2013.04.DD - Guitar Interactive Magazine - Interview with Bumblefoot

Read and watch and hear it here: http://licklibrary.ceros.com/iguitarmag/issue17/page/8



Transcript:

Stuart Bull: I started off, you fumble about just for fun and then you discover that more serious stuff later, you know. Which way did it go for you? Did you start off noodling around to music, not realizing this is important, then discovered it later on or was there always a kind of like, you know, this thing about music and it's important and this [=pointing to guitar] is serving that rather than the other way around? Did that come from an early age or?

Bumblefoot: It's hard to say. I mean it all just kind of happened... blended together. Yeah, it's like, heard KISS, "I wanna be a rockstar", heard The Beatles, "I love music", right? And the two sort of-

SB: And the guitar playing wasn't happening at this point in time?

BBF: At that point I wanted to be a bass player, but I was too young. I went to a store, I was like, "I want to be a base player, I wanna be Gene Simmons!" you know, they told me, "Well, start on acoustic guitar and then after two years, then maybe switch to bass," right? And I just stayed with guitar and I can play bass now.

SB: Right, and you just liked it.

BBF: But yeah, so I stuck with it. And during that time, I think it was more of an Angus Young type player if I were to compare to anything. That was definitely... I think Angus was a big inspiration as far as be a band practice and just be running around the room stopping and just being all crazy and stuff. And then someone said to me when I was about 12, "Have you heard of this guy named Eddie Van Halen?" I was like, "Eddie who what?" And put on the intro to Mean Street and I'd never heard anything like that before in my life, like how-

SB: And you hadn't heard the previous Van Halen albums at that point?

BBF: No, that was the first thing I heard. And then, "I'll make you a tape, check it out." And he gave me Eruption and I remember I was so just amazed by it all and just so curious and so inspired and just so, you know, "I need to decode this and figure out what's going on here." It's a totally different thing that I didn't know could be done with the guitar. I just didn't think about it. And I remember I took the tape of Eruption and I learned it by ear, I got it down, and then I took apart the cassette, flipped the reels, and then learned it backwards.

SB: No way. Could you still remember how to do any of that?

BBF: Oh, it might take a good minute. It might take a good minute or 1000.

[Plays the guitar]

BBF: I had it all down, from end to beginning backwards.

SB: What was your reason for that?

BBF: I just wanted I know it forwards and backwards.

SB: You know, like people say, I know it back to front?

BBF: Yeah.

SB: And you literally wanted to do that.

BBF: And I just got really into at that point, the guitar and what else can you do with this thing? What else can you do with the strings? What else can you do on the strings? That's the whole thing. Before that it was just about...I mean, I was still about, you know, I was writing classic rock sounding songs at age 10 about, you know, whatever girl I liked in school. And I didn't really think about.... what's the word? Getting inventive or creative-

SB: Right, moving forward or progressing in any kind of harmonic way or whatever? You were just happy-

BBF: I didn't think that that was even an option. I didn't know that that road existed. And I started getting into UK and Holdsworth and Blue and that, and frigging [?] that whole crowd of dudes and from there I heard Yngwie for the first time. I was like, "Wow! Now, what's that now? What's he doing there?" You know, I heard, you know, with Keel, Steeler [?] right. And so I had to learn his, you know, solo that he had on the album, you know.

[plays the guitar]

BBF: And go through the whole thing of that. And yeah, just started getting....then, you know, "This guy named Steve Vai plays with Zappa!"

[plays the guitar]

BBF: And getting into all of that.  And just like everybody, you have all these amazing guitar players that are rising up with their unique styles that they had and you got to explore it. And each one has a little something to you and just makes you enjoy it that much more. It's refreshing. So yeah, I just got into it and I was doing my own thing. I was like, alright, you got this neck, she got the string and the notes keep going but the neck stops. So how can I get to these? So I used to have a 9 volt battery on a rubber band and a string that I would grab and use as a slide to get the higher notes. And eventually I found out it was just too cumbersome. So I started... I was about 18 at that point, I was building my own guitars, modifying them, coming up with all these horrible monstrosities that should never be allowed near a guitar and any kind of power tool at the same time because it just... it goes bad.

SB: But you gonna stop [?] because... all right.

BBF: This button is getting loose [points to button on jacket], so it's gonna...

SB: Yeah.

BBF: So I started using this thing [shows thimble] where I would use it to... kind of like a slider [demonstrates on guitar] To get the rest of the notes there-

SB: Right.

BBF: -that I needed. So usually let's say you're tapping something and you need [demonstrates]. Get the extra note there. So I would just throw in an extra note using that [shows thimble]. If you're on this pickup right, you're gonna be picking up everything in front of the pickup so you can get all the higher notes to it, whatever it is, you know. If you're on this pickup, what happens is you can get up to that point and the note disappears, but what you can do is if you hold it down here, it's almost like the string is not going to vibrating from the nut to the bridge, it will be vibrating from the nut to this. If you hold it down it's almost like taking your bridge and sliding it forward, thus making the string shorter, thus making the neck longer in comparison and raising the pitch of your notes. And you can get more notes there. So you can do a lot of things.

Interactive magazine format is a great idea. It was difficult to read some of the text and I had to wait for the audio of some ads to play out before I could hear the audio of the videotaped interview - hopefully the format can evolve before it turns off potential subscribers.

The text portion, not the video interview with Ron, states "...around 2004 when Buckethead was booted out of Guns N' Roses....". I find I am doubting the authenticity of the sentence or selection of language. It is not a quote, it is text written by Levi Clay for the magazine.

I didn't notice that part. It is interesting even if it isn't an actual quote from Bumblefoot.

And yes, I had to wait for the ads to finish, too.

Finished transcribing.