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Just a piece of wood
Music Radar has an interview with Steve Morse, where he talks about various modifications he made to his guitars over the years. Like the rather irreverent but practical grinder mod he has done in 2000 after breaking his wrist right before performing with Deep Purple at the Montreux Jazz Festival.
But speaking to MusicRadar earlier this month, Morse said that the cast really did impede his movement, and it inspired one of the most drastic mods he has ever made to an electric guitar. If you saw him on that 2000 tour, you might not have noticed. His EBMM Steve Morse signature model looked as it always did, with its unorthodox four-pickup configuration. What we didn’t see was the mod he made to allow him to play like he did.
“I broke my wrist, right before a Purple show and I couldn’t reach some of the notes on the neck with the cast on,” he says. “So I got a grinder and cut down the heel of it to help facilitate that [access] – including the steel plate. I took the steel plate off and ground that down and well…”
Read more in Music Radar.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
That is just a snipped of the full show performed in Montreux in 2000. I’m still looking for the entire thing. Many years ago it was available in really bad quality somewhere. I remember that there was a young kid playing Smoke on the Water with them with his black Telecaster. That “Swiss cheese Hammond B3” Jon plays is one of the ugliest looking Hammonds in the world, but it’s also really funny given the occasion. Just a few days earlier, Steve has hurt is wrist or something (maybe it was even broken?). It wasn’t one of his best shows and therefore, I guess, the concert hasn’t been released officially.
October 29th, 2025 at 22:29I’ve overlooked that the story about Steve’s wrist has already been mentioned above. Anyway, I thought that the show was great ever since I’ve watched it and I admire Steve for playing it, considering his injury … 25 years ago, time flies …
October 29th, 2025 at 23:52Well, I guess it could have been worse for Steve … John McCoy, a guitarist by origin, broke his wrist before an engagement in Hamburg in the 60s “and I couldn’t play guitar anymore, but I could just about play bass with the cast”. And we all saw how that ended for poor John, relegated to bass forever – lucky Steve escaped a similar fate!
October 30th, 2025 at 02:50I remember seeing that Deep Purple dvd in stores out here in Australia, about 10/15 years ago. I have a few other artists from those Montreux concerts on dvd, official releases from around that time and all are of really good quality all round. I am not sure if the DP one is still available though as I don’t get into those stores anymore. Since I moved down to Tasmania, it is like I am living in a cave or something similar. Uwe, you can leave your comment here………………. Cheers.
October 30th, 2025 at 06:36@3
“but I could just about play bass with the cast”
– well I certainly don’t complain about John McC playing the bass! I find him really really good 😊
Uwe, can all guitarists automatically become a bassist! Or is it necessary to learn to play that instrument from the start?😊
October 30th, 2025 at 09:12@4
MacGregor, may I in all innocence leave a comment??😃
I never see any dvds with Purple in stores in Denmark. I always buy them online, or secondhand 😊
October 30th, 2025 at 09:17#5 A bad guitarist can still make a good bassist 🙂 (as musicians like to joke).
Of course, a guitarist knows where to find which notes on the bass. Does that mean they can play bass? Not at all.
The bass is easy to learn but hard to master.
Guitarists have a habit of playing bass like a guitar, and the results are usually not very satisfactory. I think Uwe can explain the differences better.
Bassists, however, have the power to dictate a key change in a band 😀
October 30th, 2025 at 12:24“Uwe, can all guitarists automatically become a bassist?”
A potentially very incendiary question, liebe Karin, which only your innocent youth could have let you pose out in the open like that!
Guitarists generally assume that they all can play bass while bassists assume that none of them can. 😂 The truth is somewhere in the middle:
– As a principle: If you can find your way round on a guitar you won’t be lost on a bass guitar. The same apples vice versa.
– On a guitar you will have to eventually master some chords whereas on a bass playing single notes will generally do for most purposes. The bass being one octave deeper means that its frequencies don’t lend themselves as much for playing more than one note at a time, i.e. dyads and triads.
– A regular bass guitar is a guitar minus the two highest strings with the remeaning E, A, D and G strings tuned one octave lower – that ensures some familiarity. They are tuned in fifths from string to string (a guitar tunes one string in a fourth for harmonic reasons) rather than sevenths like, say, a cello.
– You need more fretting hand strength for a bass, but that is something you adapt to quickly. The neck of a bass (called the “scale”) is longer so you have to cover larger distances between notes but the difference is not insurmountable even for people with smaller hands. (On an acoustic double-bass with its huge scale, however, too small a hand size can become an issue.)
– Lots of bassists used to be guitarists like Paul McCartmey, John Deacon, Phil Lynott or Glenn Hughes and quite a few guitarists like Ron Wood or Tom Petty were bassists once. When Sting went on his first world tour as a solo artist following the demise of The Police, he played guitar and hired a bassist. Joe Bouchard, the bassist of BÖC switched to guitar after he left the band for his solo career, and so did Overend Watts after he left Mott the Hoople.
So to answer your question, if you can play some guitar then that will help you play bass initially, likewise vice versa – but as you then progress on each instrument the differences in focus become more apparent. But there is no need to learn guitar first to play bass and on a beginner level you will likely arrive sooner on bass at a point where your playing sounds half-decent. Also if you play the wrong note on bass, the whole band sounds off-key without the culprit being immediately apparent – even to your fellow musicians! 🤣
October 30th, 2025 at 14:31“Since I moved down to Tasmania, it is like I am living in a cave or something similar. Uwe, you can leave your comment here …”
Only one lauding your general geological interest, liebster Herr MacGregor, be it in caves or abysses of negativity, as the case may be.
For whatever reason, the quality of Montreux Jazz Fest recordings varies greatly. Some are good, some – ZZ Top, Status Quo and Jethro Tull come to mind – are muffled low fi. Not all the DP recordings from there sound great either.
October 30th, 2025 at 16:05@ 9 – I only have the Jethro Tull 2003 gig, which sounds fine to me, ELP from 1997 and it sounds grand and Suzanne Vega and band about the same era as the Tull. This DP one is the first that I have heard from them and I may investigate a little further. @ 6- Karin, don’t tell me you are more isolated than us Australians all the way out here. Admittedly the scene has changed somewhat in the last ten years or so, however prior to then so many of the city, (Brisbane and Sydney) music stores always had heaps of music concert dvd’s, Deep Purple included. There was a lot more ‘importing’ of hard copies going on then, before all the streaming crap took over. Cheers.
October 30th, 2025 at 20:15That song ’69 sounds rather good live, especially the improve section with an ode to that era and 1971 too. Plenty of punch and clarity in that mix according to my ears here in no man’s land. Jon Lord indeed. Steve Morse loving it playing with him, the reason he joined Purple, or one of the main reasons. Cheers.
October 30th, 2025 at 21:58It is this dvd I noticed eons ago here win Australia. Not the complete show from 2000. The 1996 tour with Montreux and the extra 2000 performance from Montreux with these five songs. Memory again playing it’s tricks. Cheers.
https://www.discogs.com/release/1210403-Deep-Purple-Live-At-Montreux-1996?srsltid=AfmBOoqWC__Fcw0swGBk8scmU6HVFvYRusNg7i7nLG4Apb7VJjr1mdcf
October 30th, 2025 at 22:17@8
Thanks Uwe 😊
October 31st, 2025 at 12:04I had a feeling it would be like that!
@10
MacGregor, I live in a desert re music, or at least the music I love.
If I was into Taylor Swift (Uwe, not hitting at you 😅) I would be overjoyed. But pure, lovely rock’n’roll performed by the über-masters (that’ll be Purple 🤩) is not as easy to dig up as one should think.
I do my bit, believe me, but even I have only 24 hours a day 😄
October 31st, 2025 at 12:24