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Pranks on band mates

#42
My old drummer used to unscrew my speaker grills on a set break and then reattach them with homosexual pornography tucked underneath. I'd go a whole show like that. It wasn't until I set him on fire with a zippo to his tattered jeans at the bar that he rethought his approach to effing with me.
 
#43
Maybe this is only funny to me because I was there, but one night, we were playing in Alberta, Canada on a Thursday night and there were half a dozen people there, watching tv and talking-smoking-drinking, anything but watching us.

This was back in the big hair 80's concert style days, and being bored and feeling ignored, we spent the entire evening performing like we were doing a stadium concert. Everyone did solos, we thanked the audience over and over again, and yelled, GREAT TO BE HERE TONIGHT!!!!

We ended every song with a five minute ending, the old 80's power cord stretched out, then a bunch of accent notes all played together, concert style.

At the end of the night, one drunk turned around and said, "Did the bartender call last call?"

Ok ok, my prank story: so we did have a guitarist who was arrogant and extremely sensitive. Somewhat of a prim a dona. One night while at the hotel we took a white toilet seat paper bow that the maid leaves on the toilet and wrapped it around his guitar. When we go to the gig I called him while he opened his guitar case and while putting on the guitar, he saw the toilet bowtie wrapped around his guitar and so did some of the early crowd. It seemed pretty funny to us but he didn't laugh.
 
#44
dadofsix said:
Years ago, back when we were all insufferable idiots, and, after a rehearsal in which the guitarist was, once again, a drunken sot, the four of us who were there to actually work decided to teach him a lesson. Sadly, he was a brilliant guitarist but for his horrible addiction to alcohol. It was nights like these that, the next day, he wouldn't even remember what he had said, or done, or who he had jacked the night before.

We managed to get his back-up guitar away from him without him noticing and, later in the evening replaced his strings. No big deal except for the fact that the drummer had come up with the brilliant plan of putting them on backwards -- the high E on top followed by the B, the G, the D, the A, and then the low E on the bottom.

The next day at rehearsal, with a roomful of sweeties there watching us rehearse, and, after hearing our guitarist apologizing to us the 50th time for being so wasted the night before, I called out the next song, "Stealin" by Uriah Heep. Our drummer innocently said "hey Tico, why don't you use the Tele'. It sounds so much better on this song!"

Sure enough, he strapped it on just as the bass and the keys started rolling in -- our guitarist was on his fourth beer by now and suspected nothing. I began my vocals and, as the song progressed, sure enough he began to fill-in with quiet, gentle guitar parts that sounded absolutely . . . hideous. As the song began to build, the look of sheer panic began to grow more prominently in his face and kept growing until we reached the part where the guitar begins to thunder. Upon hitting the first power chord he jumped like he had received an electrical shock. By the third or fourth chord he began to scream (by now, the rest of us were desperately trying not to laugh).

Finally, the keys player stopped the song and said "man, you really need to tune that thing!" It took Tico almost five minutes to figure out what was wrong with his tuning. Meanwhile our drummer, the devious one, asked innocently, "man, what did you do to that guitar last night with the strings off and everything?" To this our guitarist could only sputter in frustration and rage -- not being able to remember anything from the night before!

Something must have snapped inside. He just grabbed his guitars and left. We didn't see him for another two weeks. When he returned, we were astonished to hear him ask for our help in keeping him off "the sauce."

It's been forty years. We've all moved on to different things. But, last I heard, he was still rocking and still sober. To my knowledge, he still doesn't know anything about his band-mates involvement in that "guitar tuning" incident. Though, if he reads this I'm surely dead. lol

<><Peace
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You ought to tell him what you guys actually done back then. Just to see if he relapses.

:hiding:
It's a joke!!
 
#48
It was the first night I had practiced with my current band and everything had gone really well. We were finishing up and chatting when the guitar player got a phone call from his girl friend. He did the right thing and went outside so they could argue with each other and not bother us. The drummer looks at me and says follow me. I did and he led me around the back of the house next door so that we could see him talking on the phone. He hands me a roman candle and we both light them off shooting them at the guitarist. I thought this was extreamly funny but the best part of the whole thing was that the guitar player was used to the drummer doing these kinds of things to him and so as all these flames and sparks are wizzing past his head he very calmly gives us the finger and continues on with his conversation as if nothing was happening.
 
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#49
sadowskyguy said:
My band has a prank that we use on other bands sometimes. It is called the "air to electric adapter". My dad built it. It starts as female outlet on one side, goes to quarter inch cord, with male quarter inch head, which plugs into female adapter. That then goes to cable vision cord to an air chuck!

We lay it in the most tangled area of cords we can find. When the show is over, we pick it up and ask other bands if it is theirs. The expression on their faces is priceless when they try to make sense of the air chuck side! !! We joke that you can plug it up to the sound system, turn up the volume, and pump up a tire if need be..

:)
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No PIC no Air to Electric Adapter... ;)
 
#50
Running the singer's vocals thru a pitch shifter a semitone down and then back into his/her monitor is always great fun. The clash they experience between muscle memory and what they actually hear makes for fantastic entertainment... ;)
 
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#51
These are some great stories! Tape on the cymbals, pitch shifting lead vocals, peppers on microphones I'll have to try some of these. We drove up to Charlotte to play a show one time only one person showed up and he was deaf. No ****.
 
#54
jimc said:
Similar to detuning the vocal in the monitor. I put a single repeat short delay on the singer's voice in his monitor with none of the original signal.

Ever tried talking on the phone when you can hear yourself as an echo? Try it on your singer, they won't like it!
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Works great on drummers too, try giving him the kick delayed 40 mS... oh, the agony.
 
#57
While recording on a studio, the guitarist was using headphones to hear the backup tracks while working his solo, very concentrated. At the end of his take, I took a mic ans whisperd slowly his name like a ghost. I never seen someone looking so afraid for a second or two
 
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#58
I used to pull the instrument plug just slightly enough out of the guitard players amp so that it still looked like it was plugged in but it didn't make contact and sit back and watch him go through the motions of trying to figure out why his amp didn't work. Simple prank but effective.
 
#59
We pranked the lead guitard once by placing a wah-wah pedal in-line on his feed that he didn't know about and placed it back near the drummer. On the 1st song, he went into the lead break and the drummer "wah-wah'd" the lead. The look on his face was priceless. For the next few songs, every lead break was "wah-ka-wah" and he kept jacking with his pedal board wondering "what is going on?" The rest of us couldn't hold it back and busted out laughing and he then knew he had been punked. The guitard player got a big kick out of it.
 
#60
We used to try to keep our singer in check by sometimes agreeing beforehand, that on the 3rd verse of song #8, we'd play the whole verse up a whole step, then hit the chorus normally.
It made the singer guy really focus a little bit more, because he thought he was off pitch. Then the next time we played the song in it's original format, he was much more focused and sang it so much better.
 

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