Embarrassing rookie errors….

[Stub Mandrel]

On 15/08/2025 at 22:42, lonestar said:

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!

 

Got the t-shirt... TU-3 set a semitone flat. Luckily realised when I got to second string!

[Stub Mandrel]

 Not a huge one, but last night put my hand in my pocket to pull out a plectrum as the song started... and found my car keys.  Managed to find it in about a bar.

 

Biggest near-cock up was getting overexcited playing a 5 on the last encore and switching in chorus, then a HM2, then an octaver and enjoying some huge low notes.

 

At  the end I turned round and my amp head was rocking on the edge of the speaker cab like the bus in the Italian Job.

[Skinnyman]

6 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

getting overexcited playing a 5

And of course there’s the classic rookie error of forgetting that one’s playing a fiver and playing it as if it were a four string. 
 

Doesn’t sound wrong as such, just really odd. 
 

Er, so I’m told by people who’ve done such a thing. Not me though. I’d never be that stupi…..

 

[MyNameIsMark]

I did a 7 day toilet venue tour with a very loud band & on the final date the sound guy had big issues with my signal dipping out. The poor guy was stressing behind-the-desk the-whole-show, but not hearing myself was business as normal. A couple of weeks later I realised I was trying to power my 18V 1A in power brick with a 18V 150mA out adapter… the whole tour… this still haunts me

 

And my farewell gig with the same band I had the genius idea of simplifying a weird stereo setup by using both outputs of the Boss TUx tuner instead… bypass AND output, genius… why didn’t I do that sooner? As I found out after the first song, and as any normal person would expect, everyone can hear you tuning when you use the “bypass” output, I hated myself so much

 

 

[knirirr]

On 14/08/2025 at 14:05, Rosie C said:

 

Similar to wondering why my amp is silent, when the Speakon cable is still in my bag.

 

 

I have done that from time to time. 

These days I usually use a TC Electronics BAM 200 and it's 50/50 if I'll plug my bass into the headphone socket and wonder why there's no sound. 

[Mokl]

Plugging the bass into the output of my pedal board when setting up and wondering why I'm getting no signal, is something I have done more than once 😐

 

Never happens in rehearsal.

[asingardenof]

On 15/08/2025 at 22:47, SimonK said:

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

I'd did that last week, had to forgo my drive pedal which is only needed on our second encore which we weren't sure we'd get to. It starts with a bass solo and I could barely hear it so had to go au naturel.

Edited 2 hours ago by asingardenof

[Woodinblack]

2 hours ago, knirirr said:

These days I usually use a TC Electronics BAM 200 and it's 50/50 if I'll plug my bass into the headphone socket and wonder why there's no sound. 

 

Same here - and this is the first place I put one of the blanking plugs!

[Downunderwonder]

I taped over the footwitch socket on my Trace amp, only after killing it by hooking up the speaker lead to it. Thankfully there was no major loss of magic smoke, just a popped resistor in the preamp power supply.