Steve Morse is currently back on the road with the Steve Morse Band, using all his know-how to combat ongoing arthritis issues in his right wrist. To help his cause, he’s modified both his guitar and his playing style, allowing him to continue playing and enjoying it, despite his ongoing struggles.
But it’s not the first time he’s been forced down that road.
As Morse revealed in an interview with Rick Beato at the start of this year, the Dixie Dregs and former Kansas and Deep Purple guitarist no longer has cartilage in his picking hand wrist, a painful side effect of tireless practice and gigging. He says the condition was so bad that, when he approached a sports doctor for help, he was practically laughed out of his office.
“Rather than roll over and die,” he had said, “I'm like, 'No, I still wanna play.'”
A quarter of a century earlier, he was faced with a similar test, albeit one that was entirely his own making. In the summer of 2000, while messing around on a skateboard, Morse fell and broke his left wrist. He had a Deep Purple tour looming, on which the Dixie Dregs were the support act. He had double duty every night.
Thinking ahead, Morse asked his osteopath for a cast that did little to inhibit his movement. As he reveals to MusicRadar, Morse also modified his Ernie Ball Music Man Steve Morse signature in a way that was almost impossible to see.
“I couldn’t reach some of the notes on the neck with the cast on,” he explains. “So I got a grinder and cut down the heel of it to help facilitate that.”
As for the neck plate?
"I took the steel plate off and ground that down, and well,” Morse confirms.
Footage of the band’s breathless performance at Montreux — where they returned last year for a rather literal cover of “Smoke on the Water” — shows that reaching those higher frets for his tasty guitar solos was pretty easy.
Luckily, Morse was no novice to electric guitar surgery. His first mod came before he was even a teenager, and his Stratocaster was the victim.
“A friend of mine had one of the first fuzz boxes. It was more like a battery-operated preamp, but it plugged right into the guitar,” he told MusicRadar in 2012. “I couldn’t plug it into the recessed jack, so I took a piece of an outlet box that had a hole drilled into it, and I put the jack on that.
“The fuzz sounded pretty cool, I must say,” he added, “especially to an 11- or 12-year-old kid.”
Previously, Morse has sat down with Guitar Player to empower readers with his five go-to ideas for playing and writing. Back in January, he explained how players can keep their cool when the going gets tough — such as when you break your wrist right before touring with one of the world's most iconic rock bands.
