Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

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greenmeansjoe
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Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by greenmeansjoe » Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:14 am

I nearly chopped off the very tip of my left pinkie Sunday night while slicing an apple with an expensive -- and motherfucking sharp -- German knife. Cut it all the way down to the tip of the bone, which is actually why the knife didn't just slice straight through. I came pretty close to losing the top half-inch of my finger.

It hurt like a bitch and it was a gusher. I'm a wuss when it comes to blood, too, so I nearly passed out seeing all that blood pump out into the kitchen sink. I ended up laying on the floor with my feet propped up on a case of bottled water. Later, after the blood had soaked through a second paper towel, my girlfriend almost passed out too. All that blood ... ugh. We were at my parents' house. My dad insisted I didn't need stitches. I didn't get stitches.

So it's actually healing up surprisingly fast. I'm typing with it today with minimal discomfort. But band practice was a bitch last night. I tried using my pinkie a few times, and if I situated it just so on the string it wasn't too bad, but mostly it just hurt too damn much to use. So I was playing our songs four-fingered, which was just weird. My brain adjusted pretty quickly, but I was playing alternate chord voicings and leaving out some notes altogether, and mostly it sucked. Some of it sounded kinda cool though.

I'm hoping that by next week I can put the pinkie back to use. My guess is that it'll probably be pretty tender for a while though.

Just wanted to share that.

Anyone else have tales of playing with a fresh and fairly significant finger or hand wound?

Joe

maz
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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by maz » Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:21 am

Um, not as cool as yours, but my cat scratched the bottom of my index finger right beneath a joint last week and barre chords really hurt.

How's that?






I know... it sucks.

One time I cut my head open on the refrigerator and needed staples in my head! It didn't affect my guitar playing though.

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A.L.
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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by A.L. » Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:46 am

Whoah! I just sliced my middle finger moving a metal shelf at work yesterday... got home and couldn't play a damned thing.

Maybe check out some 'liquid skin', available at most drug stores in the band-aid aisle. It's basically flexible, antiseptic nail polish.

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by JGriffin » Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:52 am

The guy who sang lead in my band in college sliced the tip of his finger off making eggrolls one night--similar to your injury, actually. The tip of his finger's kinda flat now but he still plays as well as he ever did (which was never all that great), and hasn't mentioned it as an issue in about 12 years.
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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by maz » Wed Sep 01, 2004 11:04 am

A.L. wrote:
Maybe check out some 'liquid skin', available at most drug stores in the band-aid aisle. It's basically flexible, antiseptic nail polish.
Yeah- that stuff is cool! But the last time I went to buy some, I couldn't find it so I asked someone who worked at the drugstore, "Where's the liquid skin" and she kind of sheepishly pointed me over to an aisle. I got there and didn't see it and asked her again... she turned kind of red, pointed to the rack of condoms and said, "If it's not here we don't have it!"

I was like, "Um, no, it's not a... well... it kind of does the same thing... um... nevermind." and I walked out.

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by maz » Wed Sep 01, 2004 11:06 am

You could also use this time as an opportunity to practice up on some of this guy's licks!!!

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by thebeard » Wed Sep 01, 2004 12:55 pm

finger wounds suck, I always went the superglue route, pretty much the same as liquid skin. It still hurts if you put too much pressure on it but it holds the wound shut and gives you a little fake callous.

My worst injury to mess up guitar playing was when I blew out my shoulder when I was seventeen. I had to get surgery and spent three weeks with my left arm strapped to my belly so I couldn't move it. I turned into a guitar contortionist until it came off. That really became my month of learning to hammer tap.

Jesse

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Scodiddly
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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by Scodiddly » Wed Sep 01, 2004 1:53 pm

Being stupid with a router table a few weeks back, I managed to route a little slice into the tip of my left middle finger. Didn't bleed at that much, but it took two weeks before I could try playing again. And I still don't have the full callous back yet. :(

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by madpie » Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:46 pm

"Here we should perhaps say something about the grave threat to Django?s career which happened in the year 1928. He had made an early and promising start, as we have seen, in the bals musette alongside such famous accordioniste as Gu?rino, Alexander, Gardoni, Vaissade, and Marceau. Then a fire in his caravan left him horribly burnt and his hand partially paralysed. There followed a long period of terrible suffering. For a year and a half Django was bedridden and became increasingly frantic not about the serious condition of his leg but about the hand which refused to heal, threatening to put an untimely end to his musical ambitions. Whenever his mother who never left his bedside, asked him ?What are you thinking about, Django ?? he would reply, ?My hand.? Seeing this, his young brother brought him, some time later, a brand new guitar in an oilcloth case and with this the injured man began an astonishing programme of self-reeducation which left the staff of the St-Louis Hospital gasping. By long, painful and lonely exercise the young guitarist succeeded, against all expectation, in overcoming his terrible handicap inventing an instrumental technique that was entirely his own. As his friend and mentor Charles Delaunay observed : ?Django was gifted with such dexterity that partial disablement became a challenge which it was a point of pride to overcome.?

http://www.djangomontreal.com/doc/DjangoStory.htm
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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by sonikbliss » Wed Sep 01, 2004 10:57 pm

as far as hand wounds go nothing beats Pete Townshend sticking a wammy bar straight through the middle of his hand while doing one off his trademark windmill moves. ouch!

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by RefD » Thu Sep 02, 2004 12:13 am

okay, this thread is gonna give me nightmares!
worst hand injury i ever had was bisecting the tip of my fretting hand's middle finger to the bone when i was carving a jack-o-lantern in the mid-90s.
i'm a clumsyass nincompoop, tho.
i'm also a wuss, which means i shrieked like a little girl.
*shakes head in shame*

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by spankenstein » Thu Sep 02, 2004 7:03 am

I was in a strap on cast on my left arm for 3 weeks from a skateboarding injury when I was 13. I spent a lot of time with one finger sticking out reaching over the top of the neck just to be able to play a little

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by zarcharius » Thu Sep 02, 2004 7:13 am

I worked in a factory when I was younger and through a bit of carelessness managed to get my finger right on the grinder I was using. a slice doesn't seem so bad when compared to having the flesh ripped off by a grinder. took a few months but it healed up nicely and i was able to get back to bothering everyone with my soulful renditions of smoke on the water and iron man (this was just as I was starting out, obviously).

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by greenmeansjoe » Thu Sep 02, 2004 7:23 am

RefD wrote:okay, this thread is gonna give me nightmares!
worst hand injury i ever had was bisecting the tip of my fretting hand's middle finger to the bone when i was carving a jack-o-lantern in the mid-90s.
i'm a clumsyass nincompoop, tho.
i'm also a wuss, which means i shrieked like a little girl.
*shakes head in shame*
Yeah, I'm a wuss too. I was so close to passing out the other night. It doesn't take much with me though. I've gotten woozy watching ER.

Joe

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Re: Self Mutilation and Guitar Playing

Post by signorMars » Thu Sep 02, 2004 9:04 pm

i was at my girlfriend's (well girlfriend then, wife now) house and her cat got really freaked out on catnip and was tearing around the apartment like someone on PCP when she literally skidded across my right wrist leaving two enormous swirly gashes in my wrist just 2 days before a show... it was great. i had this enormous gauze pad on my wrist, everyone thought i was some sort of suicidal starving artist, and everytime i hit a chord a little too hard my wrist would start to bleed again. i do have 2 badass scars from it now, though.

there is/was a band in Austin called the Missing Digits for awhile... one of the guitarists was missing his thumb on his left hand, and the singer/guitarist was missing a half finger or so on his right hand... i saw them play as Jawbreaker on halloween one year... they were pretty badass.
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