, no anything. All you can do there is make music. And that’s
where I go when I’m producing, if I’m working on my own stuff, whatever
it is, that’s my Batcave.
What do you use to record?
It’s
a combination of things. Way back when, everything I had was
reel-to-reel, just little Mackie boards. After that ADATs and DA88s,
then a Mac with Logic, then a PC with Cubase. For the longest time it
was just digital, then last year I went and got a whole bunch of crazy
analog gear, like the really expensive stuff that makes you really
question if you should have spend that much. The tube EQs, the
compressors that you just can’t hear any artefacts no matter how much
you squash. I think people always have this ‘or’ mentality instead of
‘and.’ They don’t realise it’s meant to be analog and digital. Each one
has something the other has and the other hasn’t, and together you get
everything.
One thing I really
like about Abnormal is the power of the rhythm guitars, and just how
animated the vocal takes are. You can just tell you really mean it.
On
this album I dug really deep and you can hear everything I was into at
that primal, youthful… Sex Pistols, Ramones, AC/DC. Just a culmination
of life up to that point. Like at moments you can probably pick out Van
Halen, even Allan Holdsworth, maybe Yngwie, maybe Ace Frehley. All
kinds of things. I think that album is a pretty good culmination. It’s
sort of the score card adding up everything. It’s like ‘Here’s where
your life is at up to this point.’ When I do these albums, that’s what
they are. They’re as biographical as the bio on the website. I just put
it all out there and spill my guts.
The energy almost makes it feel like a live album.
I
definitely wanted that feel. Very natural, not studio-processed, not
‘Let’s do it again and make sure we got the right take.’ It was like,
‘That take is all screwed up but it’s honest and pure and human as you
can get, so let’s go with that one.’ So if there’s a screw-up in there,
if the voice cracks, keep it! That’s being real! Those are the things
you rewind, like, ‘Listen to the way his voice broke up!’ Those are
things that can’t be repeated. You caught a real human moment. It’s so
easy to get obsessed and start just over-magnifying all the little
things, I guess getting microscopically immersed in it to the point
that you’re counting the tiniest little things, driving yourself crazy
for an hour comparing two different takes. Don’t overthink it. If it’s
right, trust your instincts and move on. If you were to take Robert
Plant’s vocal takes and nothing else, you’d hear all these little
noises and things that sort of get eaten up by the music, yet if they
weren’t there, there would be something very sterile about it. On some
level that stuff just gets into your soul. When the true spirit is
there, you feel it. I think that’s the mistake people make these days.
Because of the ability to edit so much, we’re editing away our spirit
in the music.
One of my
favourites is on David Bowie's ‘Thru These Architect’s Eyes’ from
‘Outside.’ His voice cracks in the most awesome way. He’s trying to
reach the notes and he’s pushing too hard but it’s perfect.
Yeah! The vulnerability, the strength when you’re just willing to let yourself be imperfect. It’s touching, it really is.
Are you much of a gearhead?
In
some ways I am and then I tend to reel myself in. If it sounds good and
it’s workin’, don’t overthink it. Find myself starting to get too
geeky, then I just say, ‘Screw it, just give me an amp and I’ll plug in
and play.’ With G’n’R the rig is an ENGL setup that I sort of modified.
There’s an E580 MIDI II preamp. I can change the patches as well as
anything else MIDI just from foot pedals. I had it modified so it’s
even smoother when you go from one channel to another. I had them come
up with some kind of circuitry to make it even less of a gap. That’s
going into an ENGL 100 watt E850 power amp. That one, I had tried one
with EL34s which I personally prefer, but with G’n’R where you have
drums, loops, bass, keyboards, another set of keyboards, two other
guitar players, vocals and backing vocals, it was getting a little bit
lost. The EL34s weren’t cutting through and I found that the 6L6s in
the power amp were very biting and very tight and they would just cut
through everything.The tone was very pointy and stuck out. But it
wasn’t as warm and comfortable as the EL34s. So what I have is, the
left channel is 6L6s and the right channel is EL34s, and the
front-of-house engineer can blend the two to get exactly what’s needed
that’s gonna work best.
Can we talk for a moment about Les Paul?
I
met his son a good handful of times at different events with Gibson.
One thing that I’m so pissed about is that there are a lot of times
when people said to me, ‘Man you’ve gotta come down and see Les Paul,
he plays in the city every week and you could probably get up and jam
with the guy. And I was like, ‘definitely wanna do that one of these
days, definitely wanna do that one of these days.’ And now I can’t. But
god, that guy, talk about the Thomas Edison of music. From multitrack
recording to effects to the Les Paul. But all other things aside, we
all remember him as the guitarist and the inventor and the innovator,
but he was a member of a family and a person, and I think of it more as
a personal loss for them, and I just wish his family the best.
Let’s talk about Chinese Democracy. Production-wise I think that was one of the best-sounding albums to come out last year.
Mastering
was such a big issue and they were so meticulous about everything about
it to make sure it stayed clear and the vision was realised. Mastering
was a big part of making that happen. I think it was the first album of
hopefully a lot more to follow that decided that quality was more
important than the volume war – it would rather be not as loud and
in-your-face, but something that keeps its dynamics and bandwidth. It’s
such a full recording. There’s so much going on in it, so much
information to be processed as you listen, that it needs to be clear
and pulled back so you can really get it without it being just this
giant square wave. So I’m hoping that with other albums that follow,
people will start realising, ‘Hey, we can just turn up our stereo, turn
up our iPod…’
What are your favourite moments on Chinese Democracy? For instance, my favourite track is ‘Better.’ What’s going on there?
There
are little things I added to it. Besides the rhythm track I put in,
there were some little bluesy riffs at the end of the second verse,
just little things like a five-beat break after the Buckethead solo,
then there’s the loud, screaming part going on… after all of that there
was a break that was just keyboards and I just put in a simple thing
with my fretless guitar. Just little things where, knowing I
contributed something of value. But there are so many little things
where you can go through it and find something that’s so interesting
about the production, or musically, or performance-wise?
Are there any plans for more G’n’R touring?
There
have been a lot of plans, it’s just that when it comes to battling the
economy… there are so many variables that could make it not work. I’m
guessing at this point that if something is confirmed, management would
let everyone know. So at this point if I said anything it would be
premature, so I should just wait for them to say anything.
CLICK HERE to buy Abnormal from Riot Entertainment
www.bumblefoot.com
Originally posted at
http://www.iheartguitarblog.com/2009/08/interview-bumblefoot.html
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