INTERVIEW: Bumblefoot
Ron Thal – also known as Bumblefoot – is perhaps best known these days as one of the guitarists in Guns ‘N’ Roses, but long before he was sharing the stage with Axl Rose on a nightly basis, he was an experimental guitarist cranking out such stunning displays of virtuosity as his 1995 debut, The Adventures of Bumblefoot. Long out of print, this instrumental gem comes off as a conglomeration of Zappa, Loony Toons, Spy Vs Spy and a medical dictionary. The album was recently re-released along with bonus tracks (and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to MS research), and a TAB book of every guitar part on the album, prepared by Bumblefoot himself is also out now. I caught up with Bumblefoot to discuss the reissue and what it was like to be an instrumental guitarist recording at home in the 90s. Let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and jump back to
back in the day when you recorded The Adventures Of
Bumblefoot. How was it recorded? Beavering away in a home studio? Yes, it was more home than studio! At the time I was still living at home with my parents, and I had a little spot in the basement where originally I had a 15IPS reel-to-reel 1/4″ eight track and a tiny little eight channel mixing board, and I did everything from that. When I got the record deal with Shrapnel I invested in two ADATs, a 24-channel Mackie board, two Alesis 3630 compressors … did I even get more mics? I think I just used what I had, which was a couple of Shure 57s and a Sennheiser 421. I had everything stacked against the wall of my parents’ basement, and that was it! I can still picture it. I didn’t even have studio speakers or anything like that. It was too noisy – it would have interfered with everyone trying to sleep at 3am – so everything I did was through a pair of old headphones. After that was just a Marshall half stack with a blanket over it and a little SM57 under the blanket. Every now and then you’d peek under the blanket to make sure the weight of it didn’t move the mic to some funky angle or anything like that. I had a little footswitch that was very simple, just Record/Play. That’s all it did. It had a slight delay to it, so I would always have to hit it a little bit earlier to have it kick in where I wanted it to. It was never on beat, and you’d just have to smack your foot down at this awkward spot and it would manage to kick in at the right time right on the right beat when you needed it to. I believe you used some pretty freaky guitars back
then. Do you ever get people bringing you replicas of the
‘swiss cheese guitar’ and stuff like that? What was the deal with the one that had the bass neck bolted on it? (Laughs) Looking back I probably shouldn’t have done those
things to the guitars I did it to. That one was, I think, a
reissue of a 50s Stratocaster. It was a really nice
Stratocaster, but the thing would not stay in tune. It was real
squealy. The neck was constantly bending all over the place, and
to me the value of a guitar comes from how it is in your, hands,
not the name or the date. So I took the thing and I just chopped
it up, and on the bottom horn I took a bass neck, I cut it in
half at around the 7th fret, pulled all the frets off and
refretted it to have the spacing that would fit a guitar that
was starting at the 12th fret. I set it into the bottom horn of
that Stratocaster and had a little Badass bridge that I spaced
at the right spot, put a DiMarzio Super Distortion in there, and
had this little mini guitar sticking out of the bottom horn.
Every once in a while I would flick a toggle switch down to
it and hit these notes that would just squeal and scream so
hard. It was just brutal. Just that tone that would go right
through you. I was playing at this place in Brooklyn, and at the
end I was using that guitar, and I switched to that neck and was
holding this one note, and the whole audience was holding their
ears in pain. I was just like, ‘Yeah.’ I was loving torturing
everybody. It was cool. |