Post by Mojo on Jan 31, 2021 0:52:07 GMT -8
www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/ex-gnr_guitarist_bumblefoot_explains_why_he_uses_a_sewing_thimble_when_playing_guitar__what_its_for.html?fbclid=IwAR22CD5LGFqkcdRD7aeiP5Kri7GjDWZ4PlApqrpcaMbg7XPqXcyNv7_zDyk
When asked about the thimble, Thal replied (transcribed by UG):
"The thimble, yeah - that's something I've been doing for good 30 years. The guitar has a magnetized hole in it that holds the thimble in there, and then you just grab it.
"I've been doing that since the very beginning, since 'The Adventures of Bumblefoot' album in '95 on Shrapnel.
"The way it came about is - I was about 18 years old and I was very experimental, trying all different things; I would build all these strange guitars and I would make my own double-necks with an octave higher, a little neck coming out of the bottom of the Stratocaster.
"And I made one where the whole fretboard, I pulled out the frets and lined it with coins and shaved down the edges - really strange, horrible sound, horrible.
"And I was looking for ways to extend the range of notes on the strings that are accessible, because what are we doing?
"We are shortening lengths of string, and we use the fret at that exact, precise spot, but once we run out of frets, there's still more notes that we can get to.
"I was thinking of all different things - I had one guitar that had up to 37 frets going into, just continuing, but they were so small, you couldn't access them, no way to get to them.
"That option didn't really work, and then it just dawned on me, like, 'What are we doing? We are pressing the string against a metal fret, and the string will always vibrate from that point to the bridge, so if we can instead of pressing the string to a metal fret - if we have a mobile metal fret we can press to the string, then we can hopefully achieve the same thing in some way.'"
Anyone who has not seen this, the thimble is on Ron's right hand, his picking hand.
"I keep it on the picking hand on my smallest finger, so I'm holding the pick with my thumb and my index finger, and then my second and third fingers are used for tapping, and then the fourth finger is for touching the thimble to the string.
"So once you are done fretting, then you hit this down, and you get the rest of the notes going up, so a lot of my old, weirder songs going all the way up to the top there, that kind of stuff."
Ron previously said about the thimble:
"Back when I was a teenager, I was looking for a way to get all the higher notes on the strings after the fretboard ran out...
"So I came up with this thing where I went into my mom's sewing box and I got a thimble, little metal cap you use for sewing right there, and I keep it on my smallest finger of my picking hand and I tap with it on the strings once you get higher than the fretboard"
