The eternally experimental shredder Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal has revealed the extreme measures he went to in order to build a fretless guitar, before an established specialist came to his rescue.
The former Guns N’ Roses guitarist, who is currently in supergroup Whom Gods Destroy, is well known for his oddball double-neck signature guitar, which combines a standard electric six-string with a fretless companion. But his early attempts at going fret-free went drastically wrong.
“I cannot build guitars,” he confesses to Rick Beato in a recent interview. “They’re awful, hideous, ‘never should have occurred in nature’ kind of things. My main guitar was a modified Ibanez Roadstar that I drilled a bunch of holes in and painted it yellow. It was the Swiss cheese guitar.”
As for his attempt at going fret-free, it makes for painful reading.
“I made one where I ripped off all the frets and I covered it with this goop made of metal shavings and epoxy and $463 worth of coins,” he reveals. “I shaved down the edges and tried to play on the surface. It was unplayable.”
Then Vigier guitars, founded by French luthier Patrice Vigier, came into his life.
“This guy came to the show in France [in the late ’90s], and he brought a guitar. He’s like, ‘I want you to try my guitar,’” he says. “I was like, ‘I don’t want an endorsement. I’m not looking for gear,’ but I tried it and, oh my god, this played so much better than my own crap.
“I spoke to Patrice Vigier, and I was just like, ‘This is someone I want in my life,” he continues. “And so we talked about how I make my own weird guitars and that I didn’t want to lose that side of things.”
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Sensitive to that, Vigier then turned the flying foot from his The Adventures of Bumblefoot album cover into a guitar, “and it sounded fucking great,” leading them to their first NAMM show together in 1998.
Bumblefoot continues, “I see these shiny-necked fretless guitars on there, and I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you make these?”
It turned out that Patrice Vigier had kept that part of his craftsmanship quiet with good reason.
“He just looked up in the air, let out this big sigh, and, in his French accent, said, ‘I’ve had this company for 18 years. We’ve only sold one of them. Nobody wants these things.’ I was like, ‘I do!’”
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So he took one home, and it was a revolution for his playing.
“It changes your phrasing and your ideas because you could drag [notes]; it’s like a slide, but you can slide with every fingertip,” he explains. “So, instead of being bound to just the vertical [movements], you can do a lot with it.”
Meanwhile, Dead Poet Society guitarist Jack Collins has also championed the use of fretless guitars, believing it can be a game-changer for heavy rock guitarists, while the Steve Vai-backed Chilean maestro Ben Lechuga has said going fretless opened him up to an “infinite” color palette.
Ned Evett, on the other hand, has been impressing with a glass-necked fretless guitar.
