Embarrassing rookie errors….

[SuperSeagull]

It's not plugged in, it's not switched on, it's not turned up. 99% of gear issues solved by one of these and still I get caught out. 

Edited 22 hours ago by SuperSeagull

[SumOne]

The 'I can't hear myself at all - so will turn everything up full and then muck about with cables and power/mute switches etc' deserves severe punishment (or at least needing to buy the band a round of drinks). It's a pet hate of mine, I know it is easily done but is real amateur hour stuff that sounds terrible if there are punters within earshot, potentially breaks equipment, and is really dangerous for hearing.

 

 

 

.....that's not to say I haven't done it myself though!

 

  

[asingardenof]

2 hours ago, Jack said:

Thanks for that, I now know what I'm calling my autobiography: A Semitone Louder

Gah! This is what I get for trying to update while having a conversation with someone.

[NoRhino]

18 hours ago, Mrbigstuff said:

Gigging in shorts. A great idea until you see how silly you look in the photos. 

Agreed. I played outside at The Dereham Blues festival thinking shorts and a tee shirt was a great look.  Looking back at photos later my wife said "The shorts were OK but perhaps next time wear a better shirt so you don't look like a total tramp"

 

Love is ❤️ 

 

 

[chris_b]

2 minutes ago, NoRhino said:

Agreed. I played outside at The Dereham Blues festival thinking shorts and a tee shirt was a great look.  Looking back at photos later my wife said "The shorts were OK but perhaps next time wear a better shirt so you don't look like a total tramp"

 

Love is ❤️ 

 

 

 

Yep. I regularly get, "You're really going looking like that?"

[tauzero]

1 hour ago, NoRhino said:

Agreed. I played outside at The Dereham Blues festival thinking shorts and a tee shirt was a great look.  Looking back at photos later my wife said "The shorts were OK but perhaps next time wear a better shirt so you don't look like a total tramp"

 

Love is ❤️ 

 

 

 

I was trying to find a photo from a recent gig which is the only one where we all wore shorts, but there appears to be no photographic evidence. Probably just as well. In our defence, it was ridiculously hot.

[Cliff Edge]

On 14/08/2025 at 15:29, Wombat said:

The great thing about IEMs is that you can play several songs in a pub and not know you didn’t put the PA faders up till one of the band not wearing them tentatively says ‘it’s a bit quiet’…

Once kicked off the second set with a great sound on stage, until the end of the first number when someone out front told us the PA wasn’t on. 

[ezbass]

Played my first big stage and ran across it - I was not wireless. 
 

Fortunately, I plugged back in in time to hit the signature riff. It was recorded and you can just hear the crackle as I reconnect.

[Owen]

I made the rookie error of trusting one of my students.

 

A long time ago I took my class of hairy rockers into a theatre pit to play West Side Story with the Performing Arts dept on stage. I downloaded the whole thing on Midi Files and then loaded them into Logic. I printed them out as TAB and handed them to my hairys. To make sure we had a safety net I had piano tracks on a CD. This was back in the day. We radically were running a silent pit with everyone on cans. There were some tidy players in the pit with 3 drummers sharing duties and everyone getting a good crack at it given numerous shows. The fight scene (if you know the show) was absolutely rocking. We ripped off a Steve Vai/Chick Corea version of it. Lots and lots of fun while they were really being stretched. Of course, not everyone was a player and there were students who needed to be accommodated with various roles. I shall call him Dave. He was clueless in virtually all aspects of the course. He was put on monitors (which were set and forget) and playback. How much of a mess could he make? We got to the quiet number before the finale of the first act. This was programmed on the CD to wind down with some gentle piano arpeggios and segue on the same track into the finale. Dave, who was chemically enhanced by then, hit stop at the end of the arpeggios. The intro the "The Jets are going to have their way tonight" etc just did not happen. That song was meant to start at 2:36 in the track. There is no way he could queue it up again even if he was operating at 100%. And he was not. 

 

So I turned to, let's call her Sue, on the keys and hissed, "Give me a G". "Huh?" she responded. "Give me a G", I hissed louder. This, while all the cast were frozen on stage. I started singing "The Jets are going to have their way tonight" acapella. The cast joined in and hammered through it. Acapella. With all the moves to the music which only existed in their minds. How we all laughed. A few weeks later. The energy levels on stage were insane, though!

[lonestar]

At a huge outdoor gig in bright sunlight I couldn’t see the leds on my pedal tuner.

No problem, I have a backup Korg lcd screen tuner. Tuned my 5 string and started playing. Horrible; I must have been about a third of a tone out. I had to stop playing, grab my backup bass and carry on with some very odd looks from my bandmates.

At the interval I just couldn’t work out what was going on. The sound guy sussed it. I’d knocked the calibration switch on the tuner in my haste from 440hz to something else. Doh!

[SimonK]

The amount of times I forget to check the settings on my pedals haven't been knocked in transit...

 

Although my favourite(?) rookie error was in one of my first bands as an 18 year old having just got my licence - of course we squeezed three lads, two amps, a bass, a guitar and most of a drum kit in a rover metro... and of course we knocked the exhaust off on the first bump we drove over!

[chris_b]

1 hour ago, lonestar said:

At a huge outdoor gig in bright sunlight I couldn’t see the leds on my pedal tuner.

 

I learnt very quickly not to write my charts in red ink!!!! I was looking at an empty page.

[ian61]

Never understood the stress around tuning. I just wait till someone hits any old note or chord and go from there.. My bass is always more less in tune so only ever needs a cent either way.

[Hellzero]

1 hour ago, ian61 said:

Never understood the stress around tuning. I just wait till someone hits any old note or chord and go from there.. My bass is always more less in tune so only ever needs a cent either way.

Looks like you never played an aluminium neck Kramer in plain sun or at an outside gig during a frozen winter ... as Kramer or Travis Bean invented the Auto-Detune.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Hellzero
More added

[Downunderwonder]

I played my first couple or three public outings with my practice amp.