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Ever screw up at rehearsal?

At rehearsal I thought I was playing an A, but it was an Ab. It's as though someone farted and it became a train wreck as everybody was looking at one another to determine who did it. I cant stop laughing at the screw up I did. I normally don't play like that. But it was a train wreck. They caught me. Lets hear your train wrecks. I know I'm not the only one. ;)
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Hahaha. This one time in Van Nuys, I couldnt remember the chorus to one of our songs for the life of me. I played it on different notes every 4 measures. So like 8 times til I got it right. Nobody noticed
*eyes shifting back and forth*
 
This is one of my favorite, funniest and true screwup stories. It was not at a rehearsal, but I had a gig. It also was not my screwup but fortunately I got to witness it.

I was doing a casual gig as a four piece (guitar/ Bass/ Keys/drums). It was actually the guitaris's gig. He and I often did duo gigs, so he would call tunes and occasionally he would want to play a song just as a duo.

So, anyway one of the songs he called on that gig was "tears in heaven". He played the song in A... I think that is the original key, I'm not sure but it doesn't really matter. So he calls the song, yells over to the keyboard player "layout for this one". So he and I start playing the song.

The keyboard player (who can play extremely well when he wants to, but is a very "odd" fellow) start interjecting some random fills and lines. What he is playing sounds god awful. So, as the guitarist and I are still playing the song he yells over at the keyboardist again "I said lay out!". So we play a few more measures, and once again the keyboardist starts interjecting random phrases that sound absolutely hideous. He leans over to me (I was closer to him) and asked me "what key are we in?". I say to him we are in A, but just lay out we have this.

So once again we continue with the song. Once again, the keyboardist starts interjecting truly horrendous sounding phrases and fills. At this point the guitarist is yelling at me (as I'm trying not to crack up) "Tell that &$!?;!$ to lay the $&)(;? out!"

So, at this point I yelled to the keyboard player, relating that message. Once again he looks at me and asks "what key did you say we are in?". I say back to him "We are in A, but just layout...don't play!" For reasons that I will never understand, he just kept on doing what he was doing and it sounded so bad I couldn't help but crack up and giggle the whole time.

Finally, the song is over and the guitarist is super pissed. I am trying my best not to laugh out loud and then look over at the keyboard player and ask him "what the hell was that?". so, for like the sixth time he asks "what key did you say that was in?" I look at him and say "it was in A!"

He looks at me and actually says (this is true) "Oh, I thought you said Bb."

I'm giggling now just remembering it.
 
I think if you are not screwing up at rehearsal you’re not doing it right.

I did play a gig a while ago with a blues/blues rock band and we were doing “Spanish Moon” in C#. I kick it off and somehow the guitarist heard it wrong and told the harp player I was messing up and playing it in C. I checked - nope, C#. At least I heard him so when they came in I smoothly switched to C, after a couple of bad notes. I had to wait and see if they were really going to do it or if I had just misheard amidst the din.

At the end of the night we talked about it and I said I was in C# and switched to meet them. The guitarist was skeptical, but after hearing the recording he admitted fault - and blamed it on his chorus making it sound weird and it threw him off.
 
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I was in a great band 30 years ago. We tried to never play anything twice the same way. At gigs, the best gag was to signal a one fret modulation just before a harp solo. The guy was good enough to pull off a solo with half of his notes gone. That joke just never got old.
That's why I play mostly jazz: The right note is never more than a half-step away (saith Wooten).
 
Years ago, I decided to partake of a 'pipe of peace' at a rehearsal with a new trio a guitarist I knew was putting together. I don't remember what the herb really was but I do remember that I didn't remember what the hell I was supposed to do on a fretless 'board. After about five minutes, my mind was like toffee and so were my hands. The fretless apparently sounded like a groaning ox. Rehearsal fell apart soon after, followed by mild paranoia .

Does that qualify?

I'm not that good at fretless and have to concentrate a lot to play it well. Even the tiniest puff of the pipe and it's time to grab the fretted bass. I still make mistakes, just not as many and not as bad.
 
Our practices are notorious for people getting the basic sequence of a song wrong. That's why I chart everything. We brought back some old tunes to modify our normal 5 piece down to a four piece, and one of those songs seemed to have a short solo that would normally have been fiddle. I commented that it was fine and I'd just have to remember it was short. Since it's charted, I'm seldom wrong about song structure (and when we change something I'm quick to ask if that's the way we'll be doing it) the whole band was quick to point out that it was exactly as long as it should have been. They whipped out their phones and commenced to play the part to prove me wrong. (Mind you I already said I was ok with it).

In the end, I got into the mic, and asked them all to "listen closely... My chart is wrong". They enjoyed it, I smiled, and we moved on.
 
Here's a non-funny train wreck story...:thumbsup:

In 1999 I agreed to sub on bass for a country covers band after more than half an hour on the phone with a great drummer that I had worked with many times in the past. He called me at the last minute and somehow convinced me that I was good enough to do it. By the last minute I mean the day before the gig...

I was taking a break from day to day work and was pursuing a college degree. Big whoop... I have the diploma somewhere in a box on a shelf. Anyway... It had been more than 4 years since I moved away to another state. The only "band" I found to play bass with was at a local church playing acoustic guitar and bass on contemporary christian music. I've always prefered classic rock so I didn't listen to a country radio station even in my car. I was expecting to have to play songs that I had never heard before. But I was expecting to get them all charted out.

I got to the gig 2 hours early so that I could chart out the songs that I didn't know. A half hour later the drummer showed up. He had no set list and no recordings of any of the songs that they played. The guitar and keyboard players show up 15 minutes before start time at 8:00pm... They refused to change the set list to take out some of the more complicated newer songs that I had never listened to... ever. And there was not enough time left to chart them all out even if they wanted to... Which they didn't.

So... for the next 4 long hours I proceeded to fumble through songs that were completely foreign to me with no charts to look to for guidance. The guitar player kept his back to me most of the night, so I couldn't see his hand. The keyboard player thought he was being helpful by screaming out numbers that I couldn't even hear because his amp was so loud...

And it sucked... (By it I mean I.) "It" was REALLY Bad...

Oh... And I'm still waiting to get paid.
.....first time I played country....steel player says"Standard country tune" well I was raised on
Van Halen, Hedrix, Trower, Montrose, etc....none of it was standard.....feel your pain
 
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I had a friend who was the bassist in the house open mic band. Some female guitarist/vocalist wanted to do (Rod's) "Stay With Me". I was so psyched to play the song, that I forgot to accommodate for the extra string on his 5 string and started on the 7th fret B on the E-string, rather than 7th fret E on the A-string (damn 4 string muscle memory)!!!