Pre Gig panic experiences - Do share

MrGuitarabuse

MrGuitarabuse

Fractal Fanatic
Greetings all
After long pandemic and crap I am finally back in Japan on a part leisure / business trip.
I decided to go to a "musicians karaoke bar". If you can play decent enough you can join the house band.
So went to Bauhaus Roppongi, https://rockbarbauhaus.com/

Brought my own Ibanez JEM since their loaner guitars are usually shitty. Opted for Crazy Train and enjoying a beer when the bar man tells me:
"oh, you know they are all tuned half step down"
CRAP!
There I am with a floating Floyd 15 minutes to stage in standard tuning.

Into panic re-tuning mode and made it with seconds to spare

So, do share your pre gig panic situations

Happy Friday
 
I'll share my band mates experience.
I was in an original band and we were doing a big outdoor festival (WAAF Big Field Day).
Our first show with 5K+ people, so was a big moment for us.
10 minutes before our set, the wind blew my guitar players Les Paul off it's stand and snapped the headstock right off.

I brought my LP as a back up for him. But the one I grabbed was tuned a half step higher and had really old strings.
So he had to quickly tune it down and right before he struck the first chord I said - hey man, those strings are like 3 years old.
He gave me a look that I'll never forget (and miss...as he passed away a couple years ago).
 
BBN said:
I'll share my band mates experience.
I was in an original band and we were doing a big outdoor festival (WAAF Big Field Day).
Our first show with 5K+ people, so was a big moment for us.
10 minutes before our set, the wind blew my guitar players Les Paul off it's stand and snapped the headstock right off.

I brought my LP as a back up for him. But the one I grabbed was tuned a half step higher and had really old strings.
So he had to quickly tune it down and right before he struck the first chord I said - hey man, those strings are like 3 years old.
He gave me a look that I'll never forget (and miss...as he passed away a couple years ago).
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What a classic... A Les Paul head stock AND tuning troubles... :D ( but I am sorry )
 
forgetting solos and arpeggiated sections of 3 sets of music (45-50 songs) that you've only been working on for 2 weeks:fearscream:
solution - ended up either faking it through (aka: hitting passing notes or hanging on the tonic) or whipping out the charts on stage:dizzy::persevere:
 
MrGuitarabuse said:
Greetings all
After long pandemic and crap I am finally back in Japan on a part leisure / business trip.
I decided to go to a "musicians karaoke bar". If you can play decent enough you can join the house band.
So went to Bauhaus Roppongi, https://rockbarbauhaus.com/

Brought my own Ibanez JEM since their loaner guitars are usually shitty. Opted for Crazy Train and enjoying a beer when the bar man tells me:
"oh, you know they are all tuned half step down"
CRAP!
There I am with a floating Floyd 15 minutes to stage in standard tuning.

Into panic re-tuning mode and made it with seconds to spare

So, do share your pre gig panic situations

Happy Friday
Click to expand...
This happened to me many, many years ago. Went to see a rival band in a big club. I knew the drummer pretty well and he asked me to sit in. I was coming from work and had a Strat in my car with a Floyd which was still quite the novelty. Their guitar player gives me the key and then mentions they are tuned down a half-step as the drummer is counting off the tune! At the time a young and naive me didn't recognize that as sabotage.
 
I was young and doing my first tour out west where the venues are much, much further apart than here in the east. At the time I was traveling with a four-slot guitar trunk because there was the occasional flight involved. Anyway, I jumped on the bus with no sleep late one night and woke up in Vail Colorado. Go to the hotel to get some better quality rest and a shower. I show up at the venue for sound check refreshed and happy as a clam until asked for the key to my guitar trunk and I suddenly flash to the keys sitting on the TV back at the previous night's hotel.

Someone in maintenance at the venue is called and they managed to find a heavy duty drill and spent half an hour drilling out the locks just in time for sound check to get cut. Oh, but it gets better, I walked out with my favorite Strat just to check my amps and the 60 cycle hum is louder than my playing. It's Vail, and the ski lift motors are apparently right behind the venue.
 
Many, many years ago... Quick pre-gig restroom stop when I heard my band being announced. Brief panic, rushed on stage and strapped on my guitar as the rest of the band started. We were covering Cherub Rock by Smashing Pumpkins, so the other guitarist starts clean guitar, then drums come in, then bass, and then I'm supposed to come in with the driving heavy guitar. Nothing. No sound. Started fiddling with the amp, efffects, etc., and nothing. By the chorus I realized I never plugged in my guitar. :oops:
 
markwayne said:
I was young and doing my first tour out west where the venues are much, much further apart than here in the east. At the time I was traveling with a four-slot guitar trunk because there was the occasional flight involved. Anyway, I jumped on the bus with no sleep late one night and woke up in Vail Colorado. Go to the hotel to get some better quality rest and a shower. I show up at the venue for sound check refreshed and happy as a clam until asked for the key to my guitar trunk and I suddenly flash to the keys sitting on the TV back at the previous night's hotel.

Someone in maintenance at the venue is called and they managed to find a heavy duty drill and spent half an hour drilling out the locks just in time for sound check to get cut. Oh, but it gets better, I walked out with my favorite Strat just to check my amps and the 60 cycle hum is louder than my playing. It's Vail, and the ski lift motors are apparently right behind the venue.
Click to expand...

As an old ski instructor I always dreamed about going to Vail for skiing :D
 
A tuning issue within the last year: All tuned up, start playing the first song and I'm way out of key. Start panicking that I'm playing the wrong notes, have somehow forgotten the song, cannot trust my memory or fingers, life as I've known it is surely over....
Ah, this scene has the expression pedal driving the Pitch block Whammy and the pedal is in some random position.
As you were...
 
MrGuitarabuse said:
Greetings all
After long pandemic and crap I am finally back in Japan on a part leisure / business trip.
I decided to go to a "musicians karaoke bar". If you can play decent enough you can join the house band.
So went to Bauhaus Roppongi, https://rockbarbauhaus.com/

Brought my own Ibanez JEM since their loaner guitars are usually shitty. Opted for Crazy Train and enjoying a beer when the bar man tells me:
"oh, you know they are all tuned half step down"
CRAP!
There I am with a floating Floyd 15 minutes to stage in standard tuning.

Into panic re-tuning mode and made it with seconds to spare

So, do share your pre gig panic situations

Happy Friday
Click to expand...
Two wood wedges shoved between the tremolo block and the body of the guitar… It's a stop tailpiece! :)
 
My first 'big' gig was a on a side stage at a decent size festival. There was a quick turnaround between bands and during our sound check I couldn't get any sound. Amp was on, standby off, pedalboard had power, tuner off and guitar was plugged in. The audio engineer was gracious but visibly frustrated and skipped me but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on.....until I realized I hadn't turned my wireless pack on.
 
Gig at after part for major bike race, continental divide colorado.

My rocktron foot controller that ran my entire rig is doa. No guitar,no gig. Packed house.

Pre smart phones so I didn’t have a schematic.

All I had was a volt meter and a soldering iron. Input had 0 volts. I probed around until I found a soldering joint with 9 volts. Chopped up a mic cable and soldered wire from hot point to dead input. Damn thing powered up and we played the gig.

A bloody miracle.
 
Too many to list. But one comes to mind pretty recently.

Subbing in a megachurch gig for a friend to a couple thousand people. I was on drums. Halfway through Musical Director misses a cue from the Pastor. We usually use backing tracks but an audible was called and one of the songs was swapped for another without anyone telling the band. I just hear through the talkback "oh shit. THREE, FOUR!"

I hit a big crash on one, and just play kick drum and try to lock in with something. The tempo was clearly way different from what we rehearsed and the band limps through the intro until we realize it's the other song. A weird big cacophony of sound and then the click comes blaring in the house for two seconds and then gets muted, while the background singer is singing the wrong song until she realizes where the audible was called.

If you're familiar with the instagram account Worship Fails, this was definitely one of those moments. :tearsofjoy:
 
Oh, another one I still laugh about to this day.

Got hired for a theater gig in Palm Springs. A Christmas Revue kind of gig where they flew in a whole bunch of Broadway Stars from New York to each sing a holiday or theater favorite. The Musical Director was also flown in from NYC while the event hired a local LA rhythm section. I was on guitar. The band wasn't given any charts or setlist ahead of time, but we are all strong readers and we were told it would just be a nice easy chart reading gig. Rehearsal scheduled the morning of the show.

The band shows up and the charts given are the Vocal/Piano scores you would find in a music store. A lot of the songs are missing chords in certain sections and we're writing in the chord progressions during the rehearsal. A three minute pop tune would be stretched over 10 pages with a DS or second ending on Page 7 would have the reader go back to page three and try to catch a coda and jump to page 9. Some lines have one bar, while others have 5 bars. INCREDIBLY difficult to read. The drummer spent most of the rehearsal taping his charts into one long score and spreading it out over 4 music stands on his kit.

Halfway through the gig. The bassist, out of frustration starts tearing pages out of the book instead of turning them. Making huge paper tearing sounds and throwing them unceremoniously on the floor or in the air. Incredible moment as the drummer and I are in TEARS laughing in the pit the whole way.

We all still laugh about this gig to this day. If you're ever hiring a rhythm section to read something down, please put charts together instead of just photocopying a piano vocal score.
 
Last year at the Vai Academy camp, I was waiting in line to join Steve and his band on stage for a jam. Maybe 3 people in front of me which meant I had 10 minutes or so to hang out, so of course I'm incessantly checking tuning with a little clip-on tuner.

Guy in front of me asks if he can borrow my tuner, sure, no problem. He hands it back to me as he's going up on stage (I'm next) and I clip it on to check mine one more time, and suddenly it's coming up flat. This is on a 7-string Nuno N7 with a Floyd so big changes are not a quick matter. I'm twisting the fine tuners on the bridge hoping to get it somewhere close before they bottom out and then notice the guy I loaned it to had somehow bumped it up to A-445Hz. :oops:

So now with minutes to go I had to figure out how to put it back to A-440 and then undo the rapid tuning I'd just done...turned out fine, and @unix-guy was there to film it, but when you're about to take the stage with Vai to lead a jam of your own choosing, that's not quite how I wanted to mentally prep for it :smile:


Just recently I was playing in a local blues festival, one of those half-hour set, quick-turn kinda things. Guy before me took his time getting off stage so I rushed to get my AX8 etc set up, rest of the band is ready to go, I pull my guitar out of the case and the high E is broken :expressionless: literally had just played the thing earlier that morning and it was fine. I had another guitar but thinking this was just gonna be a quick & easy one had left it in my car two blocks away. Had the band start without me as I sprinted to the car and grabbed the backup guitar, and joined them right as the lead part came in...luckily it went smooth from there, but that was a first for me, having a string just randomly snap while in transit. It broke right at the locking tuner too. Maybe it worked out for the better as I probably would've broken it right when the lead started anyway and then have to deal with that fun scenario I'm sure we've all been a part of at some point.
 
Might I share an intra-gig panic?

This was one of my first gigs as the new lead guitarist for a top 40 agency cover band. Had just gotten started in the modeling world with a new Kemper Stage. Little did I know about the battle between gigging in firmware vs gigging with beta firmware. I forget the exact circumstances but at some point in the intro to a pop emo rock song, my kemper stage got stuck on either a half step up or half step down tuning and for most of the song we all knew it. The crowd knew it. I stopped multiple times to check my tuning and to see what effects were engaged or not. Everything was fine. Everyone else’s tuning was fine. Sheer Panic because no one knew what the hell was going on. Finally I muted my line channel and restarted the unit and then it was fine after that. Switched to firmware after that too lol and that’s why I never mess with betas anymore haha. That was my trial by fire into the modeling world
 
Timely thread. Just last weekend we were setting up to play our second show since we started this project and the router I use to connect to my mixer decided not to work on the WiFi side. Fortunately the settings I had from the last show were close enough to get by. The only issue was with my bass players vocals as they were way too loud to his in-ears and not loud enough in the mains. Fortunately he only sings one song and we just skipped that one. I did however drop my first F bomb within mic range when we were trying to fix the issue.
 
Genghis said:
I did however drop my first F bomb within mic range when we were trying to fix the issue.
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Mics are like little kids, they have BIG ears and are too happy to repeat things. :)

Years ago my ex-brother-in-law was complaining about a groin pull, which he euphemistically described as his "nut muscle", and which my niece heard and duly relayed to the entire kindergarten class during show and tell. There was a talk with the teacher about this during the ensuing parent/teacher conference. :)
 
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