2015.05.03 - Jakarta Informer - Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal Keeping busy with time

Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal Keeping busy with time

Rock guitarist Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal has spent the last 40 years of his life playing and creating music, yet he shows no sign of slowing down.

For a start, he has just recently released his 10th studio album called Little Brother Is Watching.

He composed, produced, recorded, mixed and mastered the album entirely by himself in his in-home studio and it features Dennis Leeflang on drums.

“Billboard Magazine just put out and played the video for the song that is playing in there [the album], the title track,” Thal said while giving a guitar clinic in Jakarta.

He has also assembled a new band called Art Of Anarchy, collaborating with metal band Disturbed bassist John Moyer and vocalist Scott Weiland. “This [Art Of Anarchy] is a new thing that we put together,” he said.

Not wanting to stop with playing rock and metal music, Thal had also collaborated with hip-hop artist and producer Run DMC.

“DMC is working with this metal band called Generation Kill and they are doing this great rap metal stuff. So, I am playing guitar on it and doing all the mixing and the producing with them,” he said.

Born on Sept. 25, 1969, Thal started playing guitar at the age of 6. The Brooklyn native said his biggest influence in music was the glamrock band KISS and the legendary British pop band The Beatles.

Since his early exposure to music, he has always been involved in many projects. At the age of 6, Thal, along with older brother Jeff, had already learned how to record and produce multitrack albums with their cassette recorders.

When he was 13, Thal had already started to create his own materials and he recorded them at his home. Before reaching the age of 20, he had already mastered the art of sound engineering and music production all by himself.

His productivity in creating music is based on his belief that true musicians could only be measured by the number of works they produce — not by the number of shows they perform.

“I want to do something more than just playing music and performing in shows,” he said.

In recent years, Thal has traveled the world to open guitar clinics and shared his knowledge with young and highly spirited guitarists.

His recent guitar clinic at US cultural center @america in the Pacific Place shopping mall in Jakarta was open to the public and free.

During the clinic, he shared a lot of insights from the technical skill point of view to the business side with young musicians who grew up watching and idolizing him when he played in big rock bands like Guns N Roses.

He eagerly shared with his new students the techniques he used on his custom-shaped double-neck guitar from Vigier.

At one point, he also invited several participants to play a jam session with him.

Playing with Thal apparently was too intimidating for some of the young guitarists — they missed a lot of notes, but he patiently played along with them to the end of the song like a good mentor should.

The most interesting part was when Thal started to give tips to the young musicians on the business side and on how musicians today should behave in order to make a good living out of their work.

First of all, he said that musicians needed to have a sense of self-respect when it comes to business deals as their income depended heavily on how they promote the value of their work.

The life of a successful rock star, according to him, is beyond the glamor and the performances. Underneath all that, there is serious business.

“Underneath these, I always wear my tie and business suits,” Thal told the participants as he pointed at his clothing, which consisted of a sleeveless jacket, a black T-shirt and a pair of washed-out jeans.

He may not look like a regular businessman, but Thal said he needed to have this mentality that he was wearing official business ties and suits during negotiations and talks with producers so that he could secure a good deal for his work.

He also stressed the need for young musicians not to make the same mistakes, like what the previous generation did with the Internet.

Always being a visionary of the musical industry, he believed musicians and producers back in the early 2000s had made a great mistake by forcing Napster, a peer-to-peer music sharing application and network, to shut down.

For Thal, Napster could have been the biggest game changer in the musical industry to greatly benefit all stakeholders.

“It is not that Napster changed anything, it is that the stupid music industry did not see this amazing technology and say, ‘My God, we could do so much with this,’ and instead they tried to destroy it and they tried to treat people as criminals,” he said.

“I mean, the people were making it very obvious what they wanted and you are in the business of giving people what they want. So, why would you try to take that away from them?”

Thal said if the music industry had decided to ride on the popularity of Napster to their advantage, things could have been so much better and easier for today’s musicians to earn a living out of their work.

“What you can do money-wise if a billion people download your songs for free? It could have been the tiniest little subscription, it could have been ads or it could have been sponsors. There are a million ways it could have been done and they [the music industry] had a lot of time to figure it out. Instead, through their lawyers, they said, ‘Go sue that 12-year-old kid,’ and they screwed up everything,” he said.

“That is the biggest change in the music industry. The music industry started to see their customers as their enemies and everybody suffered for it. Congratulations record industry, you have made a mess and you still don’t know how to clean it up.”

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