Embarrassing rookie errors….

[Merton]

Couldn’t understand why I was getting no difference with my preamp set to “bypass” or “on. Spent the whole gig perplexed and convinced my hearing was shot.

Nope, plugged into the “thru” output not the “effect” output. 😀

[Jack]

At one point I had two matching 4u Gator racks. One had my bass rig in (a wireless and Helix). I needed this rack for every gig we played. The other housed my mixer and bluetooth music player. I only needed this rack when we were providing our own sound. Guess who showed up to a festival an hour away from my house with the one, wrong rack? 

 

I've long since moved on from the Helix but the mixer rack is still in use and still has several large '2' stickers on it just so I can tell it apart from the long gone '1' rack with the Helix in. Hey, at least I learned my lesson to label things clearly. 

 

[Wombat]

Off topic but what did you move on to the Helix to?

[Mrbigstuff]

Gigging in shorts. A great idea until you see how silly you look in the photos. Especially as a short ar$e

[Jack]

26 minutes ago, Wombat said:

Off topic but what did you move on to the Helix to?

Bought a Stomp as a backup, then realised I only ever used the Stomp as it was enough so I sold the full fat Helix, then realised the Stomp wasn't enough so swapped the Stomp for a Quad Cortex. 

 

As ever much time and money was spent for little, if any, gain. 

[Hellzero]

It started a bit like @Skinnyman with my first ever fiver, a brand new Hohner The Jack V.

 

I proudly came to the rehearsal with that one and only bass and started to tune it EADGD instead of BEADG with the factory fitted strings, even if I found the strings very hard on the fingers, I kept going on until the G string broke in a loud snap very slightly injuring my left hand that was on the neck.

 

No more rehearsal that evening, but beer drinking instead...

 

I had to wait for a month to receive a brand new set from the local store, hey it was 1989 so the store was not stocking fiver bass string sets at all, and certainly not double ball type.

[Buddster]

Excuse the non bass anecdote, but it was an embarrassing rookie error. (and excuse the name drop...) 

 

While still a studio assistant early '80s, I had to run a session for Heaven 17 who were recording some demos. 

The engineer who I mainly worked with had a line in cheeky phrases that he could get away with and would always get a laugh. 

So we ran through a lead vocal with Glen Gregory. No issues, all fine. 

However, I thought I'd try one of his cheeky remarks, you know, as you do when you think you're above your station. 

 

"that was great Glen, thanks. If you'd lke to leave your name and number in the bin on the way out" 

 

It didn't really go down as well as expected! 

I was rather embarrassed, but had to balls it out. 

Edited 3 hours ago by Buddster

[Combed20]

We were recording our album and I was tracking. Went for a take, and silence. Checked lead to pedal, checked pedal, checked lead coming out of pedal. Engineer started making checks his end. Turned out I'd turned down the volume knob on my bass. 

[tauzero]

Went on for the second half of a gig and silence from my bass. Backup bass - also silence. Swapped wireless to the spare and got sound. When I got home, I tested the suspect wireless and it was perfect. My conclusion was that after unplugging the two dongles to save batteries on the bass and the effects pedal, I had plugged them back in without looking to check that the one marked "Tx" in big friendly letters was on the bass and the one marked "Rx" was on the pedal.

 

As bassist, I am of course the default sound engineer. With another band at another gig, we started the second set and all was well (we thought) until somebody told me that they couldn't hear the vocals out front. The channel mute switches only worked on the FOH, not the monitors.

 

Turned up at one gig with what I thought was my bass amp, then found that I'd picked up the wrong silver case and had a case of microphones. I did have a spare amp with me, but sadly no means of connecting said amp to the cab, so that was a dash back home to get the amp.

 

And I've done the wrong venue thing as well, fortunately only about five miles from where I should have been.

[casapete]

In the early days with the tribute band, when playing smaller theatres we had our mixer onstage.

It was stage left nearest to me, so I got the job of starting our play on music which was on 

a mini disc player in the wings. The music was composed by our then keyboard player to neatly

segue into our first song with a big opening chord in the same key as the play on - very dramatic.

Last thing I did at each soundcheck was to check it was running okay.

One memorable night we were all ( an 8 piece band with string section) waiting to go onstage, 

and I saw the house lights going down which was my cue to hit the start button for the play on.

Only then did I realise I hadn’t returned the music back to the start and it kicked into life around

half way through. Cue 8 musicians frantically running to their places and instruments - we all

just made it in time to avoid a massive gap in the proceedings.

Needless to say that was the last time I was entrusted with the task, and soon after we got a 

pro FOH engineer on every gig who did the job perfectly every time. Even then, hearing the

music still gave me flashbacks. 😅

 

[Franticsmurf]

Many years ago at the start f my bass career we were playing a biggish gig at a local holiday park. Big stage, big PA, fairly large FOH engineer. He plugged the DI from my Laney amp into the desk and left us to set up and start the on stage sound check. Once I'd plugged in I realised there was no sound coming from my amp. As one inexperienced with DI at the time, I assumed it was something to do with the FOH guy DI-ing me, cutting the amp volume, so I went to find him. He pretty much dismissed out of hand my suggestion that it was his fault (fortunately, I don't have a temper and I was quite calm when asking him what he'd done to my amp). A few minutes of staring at the amp later, I realised that I'd turned the master volume down. I apologised to the FOH guy (his dismissive acknowledgement was enough to ensure I never made that mistake again) and the gig went ahead to moderate success. 

[BigRedX]

Go half way to a gig in Coventry (from Nottingham) when I suddenly released that I hadn't packed the case which amongst other things held the floppy disk for the MIDI files for our backing. We could have managed without the other stuff in the case, but without the MIDI files we had no synths, samples, or patch changes for the effects. We had to turn round and go back for it. Luckily the headlining band had taken so long to soundcheck we still managed to arrive before we needed to set up. After that I took two back-up disks in other cases that were less easy to forget.

 

In my synth-pop band days in the 80s I was using a Korg MS20 semi-modular synth live. Each song had long intros that allowed me to patch the next sound. Even with cheat sheets, I would invariably get one lead in the wrong place at some point in the set which if I was lucky would result in silence when I started playing or if I was unlucky something loud and atonal while I frantically tried to work out which patch lead was in the wrong place.

 

More recently two problems with my Helix and wireless set up. Luckily they occurred in rehearsals rather than at a gig so have the advantage that I now know to check for both. Firstly plugged the receiver into the Aux in instead of Guitar in. Proceeded to tune up and then couldn't work out why the sound wasn't being sent to the PA. That's when I discovered that the default settings allowed the tuner to be active on all inputs irrespective of whether they were connected to the output or not. The second one was when I got the transmitter and receiver the wrong way around and again had no sound. Receiver has now got some brightly coloured tape on it so I don't make that mistake again.

[BassApprentice]

In my teenage days playing at a Student Union where I'd just got a fancy wireless kit. Got carried away and decided to jump off the stage.

 

Wireless receiver drops out of bass, hits the floor and battery goes flying....

 

[Woodinblack]

12 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

 The second one was when I got the transmitter and receiver the wrong way around and again had no sound. Receiver has now got some brightly coloured tape on it so I don't make that mistake again.

 

Did exactly that a few weeks ago, much puzzled searching for the lack of sound. result, the same, receiver has red insulation tape around it.

When I was looking at new wireless the other day, I noticed that the fender telepath one has different coloured rx and tx, made me wonder why that wasn't a thing!

[ian61]

Id only been playing a couple yrs  but decided i just had to have a dirty grt Ampeg V4B amp ( or so I thght). Trapesed all over the country, found one, and shipped it back to the south coast at stupid expense.  A few weeks later popped into my local store and to my horror plugged into a used but superb Peavey 150 BW combo with DI out the works, for a fraction of what I paid for the V4.  Took me ages to move the Ampeg before I could find another Peavey.  The exuberance of youth really is wasted on the young. 

 

Edited 34 minutes ago by ian61

[dave_bass5]

12 hours ago, Mrbigstuff said:

Gigging in shorts. A great idea until you see how silly you look in the photos. Especially as a short ar$e

I still have nightmares about the time I gigged in lycra cycle shorts. WTF was I thinking 😂

[paul_5]

41 minutes ago, dave_bass5 said:

I still have nightmares about the time I gigged in lycra cycle shorts. WTF was I thinking 😂

I suspect you are not the only one troubled by that particular memory. 😄

[chris_b]

I was 17 and took  the frets out of my first bass, a Framus Star Bass, because I wanted more of a double bass sound. I took the bass to a gig that night and, for some reason, decided to wear sunglasses. It was so dark I couldn't see a thing and was far too cool to take the glasses off! I made so many mistakes that ,at the end of the gig, the rest of  the band gave me a huge thumbs down. I've never gigged wearing sunglasses since!

[dave_bass5]

I posed about this in another thread, but I once turned up to a gig with the wrong bass. It was one I had swapped pups out with and had just put the pups from the other bass in to this bass  as a place to store them. The whole bass needed wring with gaffer tape at the gig. 

[dave_bass5]

1 hour ago, paul_5 said:

I suspect you are not the only one troubled by that particular memory. 😄

Haha. to be fair they were black, I was playing keys so stuck at the back, and it was a Walkabout pub where you aren't even allowed in if you're sober