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Guitar Players from Hell True Stories

M

Mr. Ray

Feb 20, 2009
700
14
Canada
#1
OK we have the stories about the drummers from hell. Let us not forget the guitar players that have made the gigs not so enjoyable.
I will never forget a really important blues gig where we had an "experienced player" sub in at the last minute. All night he kept playing major scale country licks for his leads and major chords in minor blues. Even worse he told me he love to emulate his favorite guitarist... Albert King. I asked him when you are you going to start? He just didn't get it.

Let's here those stories about the guitarist players from hell.
 
#2
well, i actually got this one time. we were playin an original song, and there was a small solo in the middle. before the gig, he winks at me and says "watch this, ive been practising" first off i was thinkin wow, he practised. but, during the solo, which was supposed to be around 45 seconds long, ended up being 10 minutes long, 10 MINUTES!! i dont know what he was thinking, and a few people even left half way through it. i cried over that one. quit the band a couple days later
 
#3
ever been asked to leave a band because you were a better guitar player than the guitard, and he felt threatend by you. I picked up his guitar once to mess around with a blues jam, apparently that was the wrong thing to do. So glad I am out of that band.
 
#6
I played with a guitar player once (key word: once) who showed up with an old Fender Bassman 100 as his amp. He used an even older Ibanez distortion pedal that was held together with scotch tape. Wires falling out of it and everything. If that's not bad enough, he insisted on turning up to eleven.

I have never heard so much feedback from one player in my life. I don't think my ears will ever be the same.
 
#8
i used to sing in a hardcore band and at one of our gigs our guitarist decided to go on a lecture about mothaflippin' HOCKEY! 2 hours before we would go up on stage.
he didn't sound check our nothing he just took off.
he shows up about 40min to late and one of the other bands playing the same show had to cover for us by playing their set a little earlier.
the show went really bad and we did'nt even bother to contact him after that, we got a new guitarist and that was that.
 
#11
mgash said:
ever been asked to leave a band because you were a better guitar player than the guitard, and he felt threatend by you. I picked up his guitar once to mess around with a blues jam, apparently that was the wrong thing to do. So glad I am out of that band.
Click to expand...

My band broke up, in essence, because I was becoming a better songwriter than my guitarist, who felt threatened, and promptly quit the band.

We had been a 3 piece for about 3 years. When I had joined the band I had only played bass for about a year, the guitaist for 3. I had been writing since I first picked the bass up, only at this point alost 4 years after I was actually getting really good. The guitarist and I were both songwriters/vocalists. He started to claim that we were playing more of "my" songs than "his" songs. I told him I thought they were all "OUR" songs. Apparently not.
 
#12
I was putting together a new band and auditioned a guitarist that also wanted to sing. Cool, I thought, as I didnt want to be the only vocalist. So he showed up to play his guitar through a crappy old PA. Ok... He had some multi-effects unit thing, which made sense (as I was looking for someone who knew how to use effects) Ok... we were jamming and he started singing. YUCK. I know im not the greatest singer, but man was it bad. Ok, I figure id give him another chance on guitar. Next audition, he shows up guitarless.

"My wrist has been hurting and I really just want to sing."

Goodbye...
 
#14
I played with a guitarist who,drunk or sober, would play all his solos in a different key than the song!

He generally got the chords & arrangements right & the solos would be the correct patterns/scales just in a different key.

Eventually I figured on his secret code. This guitard could only solo in A,E,D,G or C. The only problem was you didn't know which one. Come guitar solo time you had to check where his left hand was to try & figure it out.I started getting it right with him approx.75% of the time.If you misjudged all you had to do was play the chord progression in A,E,D,G,or C.Out of those 5 you would get it right eventually.He never did the same solo in the same key for ANY song,although(follow me here)he would do the same solo every night for each song.You just had to guess the key.

It was a bar room country band in the early 70's. They were called "The Pony Express" & they were actually fairly popular locally. A singer(& some minor acoustic rhythm guitar,though that was mostly a stage prop.),this guitarist & electric bass& drummer. If there would have been another instrument it would of been a diaster!

They gave me a lot of decent paying work!
 
#17
Ugh...

Lead guitarist would constantly flub solos, or play them in the wrong key. Not like the above, he would try to learn the patterns so he could mimic the solo, only he would learn them wrong, or try and cop licks he just couldn't play. Solos were painful, and the singer and I usually had to look away to keep from laughing at the cat abuse coming from his guitar. Oddly enough, he was a pretty solid rhythm guitarist.

Rhythm guitarist had zero feel. He just didn't understand how to play with feel and dynamics. Every chord strum was loud and violent, usually off time, and he was always super stiff. He played on a Mexi Strat for a while... few weeks before our last gig he showed up with a $2000 Gibson SG... Nice guitar, so his loud, violent and undynamic playing sounded pretty good.

Both are cool guys, and I have fun gigging with them, but ugh... sometimes their playing and volume wars are painful... figuratively and literally.
 
#19
I've had 2 Guitarist from Hell experiences in the past year..

The first was when the band I was in at the time fired our lead guitarist; I was the new guy, and he had been in the band for 2 years, but despite that, I knew the songs better than he did, and he was the most inconsistent, undisciplined and crappy-toned guitarist I've ever encountered. Never played the same thing twice, didn't want to listen to any advice from the rest of us, or our requests for him to write parts that worked with the songs, and just got defensive all the time. They had been putting up with it all this time out of a sort of malaise, and when I showed up and started whipping things into shape a little bit, they realized how good these songs could be, and how much he was detracting from them.. he didn't want to shape up, so we had to be brutal with him and let him know that he wasn't in the band anymore. Anyway it seems he completely blamed me for the whole thing, despite the fact that I wasn't even the one who originally suggested firing him, and his parents (whose house we had been jamming in)also had a mean on for me after that. His father (who was clearly an alcoholic ex-musician who was living vicariously through his son) went so far as to accuse me and the other guitarist of stealing one of his crappy guitars (a Squier, as I recall), and called me repeatedly, threatening to call the cops, etc, if we didn't give it back. The guy we fired actually admitted to losing the guitar to his dad before this ever happened, and yet the guy still tried to get a guitar out of us.

The second time was last month, as we were trying out a new guitar player in the band I'm currently in. Very similar kind of guitarist to the one that was fired from my last band (the other guitar player from that band is in the current one as well).. he basically came in, started playing his own riffs, which were decent, nothing mind blowing, but not terrible. Problem was when we asked what he was playing so we could play along, he refused to tell us, claiming that he "doesn't know about all that note stuff - I couldn't tell you whether its an E or E flat or whatever, I just play what sounds right". Then he turned his back to me so that I couldn't see his fretboard, insisting that I should just play what sounded right. THEN when we were playing our tunes, he never bothered to ask for any insight or song structure.. nothing.. he just stood there making god-awful noises, both out of key and out of time with our songs.. and balked when we suggested he actually learn the established guitar parts. We finally had to tell him it wasn't working, trying to be polite, but he wasn't having any of it and started insulting songs that I had written and insulting my playing because I had said at the start that I wasn't a fabulous improviser, I prefer to take songs home to work on them (although, I added later, at least I can play along when given a song, unlike him). At that point I had had enough, and out came the brutal honesty. He left shortly afterward.

Having said that, though, the other guitarist that I've been in my last 3 bands with is an awesome guy, very humble and easy to work with, and a good guitarist, to boot.. so there is hope yet!
 

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