Your worst stage experience

[St0rMl0rD]

I don't know if this thread exists yet, but I wanna hear some really BAD live experiences with you guys as performing artists. My own was a gig when I had all my sounds loaded in correct order and the gig started with my us covering Glorious by Andreas Johnson, of course I had a string sound loaded. The problem was with me pulling the black cover down from my keyboard rig, which moved the mod wheel, and I played the whole song with vibrato strings, lol.

So, what's yours?

-J

[P-dur]

We were playing it's a long way to the top if you wanna rock'n roll by acdc (of all songs in existence) at school, and about halfway through we had a collective breakdown, and nobody knew where in the song we were, so it was a rather great fuck-up, we just had to stop. Also present in the "crowd" were some guests from schools in Italy and Japan. I guess they had a memorable evening.

[RemcoG]

During Blackest Eyes from Porcupine Tree, I clicked a sound a few sounds too far with my pedal. What happened was, right before the last 'heavy riff', I skipped to a percussive/banjo like sound I use during Lazarus by Porcupine Tree, in a bridge section.

So that sounded just stupid XD

And ALWAYS, right before the gig, there's something wrong with my laptop. Luckily it is always fixed within a few minutes.

[Devnor]

Mine was a room full of drunk bikers and a man with a gun.

[Christopher]

My worst experience was definately telling the "concert roadies" to open the piano completely and then sitting behind a closed piano which led to not being heard at all-.-

Even the Ribbon Controller fucking up at the beginning of Pull me under was not THAT bad... some strange notes in the intro... plug it out, go ahead and except for the band and 1 or 2 musicians in the audience nobody realised o.0

[osiris]

The worst experience I've had was at a college gig some years ago. We were playing go with the flow by queens of the stone age (I didnt play keys back then, so I was on guitar) and there was a power cut in the middle of the song, so all the lights in the building went off as well, and the drummer was just playing alone... Then after about 15seconds power came back n we carried on. Drummer kept it going in the power cut though lol.

Another college gig I played the first song, then second one knocking on heavens door, I was doing guitar and lead singing, and introduced the song, then strummed my guitar n it had gone horribly out of tune. n didnt wna stay in tune.. After a few mins of failed tuning attempt, my friend lept in with his guitar for me to use.

Another thing that happened once was in soundcheck (this was with my current band, me on keys and metal vocals) I had warmed up my vocals in the car, n then came to scream in the soundcheck n no noise came out. So all the other bands were sniggering... Then after clearing my throat a bit I sorted it... Was quite embarrasing.




They aren't the worst things that can happen... but they're probably the worst ones that have happened to me so far.

[el mae de las teclas]

I started playing keyboards at a not so young age, 16. A few months after I started taking classes, my keyboard teacher told me he had a friend who was in a black metal band and that he needed urgently a guest keyboardist for 1 song in a metal battle fest that would take place in the next 2 days.

I was told it was only a few chords around and I thought I would be fine, so I accepted!

Problem was that I had never played before live, and I wasn't involved in the underground metal scene. So when I arrived the venue, I was impressed by all that people dressed in black and looking mean!

Not to say that when playing the song, I couldn't hear the band on the damned monitor, and I freaked out! On the middle of the song I had no idea where I was and I just kept playing the chords in random order! It must have sounded horrible, in fact I'm sure I ruined the song! What I don't get is how they were able to win the 3rd place after such a disaster!

[Christopher]

Oh God you remind me of something really annoying...
an idiot behind the mixer unit... amplifying my keyboard only in the high-frequency-levels and then, in the middle of our DTMedley, I hear the rest of the band, but my keyboard is like muted or something. I went like "WTF are you doing there?" and he just says "It's just the monitor, keep on playing" :mad:
Do you know how hard it is to play without hearing yourself? That was a hell of a gig at my school...

[St0rMl0rD]

Oh God you remind me of something really annoying...
an idiot behind the mixer unit... amplifying my keyboard only in the high-frequency-levels and then, in the middle of our DTMedley, I hear the rest of the band, but my keyboard is like muted or something. I went like "WTF are you doing there?" and he just says "It's just the monitor, keep on playing" :mad:
Do you know how hard it is to play without hearing yourself? That was a hell of a gig at my school...

I feel ya. Once I had a gig with my second band, and I couldn't hear myself in the monitor at all. Sooooo...The song was in DMaj, I played the whole thing in GMaj...Whoa. :biggrin:

-J

[el mae de las teclas]

LOL Stormlord!

I think there are basically to bad situations when monitoring.

1) You don't hear yourself.

2) You hear yourself too much, and because of that you don't hear the rest of the band.

Both suck big time! Both have happened to me several times.
Can't wait to have a dedicated monitor mix guy for our gigs.

Keep them comming!

[mmichaelc]

Several years ago I was doing a school concert in a string orchestra (I was playing cello) and we covered lady madonna by the beatles.
I was the only cellist so I was playing the bass line that's meant to stand well so what did they do, they mike'd me up and I'm not a very good cellist so the whole audience could hear all my slightly out of tune notes! :redface:

Also, at another gig my mate's band was playing and it was in a pub so they didn't have a proper electrical supply and his massive blackstar amp sucked too much power and just turned off and took the pa with it. For some odd reason the bass amp stayed on... quite funny though.

[Asho]

Doing final public recitals before sitting for my diploma of music. Because I suffered from stage nerves something shocking I'd been practicing on a grand piano in the schools main hall for about 2 weeks. Anyway, come performance night, I suddenly lost all nerve as I got on, and when I started on the Bach prelude I was opening with my hands and feet shock so much that I couldn't pedal or play in time and I had to stop 20 seconds in and start again (my teacher who was turning my pages actually put a hand on my shoulder to say stop too). Doesn't seem that bad looking back on it, but I felt pretty traumatised later.

[Maximus]

Doing final public recitals before sitting for my diploma of music. Because I suffered from stage nerves something shocking I'd been practicing on a grand piano in the schools main hall for about 2 weeks. Anyway, come performance night, I suddenly lost all nerve as I got on, and when I started on the Bach prelude I was opening with my hands and feet shock so much that I couldn't pedal or play in time and I had to stop 20 seconds in and start again (my teacher who was turning my pages actually put a hand on my shoulder to say stop too). Doesn't seem that bad looking back on it, but I felt pretty traumatised later.

Don't worry too much about it, the most nerve wrecking playing experiences for me, have been playing Solo Piano on recitals, i once played as a hired gun for a singer in front of 50,000 people and it didn't even came close to how i feel before they call my name on recitals.

I've been in incidents with guns, girls making out on stage :biggrin:, Girls flashing :cool:, power outages, unstable power, Blowned monitors on stage (too loud then nothing), band and crew members fallin' off stage, out of tune keyboards, band members barfing on stage, played by the beach of 2 diferent oceans in less than 24 hours, so its been cool, funny, angering and scary.

Live playing Rules :tongue:

but the worst i remember happening to me, was the first gig with one of my bands, they've told me that they kicked out their keyboard player (i've only recorded their record whithout his knowing at that time) the day bofore a big gig, so i've had to do transcriptions for 16 songs, no rehersals, songs with piano intros etc. the first song was Ok, but then i discovered that they've transcribed about 10 of the songs to diferent keys, and they forgot to tell me
So i personally looked pretty bad :mad:

Bastards....
i love them but........
the Bastards......

[Mathieu Fiset]

Haha ! Some are really embarassing moments !

I think my personal worst live performance...hum...at least that I can remmember, was last winter, at a Manahil concert.

That was my first gig using my laptop for drums and bass sequences...at rehearsal everything was perfect, at soundcheck everything was alright but at show time ???

At the middle of the first song, the sound of the sequences started cutting at random places, stoping, restarting...really CHAOS ! I thought that was the program I was using or the laptop itself but everything LOOKED fine...anyway to make a story short, I was forced to stop everything and THEN, was the worst moment :

SILENCE

Yeah...I was standing on the stage, alone (my singer went backstage), everyone in the venue waiting for something to happen, and me, trying to start my beats, with total faillure !

SO ! I decided "Hey, why couldn't we continue the show "acoustic style" ?"

So my singer came back and we really continued the songs, without any beats, only piano sounds ! And the rest of the show was fantastic, in fact, peoples loved us even more than the 2 other bands of the show ! Wow !

So it was one of the worst moment, ending in a great gig...hehe

And after the show, I realised the problem was the "out" of my laptop, being too sensible to the big and loud basses, so when "vibrating", the sound would stop...Now the probleme is solved :biggrin:

[rifaa]

I started playing keyboards at a not so young age, 16. A few months after I started taking classes, my keyboard teacher told me he had a friend who was in a black metal band and that he needed urgently a guest keyboardist for 1 song in a metal battle fest that would take place in the next 2 days.

I was told it was only a few chords around and I thought I would be fine, so I accepted!

Problem was that I had never played before live, and I wasn't involved in the underground metal scene. So when I arrived the venue, I was impressed by all that people dressed in black and looking mean!

Not to say that when playing the song, I couldn't hear the band on the damned monitor, and I freaked out! On the middle of the song I had no idea where I was and I just kept playing the chords in random order! It must have sounded horrible, in fact I'm sure I ruined the song! What I don't get is how they were able to win the 3rd place after such a disaster!


Well, it´s Black metal, so people probably thought it was just the way it should sound I would guess :biggrin:

[zolhof]

I don´t even like to remember this.. back on my drummer days, the year was 1999, I decided to use a Yamaha DTX instead of acoustic drums (think about Akira Jimbo) to do a DT cover show. Everything was fine and the drums were sounding AWESOME (I did a lost of programming to sound right for each song).

Concert time, full house, we had no time to do soundcheck (several bands were playing that night) and the expectation was high (we were gonna play some Scenes songs, recently released). The show started with Metropolis.... it felt just like the CD on the first 2 minutes!

By the 1st chours the drums started to sound weaker and weaker... by the instrumental section there was no drums at all! So we had to stop the song to figure out what was going on. Here´s what happend: the roadie plugged the DTX rack on the wrong socket (wrong voltage) and slowly burned my module. It took +5 minutes to completely go down.

Man, I was depressed. I almost cried! Anyway, I borrowed some cymbals from other drummers and finished the show in the acoustic drums.

[Maximus]

By the 1st chours the drums started to sound weaker and weaker... by the instrumental section there was no drums at all! So we had to stop the song to figure out what was going on. Here´s what happend: the roadie plugged the DTX rack on the wrong socket (wrong voltage) and slowly burned my module. It took +5 minutes to completely go down.


Repairable?

[St0rMl0rD]

Ouch! That must have been nasty :(

-J

[Gustavo]

Man that was a terrible experience with the electric drumset!

Well, my most terrible live experiences have been at two different recitals: one was at school, I decided to play some Mozart Sonata, but the school trying to simplify things a bit, decided to put some cheap casio keyboad. unaccostumed to it and feeling the pressure of being alone on stage, I panicked in the middle of the song. I had started too fast and could not keep up with the pace I had set myself. So I my fingers started to trip and I started playing really slow and bad, I just stopped, and decided to start again from the last verse. It did not end up thaaaat bad, but it was quite embarrassing, even though it was not exactly an easy piece XD. My other experience was with a real grand, the problem this time was that the keys were too damn hard and sticked to the end (everyone that played in the grand noticed this). I was playing wait for sleep which is not exactly slow, so it sounded not as it was intended, so in order to compensate I started playing at about half as fast as it should be, sounded good, but I had to skip some verses and some of the repetitive choruses. I did not want to take 6 mins to play a 3 min song.

Not bad at all I guess, but it may have something to do with my live playing being only piano recitals XD. I have auditioned to play in several musicals and stuff, but I always get nervous on auditions and fuck things up. I get more nervous playing for two guys than when playing piano recitals.

Gus

[Christopher]

For me the best motivation for not being afraid is telling myself "sure some won't like it, but if you fuck it up because of being afraid of the audience, nobody will like it"
Worked for me in front of the whole school, the city's mayor and the bavarian prime minister(his daughter was playing there so he was there, too).
And what helped me also was delivering speeches in front of the same audience in European Parliament simulations... even in English(foreign language for me).
For those who are still at school and have problems with frightening audiences, join your school's drama club/politics club etc. and improve your readiness of speech, it can help very much with standing in front of big audiences when you do it on different occasions.

[zolhof]

Repairable?

Yeap, but I sold it right after that incident and sticked with the acoustic one! Big trauma lol

Anyway, I learned a valuable lesson that day and nobody touch my gear anymore! :redface:

[Premetheus37]

I've got two of 'em for ya. A technical failure and a playing failure. The former was that a roadie had turned on my keyboard while his foot was on the sustain pedal. I had to play all of Finally Free with a reverse sustain function and BOY was that fun!

The other was awful. I was accompanying my school choir back in high school for a benefit concert for a girl who had recently passed away. The song was "For Better" from the musical "Wicked" which was a nice, touching song. It gets all quiet and meaningful at the end and I'm sure people were crying. The mood was then quite effectively ruined by my being too "in the moment" to realize that I didn't stretch my hand quite far enough for the very last note of the song, an octave Eb in the bass. I ended up playing a dominant seventh on an Ebadd9 chord that destroyed the moment. Still haunts me.

~Premetheus

[whitelightening]

When I was 5 years old, in kindergarten, we were performing the Mexican Hat Dance for our school program. I was wearing my brother's hand-me-down dress shoes as I didn't have any of my own that fit me. Well, needless to say, my brother's shoes were too big and during the dance one of my shoes went flying off into the crowd and smacked an old lady square in the face. It's funny now that I think back on that moment, but it was seriously traumatizing at the time. Maybe that's why I hate performing in front of others?

[PinkFloydDudi]

When I was in 7th grade we played for our middle-school dance. Not only was I nervous, but the only one in the band that could actually play at that time was our lead guitar player, who was decent at best.
Lets see here:
1) We sucked miserably
2) We had power issues where people were cutting in and out
3) Even the guy that could play a bit sucked

We left the stage after 1 song and at that point I would have been ok with never performing live again. lol.

[lebabski]

I feel ya. Once I had a gig with my second band, and I couldn't hear myself in the monitor at all. Sooooo...The song was in DMaj, I played the whole thing in GMaj...Whoa. :biggrin:

-J

oohh i had a similar experience as well with an ass of a sound tech.

The guy at the mixer kept adjusting my volume throughout the set, and he was turning the volume up and down drastically. I had my keyboard setup in such a way that the volumes are set (i.e. louder during solos, softer during the guitar solo, etc.). The 'sound tech' couldn't understand that it's supposed to be that way and kept adjusting the volume! :mad:

[sparkey]

thats happened to me

and also the sound guy wouldnt know when solos were

or say in the chorus where i need to be LOUD and it wouldnt move

sound guys annoy me, i got a volume switch, let me do it...easier for you

[Omega Monkey]

I haven't had a lot of stage experiences yet. I will say that in general, playing live keys is going to suck at least a little. There's always SOMETHING. Either the bastard sound guy doesn't want to give you 2 DIs so you can run stereo (and of course thinks he knows more about keys than you), or there arent enough monitors so you don't even get one (after the singer told you not to worry about bringing an amp), or some other BS problem.

But I'd say my worst overall experience so far was playing guitar. This was about a month ago with one of my current bands. We were playing 2nd (out of 4) at a tiny venue in DC. But not in an area that is actually easy to get to at all. Basically the only things in the neighborhood were these 2 venues (I actually played the other one the night before with a different band), and not much else. Parking kind of sucked. And it was raining.

Anyway, I got to the place and unloaded my gear. Of course, the place is so tiny that all of the gear is just off to the sides of the room (ie where the audience is). Anyway, I wanted to go get something to eat. Took forever to find a little deli place that was ok, but there were a bunch of assholes taking up all the tables/chairs even though they weren't eating. So I took myt food back to the venue. Then the girl at the bar bitches at me that I cant bring it in! Eventually she let me, but told me I had to go upstairs (where the stage is and a bar, but NO seating). That wasn't too bad but just kind of a pain in the ass.

So the first band plays, they were pretty good. They take their stuff off stage and we start setting up. I had wanted to record, but when I got there I saw the mixer was mounted to the wall behind the bar (it was only like a 16 channel or something), with no flat and clean space to speak of for my MD recorder. The bassist had a "field recorder" that he used but it came out kind of shitty (too quiet, because he never bothers setting the levels at all).

So we're setting up, and at this point I had only just started playing in bands again and hadnt really played much in the way of shows before. So all my pedals are just "loose", and I have them all in a milk crate with all my cables and adapters. So setup isnt super fast, but it doesn't really take that long.

But before I can even get my guitar out of the case (which is still in the audience basically), the bassist/singer starts introducing us and everyone starts playing.

So I'm FEVERISHLY trying to get my guitar out and strapped on and get everything connected and get my sound going. My setup wasnt too complicated, just 3 or 4 pedals plus a rack delay (sitting on my amp). Anyway, I go to play and my distortion DOESN'T WORK. So I fuck with it for a few seconds, but since everyone is already playing (the first song has sort of like an ambient intro that goes on for a minute or so, so me not playing wasnt TOO big a deal at this point), I don't have to time to diagnose wtf is going on and just have to unplug it.

So now I have no distortion to play with. We're a fairly loud indie rock band and literally every song we play has me using distortion at some point, if not for the whole thing. So as some of you may know who are familiar with guitar playing, distortion (or lack thereof) pretty much totally changes what kinds of stuff you can play. So I basically had to reinvent most of my parts on the fly. Which would have been bad enough, but we had only been together for like 3-4 weeks at that point, so I barely knew the songs as it was.

And of course I had no monitor, so I just cranked my amp up to where I could hear myself enough, closed my eyes most of the time, and just played by feel/ear almost the entire 40 minutes we were on stage.

The biggest thing is, besides the bassist being an ass not checking to see if everyone (in our SIX piece band) was ready to play, that if I had had 2 minutes to trouble shoot my distortion issue, all it was was that the power supply was dead. If I could have gotten one from either the other guitarist or one of the other bands, or just a 9V batter, I would have been all set and my playing would have been and sounded 100% better.

As it was I felt like nobody (in the band or audience) gave a shit what I was doing, and neither did I really.

So yeah, that sucked.

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot the "best" part. After the show when I was pulling my car around to load up my stuff, I was involved in a hit and run. Basically, I was at the light waiting to turn left. The light turns and before I even have a chance to register that the light has turned (ie like 1/2 a second), I'm jolted from behind like "WTF!!!!!!!!!!!". Before I can even realize what happened, this black SUV takes off in the oncoming lane around me and the cab behind me. The cabbie gets out and he says basically the guy hit him. We stand there for another minute or whatever, but I'm kind of spaced at this point and I want to go tell the cops who I had seen around the corner (too far away to see what happened) about the situation. But basically, I never got the cabbie's info, who is technically who hit me, so the cops couldn't do anything about it. They basically told me I could report it to their hotline, but unless the cabbie also reports it (which he is legally obligated too, being a commercial vehicle, but cabbies in DC arent known for their strict adherence to regulations) there's nothing the cops can do about it.

Fortunately at least, it was a square hit from a short distance at low speed, so there wasn't any noticeable damage to my car, which is already a bit beat up as it is (just cosmetically, which is how it was when I bought it). So I didnt even bother reporting it, because there didnt seem to be any point.

Oh, so anyway, after spending like 10-15 minutes talking with the cops on the corner (with my car double parked in front of the club). I get back and ALL of my band mates have vanished. And at least 2 of them knew I was talking to the cops about what happened. No "hey see you at practice next week" no nothing, just gone. So I had to load all my gear by myself and have one of the guys from another band (who I didn't know at all by the way) help me with my amp.

[PinkFloydDudi]

Either the bastard sound guy doesn't want to give you 2 DIs so you can run stereo (and of course thinks he knows more about keys than you), or there arent enough monitors so you don't even get one (after the singer told you not to worry about bringing an amp), or some other BS problem.

It surprisingly doesn't take long for one of the above listed to happen. Usually within your first couple of shows playing live with a sound guy!

I love the "here is 1 DI".

"Dude, I'm a stereo instrument"

And why is it that keyboard players are the last in importance for monitors! We are one of the only instruments that makes NO sound when simply plugged into the FOH!
There ya go, give the monitor to the guitar player that has a Marshal amp stack behind him!!! Lord knows he might not be able to hear himself over the fighter jets that just might buzz by us!

[lebabski]

It surprisingly doesn't take long for one of the above listed to happen. Usually within your first couple of shows playing live with a sound guy!

I love the "here is 1 DI".

"Dude, I'm a stereo instrument"

And why is it that keyboard players are the last in importance for monitors! We are one of the only instruments that makes NO sound when simply plugged into the FOH!
There ya go, give the monitor to the guitar player that has a Marshal amp stack behind him!!! Lord knows he might not be able to hear himself over the fighter jets that just might buzz by us!


that's why i got a stereo DI, to solve the first problem. Unfortunately, it's not practical to bring your own set of stage monitors for regular medium sized gigs; and usually the stage monitors always suck. How sad..

[PinkFloydDudi]

that's why i got a stereo DI, to solve the first problem. Unfortunately, it's not practical to bring your own set of stage monitors for regular medium sized gigs; and usually the stage monitors always suck. How sad..


Need to put one of those on my shopping list I think...

[Omega Monkey]

Yeah, if I start playing enough paying gigs on keys, I may have to get a stereo DI and a small pair of powered monitors. I would love a pair of 8" JBL EONS, those would be perfect, but I dont think they make the 8's any more.

[Maximus]

Yeah, if I start playing enough paying gigs on keys, I may have to get a stereo DI and a small pair of powered monitors. I would love a pair of 8" JBL EONS, those would be perfect, but I dont think they make the 8's any more.

K10's...........

[Athox]

I have two stage happenings...

My worst moment on stage happened at a school gig.. can't remember how old I was.. maybe 15 or something. I played the guitar then, it was somewhere in my 5 year complete break from keyboards...

So we had this lead guitarist/singer who just kicked ass.. did guitar solos like santana having an average day. And we were covering Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits at this point, and I was supposed to play the solos there... because it was kinda "my song", in that I brought it up to begin with.

I was never the one to practice much, but when I practiced I felt I played pretty well, because I never took the time to really look at myself playing (which during self practices was more like play from start to end, and pause where you fail and start that bit again.)... I don't think I ever played the solos in question from beginning to end even once. We never had much time to practice as a band either...

So come gig day, I started the first solo.. went pretty well... for about 5 seconds. Then completely froze. The others just looked at me like "wtf?". When the second solo approached I asked the lead guitarist to play it, because I forgot how it went. While in reality I remembered how it went, I just couldn't fecking play it.

So that's when I learned that I should actually play the entire thing in one go before I know it's ready for live! :P


The second thing was quite recently, when my Status Quo tribute band opened for Dan Baird & Homemade Sin (Georgia Satellites) when he was playing here. Not strictly a tribute band, we also had a few other songs. And this one was Times Like These by Foo Fighters. I was playing some sort of hammond pattern.

At the last practice before the gig, they told me that they'd transposed the song down a half step from what we were previously doing (which was already a whole step down). And so I never had much time to practice (being away from home during the whole week), and decided to transpose it using the transpose function on the nord electro to save time. I had one practice run at home, and I had to transpose it one UP (showing as +2 on the LED display) when playing to the CD (to match my playing it one DOWN as I had played it with my band).

So I get to the gig, and when that song comes up, I hurry to transpose, and some place in my mind, I added together the already transposed version (which I was playing) to the new transposition, making it 3(!) half steps down.

Naturally it sounded horrible for about three bars until I realised it and fixed it. And I made a fool out of myself in front of Dan Baird (who was watching). :(