Bumblefoot

Thanks so much everyone

My cock is ramming in and out of There Was A Time as I type this.....

Hey, gonna go eat dinner with Mrs. FuckTWAT, hope to see a bunch of ya's soon

Finally getting healthier, been Hell. Excited about getting back on stage in better physical form...

Ron

PS - FUCK Estranged. And FUCK Civil War. I'll *never* play either one of those songs ever again.

Hey all, was just fuckin' with that kid, lol.... you should KNOW by now I'm a ball-buster. lol

See you in Vegas!!!

Ron

Just got home and heard about this. For what it's worth, the mods and posters here have my gratitude. That includes the folks that gave me shit, lol. Thank you to the mods for taking care of this place, and to everyone for all the care and interest and passion you've shown. No community online or offline agrees and gets along perfectly, that's nature - but overall, y'all have been fkn great I appreciate a whole lotta ya's a whole lot. Ron

Shit, where were all these great music questions hours ago? Just finished a buncha work, I'm starting to reverse the info in meta tags, that means I hit my mental limit, shutting the 'puter......

Diet - don't drink your calories. More water, less juices, no soda... cut down on fast food, snack on vegetables, and jog on a treadmill a few times a week.

Hendrix - lotta classics on Experienced & Electric, but I think Axis has some deep shit goin' on...

Just used my last brain cell. Gnite folks

He calls himself an Aryan Ron, that says all you need to know about Satanisk How bout my guitar question? :D i'll be your best friend and buy you a box of chocolates? :xmasssanta: (laced with rohypnol and drag you to my basement and force guitar lessons outta you! )

Sounds like for the direction you wanna go, it's all about strumming rhythm stuff - use a metronome and start doing strumming patterns, then get more complex by adding accents, a shuffle feel, rests on different hits... it'll get your groove happenin' when ya play.

How very great. Woke up to see another bandmember come here to insult the fans. Axl can really choose his people.

Oh great!!!

I don't insult the fans. I insult individuals that insult me personally. Crazy concept, I know!

Thanks for the chat. Random question. I thought I saw you in the crowd at the Soul Asylum/Stinson show last Feb. at Mohegan Sun. Was it you?? Lol And any chance you will be at Tommy's NYC or Boston shows this weekend? Thanks again for always being so friendly to the gnr fanbase!

Nah, wasn't me. Wouldn't mind seeing him in NYC, if I can get enough work done..............

Gnite!

(Thank you Sanna & ZoSo)

Are you a Charles Bronson fan?

Not liking Bronson would be like not liking Norris. He even kicked ass in the Twilight Zone episode w/ Elizabeth Montgomery....

thanks for coming Ron!

was in first row at the ARC show in PARIS...

took your hand three times...

it seemed you had a blast

Had SUCH a blast, thank you!!

Hey Ron!

Thanks for checking in.

I was always wondering which current guitar virtuoso's music you may dig (apart from yours obviously )? Also whats your opinion about the afe-fx, I cannot recall if I have read anything about this toy in connection to You?

thanks,

fellow

Axe-FX is the best gadget of its kind I think. No connection... I don't listen to much widdly-widdly music, but some great players ya may wanna check out are Mattias Eklundh, Guthrie Govan, Chris Godin, Stephane Alaux....

Ron will you be my date in the mygnr prom?

http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?showtopic=173209

Depends. Can you raid your parent's liquor cabinet?

For sure. Whats you're drink of choice? I'm a fan of rum myself.

Anything that'll get me laid. lol

Out of interest how long did it take to grow you're beard Ron?

Started in mid-June... was gonna let it grow for a year...

A question that means a lot to me because I'm more a Bumble, 4tus and DJ fan than I am a GNR fan : have you guys ever talked of recording some stuff together outside of GnR ? I don't know, have 4tus play on one of your songs or play lead on some of DJ's material or whatever ? Like Dizzy and Richard did on Tommy's song last year !

I would - have thought about it.......

Ron will you be my date in the mygnr prom?

http://www.mygnrforum.com/index.php?showtopic=173209

Depends. Can you raid your parent's liquor cabinet?

I am sorry to hear that, Ron. I have personal experience from this disease and my advice is to to spend time with your dad now while you still have him, all of him. Don't give attention to the rumours, don't give attention to the haters, hell, even ignore business and job for a while, focus on your loved ones.

Thanks Took my parents to see the Grand Canyon last August - took em all over Arizona, to the beautiful parks, they loved it They'd never seen that part of the country, glad we were able to do that. It'd probably be our last vacation...

Hey Ron, do you rehearse Riad with the band at all?

Yep, had rehearsed all of Chi Dem with the band - was pretty cool playin' most of it in Tokyo

what music out there today do you listen/gain influence from or is it all past artists? & bring back the swiss cheese & flying foot guitars for the solo spots!

Gonna leave those guitars in retirement, they've been through enough, lol. Harder to find things that move me in today's music... Muse...

IF you take song recording requests, I'm gonna toss my hat in the ring (and I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this) and request that you PLEASE record a cover of "Sailing". The live versions are great but this one just SCREAMS "Record me!"

Ok, I got that off my chest!

Would be a sweet one to do....

Even though there weren't some songs that were played live, were you ever worried Axl would've gone "we're doing "Coma" tonight"? or did you all rehearse the entire catalog in case that did happen?

Gaaahh!!! A lot of songs did happen spontaneously - Don't Cry, Rosie, Brick In the Wall, the jammy stuff all happened on the spot and some of em stuck.....

Hey Ron. I know you won't talk business, but seriously, something has to be said, and soon. Maybe you can say something that wiggles around the issue, but still gives us something.

Right now things feel dangerous for us, so something has to cool it off a little. And i know you don't want to get involed, but, you are one of the pillars of this band, and you have the responsibility. You can't ignore that.

I guess I can feel better knowing that you're a pretty highly evolved being, and you can handle this, and that no mater what happens, you'll be able to work it out. I don't know about the others though.

I look like I'm the Geico caveman, and I'm the evolved one...! Those poor other guys, lol.... 2 of my cats died last year while I was touring. 3rd one now has a inoperable chest tumor, it's getting harder for her to breathe and to swallow food - I'm in a mindset of dropping all baggage and just giving her a happy peaceful remaining life, which may not be much longer. My dad's slowly developing Alzheimer's - diagnosed last year. He needs eye surgery too. Same mindset - give him a happy peaceful remaining life. Right now I'm dealing with a lot of end-of-life stuff, gives a lot of perspective on what matters. The stuff you want me to talk about just doesn't have that true life-and-death importance where I should compromise my values and disrespect my bandmates and betray their trust and squeal about things that concern and affect other people much more than me, no. Ignore the drama.

Ron quick question, whats your favourite moment of the entire Australian leg of the tour?

Sittin' on the stairs outside the hotel for 2 hour after the Adelaide show playin' guitar with fans... loved the Sydney show Taking my wife to a winery, and a wildlife park in Perth to feed the baby kangaroos...

What was the first concert you went to, how many times did you go to L'amour (and did you ever get to play there)? How old were you when you first played a paid gig?

First concert was KISS at MSG in 79, amazing........ L'Amour! YES!!! Played there a lot. First time hangin' was in 86, Vinnie Vincent Invasion played that night.

Story about playing L'Amour here: http://www.bumblefoot.com/gear/03-the-mutant-cow.php

While we're on guitar stories.... ( from http://www.bumblefoot.com/gear/01-pensive-expenguin.php )

As a young child, I would create potions, combining anything I could find. Me and my psychopath friends referred to them as "concoctions." In my backyard, there was a crack in the cement steps near the grass, and there were always ants crawling in and out of the crack. These two key elements in my youth led to my goal in life - to find a way to relocate these ants with one of my special "concoctions." I tried any combination of ingredients that seemed logical - ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, bleach, milk and piss. I'd pour it in the cement cracks and wait. 3 days later, the ants would be crawling in and out, unaffected by my concoction. They obviously had superior strength. I had to try harder - orange juice, spit, baking soda, glass cleaner, glue, shoe polish, and melted crayons. Ya see, the key to knowing a good concoction is the Smell Test. If you smell the concoction in a cup from 4 inches away, you should gag 2 or three times, and then another 2 times from the memory of what you just smelled. If not, you didn't make the shit strong enough. The puke reaction was definitely relative to the amount of onion and garlic powder - mix that with Coca-Cola, some sulfur and other shit from the chemistry set I had (birthday gift), and you're guaranteed 6-and-a-half good dry-heaves - 3 from the actual smell, the third making a genuine hacking sound, another 2 from thinking of the ingredients, and the last one-and-a-half as an instant flashback to the smell, and the hacking sound ya just made replaying in your head. Anyway, back to my story. I had to try harder and I did. I emptied a little bit of everything I could find in the refrigerator, kitchen cabinets, cleaners under the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and anything I can add from my own person. Yo - who the fuck says "my person" - that's asking for a fight. "The shoehorn is on my person." If you regularly use the term "on my person", hit yourself for me. Anyway again, I combined all that stuff and came up with the greatest batch of concoction I could ever invent. I *knew* this shit was gonna work. I was gagging from 2 feet away. I held that shit far away from me and held my breath and brought it out to the yard, trying not to think of the ingredients so I don't gag another 2 times, and poured it in the cracks.

The ants never came back.

My only mistake was that I never wrote down the ingredients. After that, I reached my height of success and retired from the concoction business. It was time to find a new goal.

I forgot why I was mentioning this story - it had something to do with the guitar. Oh yeah - around 1988 I was forced to come out of concoction retirement, in a quest to find the perfect substance to use when building guitars. I came up with this shit that was perfect - the only side effect was that some of the ingredients would travel up your skin and you'd itch for hours, just from touching your finger to the can of it. The main ingredients were sawdust, fiberglass dust, and epoxy resin. Combine that together and it'll outlive your grandkid's roach collection. I put a layer of the stuff onto the guitar neck after I removed the frets, and then stuck a bunch of coins onto the neck. After it hardened, I filed down the sides of the coins that stuck out, and had $4.63 on the neck. I cut away the body some more, and put the Les Paul-style tailpiece at an angle sticking out of the edge of the body, and wired 1 DiMarzio super-distortion pickup and 1 volume knob onto the body. Then I took an old magazine and put pictures of penguins all over the body, and painted over them with polyurethane. I use a thin rope attached to a tuning peg as the guitar strap, because of the light body that makes the guitar "neck heavy". I then typed on a little piece of paper with my Commodore64 computer's dot-matrix printer, and made a label that said "Bad Ronald - The Pensive Expenguin" and polyurethaned it onto the guitar's head. That's the name of this guitar.

Just want to try to repost an abridged version of my earlier question with another one, hope you don't mind:

1- Ron, GNR obviously is the main priority in your music career at the moment, and (unfortunately) you have to plan your other musical projects around it.

Just like somebody working in business might consider themselves having reached a peak in their career by being promoted to a 'Senior Manager' or such, do you consider GNR to be the climax of your musical career? If you received an offer to joined a high profile band that was of interest to you, or you happened to become part of a new project that could become a full time success in its own right, could you see yourself moving beyond GNR? I feel sorry that GNR, being the beast as it is, dictates alot of your other musical projects, which I think could be more creatively inspiring to you

2- Does the band ever do any songwriting together? Meaning you guys throwing riffs around to each other and 'submitting' ideas to Axl as such?

Ah Ben, that's a bite-me-in-the-ass subject that'll be twisted up no matter what's said... no bizz/future talk

Ron, a quick one:

Did you guys keep that big flag (fans in Brazil gave you)??

That was still one of the coolest fkn things ever Not sure who has that now - I have a ton of stuff, shirts, flags, gifts, but not the biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig flag...

I drove (solo) from new orleans to toronto last Jan to see you guys and it was awesome. I got there at 11 am and waited with an awesome group of people and we got first row and the show was fucking awesome. that was the first real concert I've ever been to and it was just one of the coolest things ever for me. thanks a bunch I'll always remember that.

That's cool as Hell - I think we spoke back then, no? I remember hearing from someone about a drive like that, was it you? Thanks for bein' there

When I was 12 I took a cassette of Eruption (Halen) and opened it up, flipped the reels, and learned the song backwards...

Damn man, that's crazy!

Ok, another one: I know that you have the ability to learn a song a few times just by hearing it. How long did it take you to hone that talent?

Anyone can do this shit, ya just gotta do it. Focus, but don't force. To see music, don't listen to the notes, listen to the clashing between them, the overtones and secondary waves that occur when combining different notes. The wobbling of strings that are a little out of tune - listen for that stuff. It'll help ya be able to pick up stuff just by listening. But give it time, everything takes time, just let nature do it's thing, and you'll become whatever kinda player you are. And that'll happen from whatever kind of music's in your heart, it's about playing THAT music, that's all that counts...

The truth about me comes from me...

There is a supposed document saying you discussed the return of Duff to the band with Axl. Is there any truth to that?

Did you talk to Axl or anyone else in the band about the supposed documents yet and what do you think of how the fanbase acts about these documents?

Anything I say about anything will end up on some other site with a twisted headline and will stress me the fuck out, not worth it, not saying shit about anything. Just aint worth the headache, not now. *Ignore the dramaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa*, ignooooooooooooooooore theee draaaaaaaammmmmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...... I have to ignore it, too much work I need to get done, not enough time to do it. (I'm still here typing instead of doing it... gaaah!!)

It's cool that you are willing to show your weak side, but please don't ask me to pity you, when I think of you, I think one of the guy that was part of the best rock act that I saw live last year. Sorry for punching back at you and not bowing down to everything you say, but I really respect you nonetheless, I hope you will get that, no harm intended and hope your family'll be alright in the future.

ABSOLUTELY don't want pity! My best friend is bed-ridden and can only communicate with eye movements, and *he's* not bitching, geez. Point being, *everyone* is human, and everyone is imperfect, and no one has it easy. In fact, happiness is really the only thing that matters in the end - you can have everything but if you don't have that, it all means nothing. And you can live in a cardboard box but if you're happy, all is fine. Stress, drama, random unnecessary acts of hate and cruelty - that shit will poison you, shorten your life. The best thing for your soul is to ignore it, focus on things that make a difference, and keep people out of your life that cause drama - they might as well be stabbing you, they're doing as much damage. So yeah, these days I go out and have a real good fucking time. Balances shit out.