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 20 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.

[tauzero]

I often put my Zoom MS-60B+ on top of the amp with a short lead. At one gig, everything went silent at one point and I saw that the pedal had vibrated off the amp. So I took to using a longer lead and putting the pedal on the floor, except at a couple of open mic nights where the pedal sits quite happily on top of the amp and stays there. Until tonight. Bah.

 

Another open mic one, this time when playing guitar - I'm so used to playing wireless that at the end of my slot, I just stood up and walked off stage, causing a mic stand and music stand to come crashing down. Oops.

[SimonK]

Not sure if this counts as a rookie error (or maybe saved by a pro?) but many years ago I played at a rather posh end of year school concert for my old school, in an acoustic guitar duet with an old guitar teacher called Simon James (who was one of the founding members of the band "Acoustic Alchemy" if anyone remembers them). The whole concert had gone very well so in a fit of enthusiasm the school music teacher invited all the musicians to come up on stage with their instruments for an impromptu finale. As I went to go up Simon motioned at me to sit down and said we would sit this one out. Sure enough it was an embarrassing disaster that fortunately we had no part of!

Edited 4 hours ago by SimonK

[velvetkevorkian]

I think my most embarassing one is when I managed to book tickets to go to a gig (to see DB virtuoso Edgar Meyer iirc) without realising that my band at the time also had a (totally different) gig that night, which somehow I didn't realise until they called me to find out why I wasn't at the soundcheck.

 

Fortunately they were able to cope without me for one night but not my finest hour.

[chris_b]

A couple of years ago I managed to book a gig on my daughters wedding day!

 

To be fair she hadn't written it in the diary. I knew there was going to be a wedding, but I had no idea of the date!. It's the wife's job to keep track of all that stuff. The clash was noticed a couple of months before the big day, so a dep could be found, but I'm still regularly ticked off over that one!!

[ian61]

I think bk to how I played when I first started as an 18 yr old sprog and its makes me cringe. Always the performer with way too much over playing, whacking the strings without any finness. Jumping about like an idiot missing notes etc. About as rookie a collection of errors as it's possible to get. Probably took me a good couple of yrs to cool it and start to play.... 'properly'. Been re-fining it ever since.

[Stub Mandrel]

34 minutes ago, ian61 said:

Probably took me a good couple of yrs to cool it and start to play.... 'properly'

 

I should probably do that before it's too late...