My last band were looking for a bassist for ages and, after fruitless searching, I suggested going back to bass and us trying out some proper guitarists - which none of us were really keen on which is why I was on guitar in the first place. We picked three interested parties and set up auditions, giving them one hour each with a 20 minute break between each one. The first guy came in, nothing special, but not crap, but not the right guy for the gig. The second guy I thought would have worked, but kept asking about how I did the solos on the demo. I told him that 99% of what we were doing was nothing to do with solos and not to worry too much about it but he kept asking about this lick and that, quite neurotic about it and the other lads weren't keen. The third guy had sent us some mp3's of some Vai style sweep picking and six string pyrotechnics so we were expecting great things.
But there was no sign of him.
Eventually, with about 30 minutes of the session left he called, he got lost and was looking for directions. He arrived with about 15 minutes left, but certainly looked the part, apart from a very, very cheap guitar and a pod, which he plugged into the PA. Now you need to imagine how a Marshall stack would sound if it was deep, deep in a cave and you were at the cave entrance, several miles away. It's as close as I can depict his reverb and echo drenched tone. Now imagine the guitar is slightly out of tune too. There you go. He had a couple of weeks to learn the songs we sent him so we asked him which song he wanted to play. He didn't know the names, so the first one. Ok, we said, it starts with a guitar riff so off you go. He asked if I could show it to him again, just to refresh his memory. It was a very simple riff and he was having trouble with it. We started the song and, after four bars, switched to the verse, except Vai was still butchering the intro riff. Eight bars later we head to the chorus, he's still playing the same riff. I noticed the drums start to get a little sloppy and then stop. I looked over and the drummer was hunched over behind his bass drum in what appeared to be a convulsion but managed to squeak that his bass drum skin had split. The singer was crying and bent over behind the bass drum too to see if he could help, their shoulders shaking in unison. I was the only one who could speak, so I had to say that it was time to stop and pack up since the bass drum skin was broken. The guy asked if he should come back next week. I said we'd have to get the drum fixed first and that we'd call him. Nice fella, not a guitarist though.