Bonepony - The "Stomp Shoe"

The "Stomp Shoe"

During the early days of the band, Bonepony did not have a drummer or a bassist. The absence of a rhythm section was supplemented by band members playing various percussion instruments including bells, tambourines and small drums. However, Johnson wished to achieve the same effect for which the old blues musicians had perfected and were known. Therefore, he began stomping the beat on either a wooden box or the floor to achieve the desired effect and sound. As the band began touring more and more, they noticed that the sound wouldn’t carry well in all venue settings so out of necessity the design required improvement. A pick up was placed inside an old tennis shoe and one of the band's members would wear the shoe and stomp out the beat while they played. Hence, the "Stomp Shoe" was developed. Lately, however, the band has stopped using the stomp shoe and instead built a specially-designed board, appropriately called the "Stomp Board," that can be stepped on the same way. As Nguyen explains, "We have a microphone in that shoe that I plug into a compressor, some old early analog techno stuff basically, analog drum machine stuff. And Scott’s got the same concept in an actual board, it does basically the same thing, and I can walk around and stand up and kind of feel a little bit better, and sometimes Scott’ll tip over and that’s the rhythm, that’s where that comes from." Kenny now is in charge of the "stomping", as Nguyen often needs both feet to operate the bass pedals.