Most Embarrassing performance

[DEFELDUS]

omg thats insane. i have never come close to breaking a string (and i keep strings a long time, i like the worn in feel and tone, i currently have a set of year old flats on my fretless ) i just dont see how anyone can break a bass string (unless they do it intentionally )how did it happen?



btw: good job recovering

[Mr.QuakQuak]

Beh my friend brakes strings all the time. But it's because he gets mad and pulls it really hard

[boingo]

this was about 6 months ago. we were scheduled to play at my best freinds summer house in long beach... i think. anyhoo that afternoon i had enough money to go get my 8th and final tattoo. so to ease the pain i smoked about 5 joints, and 30 minutes worth of bong hits before. i got it and remembred i had the show tonigh and it started in like 3 hours. so i was sooooooo baked, i got there,a dn you know how they tell you to rest when you get it, i got it on my ankle, and my balance was that of a drunken irish boxer. i could barely stand up, and 30 minutes later i collapsed into a laughin fit. and i quote myself
"hahahahaha, i cant feel my legs man! theyre flying away, look my tatts coming to life!!!"
more and more laughs. then 45 minutes later we continued our set. but about a week after that i was confronted by some of my best freinds buddys from work and they were teasing me on my performance.
moral of the sotry is
dont get a tatto and extreely high before a live show.

[apparatus]

The second gig with my first band was hilarious. We were invited to play at a christian youth day thingy in another city. At first we had intended to play covers all the way, but when the lead guitarist came home from a trip to Bolivia, three weeks before the gig, he wrote some five songs in two nights, and we decided to go for playing a couple of those instead.

We had barely slept three hours the night before the bus trip (which was quite long and exhausting.. especially with a guy sitting next to me trying to persuade me to like Linkin Park). The last kilometers, we had to walk (it was some pilgrimage thing) and I caught a cold.

There was a mass which we had to attend, and we could barely keep ourselves awake. Then we went outside to find something to eat, and it turns out the only vegetarian food they had in the city was fries and crisps. And it was raining, so my cold got even worse (not good as the guitarist had told me the night before that I would sing.. what a deal).

The worst thing was that the songs were barely finished, let alone practised. When the rain stopped, we stood outside in the court of an old fortress and practiced without amps, and we kept on changing bits and pieces of the songs all the time. It was quite a pittoresque scene.

Then two minutes before we should have been on stage, one of the guitarists broke a string, and of course they both forgot to bring any spares.

We finally got on stage, exhausted to the edge of indifference, and we played our three songs. The funny thing was that the guitarists didn't have any straps so they sat down while playing.. I was the only one standing. I heard none of my voice in the monitor speakers, the sound guys ****ed up the guitar levels and the drummer played a totally freaked out pattern on a song which was supposed to be a simple 2/4-beat.

It was really embarassing to stand there in front of a thousand people, howling with a screwed up voice (as I couldn't hear myself singing), with the guitarists sitting down, the drummer totally in denial and the sound ****ed up. However, I was so exhausted and sleepy that I didn't give a ****. Immediately after the gig, I got a ride back home, and I slept all the way.


darn, it became a long story.. I'm probably just bored.

[ClarkW]

Yikes. Christian Youth Day turned out to be the Gig from Hell.

I'm as much a believer as the next guy, but NO WAY I'm walking more than a hundred yards with my gear. The festival liaison or whoever definitely dropped the ball on that.

Most embarrassing gig moment...it was a Thanksgiving dinner / talent show event put on by the youth group at my church. Everyone ate, and they were going to have the three or four talent acts perform, then serve dessert.

The first talent act was some skit that was terribly humorless, and the second was my brother playing his electronica music. I love my brother and all, but his music is far from mainstream, and generally ends up being very tedious to all but the most intent listener. And he played for too long.

So the people in charge decide, one he's finished, that they'll take advantage of our setup time (we had everything already set up, the bozos) to start passing out the dessert. Great, we're going to have people walking around getting pumpkin pie while we play.

Also, did I mention that this was the first time I ever played bass in front of people? Oh, did I also mention that the lead singer couldn't make it to the gig, so I was singing All Along the Watchtower and With or Without You? So I count off the downbeat for...I think our other song was Summer Song by Joe Satriani. I count 1...2..(bizarre snapping sound and profanity from drummer).3...(drummer says: "Stop").

He had forgotten to tighten the snare (the little metal/gut thing strapped across the bottom to make the snare sound) until just then, and when he flipped the lever, it came unattached. It was basically a little length of string that tied onto the drum body. Of course, it was about 3 millimeters longer than the absolute minimum length necessary to affix it correctly. We tried our best, finding the most dexterous and fine-fingered person we could to tie the snare back on. This process took approximately 8 minutes.

By the time we got ready, more than half the audience had eaten their pumpkin pie and was LEAVING. NOISILY. We started playing, and people kept leaving. Those who had a shred of tact and stayed later told us that we played just fine, and that people were only leaving because it was 9:30 on a Thursday night (most of them were college students). The drummer said, as we were breaking down, that he was ready to stop playing and walk out, he was so pissed off about how people were just talking and walking across the playing area, etc, but he didn't stop because I didn't.

I didn't stop because I was so nervous and trying so hard to remember the words and the notes that I couldn't think of anything else.

That night, we renamed ourselves to "No More Free Gigs."

[Exedore]

I've seen my fair share of broken strings/equipment, shows where people were leaving in hordes, and "oops, let's start over" moments. But I think the worst was my last show with my previous band. We had this song that had this part where it was just one guitar and vocals, and just recently we had decided it might sound better with just bass but we hadn't come to a conclusion yet. So we're playing this song and we're coming up on that part and I'm not thinking about that because I'm noticing I think I'm a little out of tune. Then we're right on top of that part and I remember and the guitarist and I look at each other, and as I'm about to shake my head no he points at me and it's either I play or the song stops.
I wasn't "a little" out of tune. I was way out of tune.
So after that song I unplug to tune (for some reason I only had one chord so I had to unplug from my amp and plug into my tuner) and when I plug back in for the next song I can't hear myself at all. So for the rest of the set I kept going back and forth checking all my connections and levels and playing and not hearing anything but hoping the kids could. I think maybe the soundguy turned me way down after my "solo".
I asked people afterward, they could tell something was wrong with me but the only part they could really here was the part I played by myself way out of tune.
I should have remembered that since I was playing in a metal/hardcore band, no one would be able to hear me anyway...

[bryan bailey]

An outdoor gig about a year ago, while doing covers I didn't know. man that show sucked. I am suprised they still payed us.

[j b scott]

i realized i am lucky that i have not encountered half of that stuff you guys have had to deal with.

i think that we are kinda lucky compared to a guitarist in that we can play worse or improvise on an unknown song, and the gig will still go well, wereas if the guitar part is not sounding right, everyone will notice.

the most embarasing thing iv had is just playing with mates when i first was learning, i mean i had had a bass for like 2 days, with no musical knowledge, and trying to play along to their songs, i didnt even understand basic concepts of key signitures or even bars/measures and riffs and to add my ear was crap, i didn't know if i was playing right or not.

its just that looking like an idiot is not fun, hopefully first impressions arent everything.