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Most embarrassing moment as a musician?


RABid

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Reading Carlos response in the Weirdest place thread made me think that we need a most embarrassing thread. So here goes.

 

In the ninth grade I decide to join the high school band as a drummer. Being the youngest, i.e., smallest in the percussion section I got stuck carrying the bass drum in marching band. It seemed like the bass drum was bigger than me. When I strapped it on it was a chore moving around. The band learned a fancy routine for turning corners in a parade that consisted of each column doing several 180 degree turns and a single 90 degree turn. So not only was I struggling to carry the drum, I had to snap off a few quick turns. You can see where this is going. Christmas parade, neighboring county, large crowd, sub-freezing temps, small kid, big drum, 180 degree turns. I stepped on a slick spot just as I had to make my first turn. Next thing I know I am flat on my back in front of the crowd with the breath knocked out of me and the bass drum still strapped on my chest. I remember the trumpet player behind me just standing there saying What do I do? What do I do? over and over. What she did not do is help get that thing off of me. While the other musicians were going around me I finally rolled over and slowly worked my way back up to standing.

 

End of the school year the final issue of the school papers comes out. The last issue of the year always has the senior wills. The few people in school that did not know I fell in a parade were coming up to me and asking Why are so many seniors willing you a bass drum on wheels?

This post edited for speling.

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About four months ago we're playing one of our nice clubs.

 

The steps up to the stage are right in the center.

Our walk on music begins and I proceed to the steps. I'm taking the step from the step to the stage when all of a sudden I trip over myself and face plant right on the stage. Right there. Lights on me. Packed house watching this gymnastic move.

 

So, without missing a beat, I roll over and get up on one knee and raise my arms straight up like an olympian completing a difficult maneuver.

 

By playing it off like this, I owned the crowd the entire night. LOL I was still mortified though. Trying to be all "rock star" walking on stage, and pulling a Three Stooges move.

 

 

David

Gig Rig:Casio Privia PX-5S | Yamaha MODX+ 6 | MacBook Pro 14" M1| Mainstage

 

 

 

 

 

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Early in my days playing out in bands, probably around 1990 or so, I was playing Keys and Sax. My sax had fallen off its stand and I didn't get much of a chance to check it out before the next song. We played Duran Duran - Rio, and my big sax solo comes up. As you may recall, it's a fairly long solo. I position myself front and center on stage and.... "HONK!" to my horror, I can't make a note come out of the thing. I just keep trying and "honk, honk!" The rest of the band is practically rolling on the floor laughing by this time. Apparently, one of the rods bent just enough that one of the pads wouldn't seat, and it affected pretty much the entire range. When the song was over, this old guy comes up to the stage and motions me over. I walk over and he says "that was awful!". Yeah, no shit. That really set the rest of the band off laughing. That was an inside joke from then on...every time I played anything, the other band members would turn to me and say "that was awful" and laugh.

Dan

 

Acoustic/Electric stringed instruments ranging from 4 to 230 strings, hammered, picked, fingered, slapped, and plucked. Analog and Digital Electronic instruments, reeds, and throat/mouth.

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Back in 1978, I played my very first gig with my band in an LA rock club. I had a brand new ARP Quadra, and during the very first song the "A" above middle C went dead. The Quadra was featured in most of the songs we did.

 

This totally sucked because we did lots of songs in keys like A, D, G, etc. I was nervous as hell to start with, and this totally freaked me out.

 

All of our friends were there and I had to improvise, using other keyboards for Quadra parts and shifting octaves.

 

I was totally mortified because I couldn't play a lot of our songs the way we'd rehearsed them. But it was all original music, and afterwards I learned that no one in the audience had any clue as to my technical hassles.

 

 

 

Michael

Montage 8, Logic Pro X, Omnisphere, Diva, Zebra 2, etc.

 

 

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Worst equipment failure - when I built my first Hammond chop I had to completely rewire everything with new wiring harnesses, because I moved the generator to a box in the base.

 

I stayed up for almost a week wiring, and wired up until the very last minute when they came to get me to head several states away for a gig. I was still wiring after we set up and right up until the first set.

 

The organ was dead, wouldn't start at all, and I had to play the entire first set on a Pianet. Not good.

 

During the break I tore into it again, and found one little cold solder joint on the start motor terminal.

 

================

 

Playing one of the biggest shows we ever did in my originals band, for 11,000 people opening for Peter Frampton and Black Oak Arkansas - we were crammed onto the front of a very wide stage, basically in a row. The singer couldn't hear me, and asked for some keyboards in the monitor.

 

The side fill directly behind me was a big PA stack, and all of a sudden all I could hear was deafening keys - I couldn't hear the drummer any more and completely lost the beat!

Moe

---

 

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EMBARRASSING MOMENT #1: I was hired to accompany a Talent Night. I was accompanying a young lady on Whitney Houston's "Savin' All My Love For You." The pianist right before me had "done me a favor" and put my music on the piano for me. I hadn't spent a lot of time practicing this one because it was so easy, and was pretty much just sight reading it on auto-pilot. There were several other, more-challenging numbers.

So, we're going along, first verse, second verse, and just as it's going to the bridge, I discovered that the middle page is MISSING, and that's where the bridge was. When the other pianist had picked it up it had fallen behind the piano.

Bridge modulates to a foreign key (key of the 6th, which in this case was F#m). So, the singer was working her butt off, singing along, while I valiantly tried to find the chords, always at least one chord behind her! It was AWFUL.

Finally, it comes back to the 3rd verse, and I had music for THAT, so we were back on Terra Firma, but at that point I was happy just to have the song over.

 

EMBARRASSING MOMENT #2. Playing a wedding. My (then) girlfriend's sister was getting married, and I volunteered to play for free as my gift to the bride and groom. So, the ceremony is going well, I'm playing on a pipe organ sent down from the Gods, and it was just beautiful.

After the homily, the patriarch of the family, Pepe LaChance, comes over to where I'm sitting at the organ, smiles and nods to me, I smile and nod to him, he smiles and nods at me, a little more emphatically this is turning into a Victor Borge routine. One of the cousins sitting nearby whispers to me "Ave Maria!" Turns out Pepe sings "Ave Maria" at all the family weddings, except nobody remembered to tell ME about it.

So, no problem - I've got it right here in my wedding book. I bust into Schumann's "Ave Maria" but it's the WRONG ONE. He sings the Schubert "Ave Maria" or some other one I never really found out. When he didn't start singing after about 16 measures of introduction, I decided to prompt him by starting the song. I ended up singing it myself, and made matters worse because I was perceived as upstaging Pepe. Sometimes, you cannot win.

Muzikteechur is Lonnie, in Kittery, Maine.

 

HS music teacher: Concert Band, Marching Band, Jazz Band, Chorus, Music Theory, AP Music Theory, History of Rock, Musical Theatre, Piano, Guitar, Drama.

 

 

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I played (for free) for an employee Christmas party at a hotel bar where we were the house band. Got so drunk that I passed out in a comp hotel room during a break and didn't wake up until the next day. Deservedly so, I was awakened by a faulty bank alarm across the street that went off at 120 decibels around 7am, and I had the mother of all hangovers. Fortunately the hotel was not far from my parent's house so I went there to sleep off the rest of my misery.

 

I was young, stupid, and totally ashamed of myself. Even though it was a free gig for the hotel employees and I was invited to drink, I let the band down. It never happened again and it never will.

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I was doing live music for a fashion show. It was a big set up as we were doing everything from big band standards to rock and roll, movie themes to grunge. It was a lot of fun, particularly as I was playing trumpet as well as keys (and occasionally both at the same time).

 

Anyway, they wanted a recreation of something in the style of the Prodigy - lots of evil synth lines and weird samples at any rate, so with youthful optimism myself and the band leader decided we could do this live no problem. It would however require me running backing MIDI tracks off a laptop. It was a hell of a lot of fun putting it all together, particularly as I'd just bought the SR-06 Dance card for my JV-1080.

 

The idea was to segue straight in from something else with a huge crash of guitar squealing and drum crashing, which would give me enough time to hit the required buttons to change the rack mode and hit play. Of course, come the show, nothing happened. After quickly mouthing "It's f***ed" at the drummer, under cover of the world's longest cymbal wash, I restarted all my racks, mashed the the panic button for good measure and briefly wondered if playing all the backing parts was feasibly with just two hands. Of course, what had happened was I'd been tweaking the backing in rehearsal and left one of the tracks solo-ed :facepalm:

 

Interestingly, the show decided to seriously scale back the live music in subsequent shows and I've never used a laptop on stage since... :rolleyes:

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I played (for free) for an employee Christmas party at a hotel bar where we were the house band. Got so drunk that I passed out in a comp hotel room during a break and didn't wake up until the next day. Deservedly so, I was awakened by a faulty bank alarm across the street that went off at 120 decibels around 7am, and I had the mother of all hangovers. Fortunately the hotel was not far from my parent's house so I went there to sleep off the rest of my misery.

 

I was young, stupid, and totally ashamed of myself. Even though it was a free gig for the hotel employees and I was invited to drink, I let the band down. It never happened again and it never will.

 

I rarely drink before playing, but am never living down being carried unconscious out of a venue having enjoyed myself too much after a Christmas gig.

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We had a funny moment not long ago. Our singer lost her voice, we got a last-minute fill-in. We had a list of tunes she knew and a couple of us guys were marking songs we could cover. I printed lyrics to Tom Petty's "American Girl" since it was not marked on the list.

I get to the show, I'm told "she knows that one and will sing it" when I bring up the fact that I can cover it. Ok, I toss the lyrics to the side and 3rd song we launch into American Girl (long intro on that song). I don't notice she's not on the stage, and then the verse hits--everyone on the band turns to look at me, and I realize what is happening. The look on the guitarists face was priceless, to his credit he turns immediately and starts singing *something* (he didn't know the words) while I was down on the ground trying to find the lyrics...

 

Most embarrassing playing moment for me recently was playing Black Magic Woman--I started that little organ riff off, and noticed that something was very, very wrong. Everyone's looking around, we can't figure out why it sounds so damn bad since I'm obviously playing the part right--EXCEPT I was a whole step up.

 

Another one that affected me but wasn't caused by me--I sing Some Kind of Wonderful in C. Our bass player and drummer play by themselves for a while before anyone else starts...well the bass player was in G. A 4th down! Trying to recover from that was hilarious since I locked into G just perfectly (sounded terrible, like a bad Elvis version)

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I have two to share, one of which impacted an entire gig and the other was just a fleeting moment on a one song sit-in jam.

 

The first dates back to the mid-90s, when I was playing with an original ska/reggae/pop touring band with a bus and loads of regional gigs. The band was in the midst of recording at a local studio and then playing gigs in between. We had a big rolling "coffin" ATA case that held all the guitars and my keyboard. We had the coffin at the studio and our guitar player took the bus by the studio to pick it up before we hit the road for our next gig, a 4 hour drive to a big college campus party.

 

My rig at the time was a Hammond XB2 mounted on my rolling/tilting keyboard stand (still use that one now) and the XB2 was MIDI'd to an offstage rack that had a Dynacord CLS-222, a Roland JV880 and a Korg M1R. I played 60% organ and the other sounds were set up with a pretty complex array of patch changes that would trigger the pianos, synths, etc. I had a 50' snake from the XB2 and never had to touch my offstage rack.

 

Getting back to the gig at hand, while we're setting up, I had my rack and was getting that set up along with the monitors and so forth. I had the rolling stand ready and went to the coffin to get my XB2 in its flight case, usually nestled in with all the guitars. Somehow my keyboard never made it into the case and I realized it was still at the studio back home, 4 hours away. We were 1-2 hours from gig time and there was no way to get the XB2.

 

I'm pretty frantic at this point, because I have a perfectly awesome MIDI rig and stand, but no keyboard to cover my organ sounds or to control my offstage rack. This was a fairly rural area and no local backline options. I started asking college kids if there was anyone with a keyboard I could borrow for the gig. Most of these folks had been drinking all day and it was not looking too good. Finally one guy said he thought his roommate had one. So they took off to go find it as the clock keeps ticking. 30 minutes later, these guys roll up and sure enough, they have a keyboard for me to use. It was a 4 octave low end, non-velocity sensing Casio CTK-something, but it did have MIDI. I had 30 minutes to figure this thing out and it was really not a good situation. No patch change, no real organ sounds, just a mess.

 

I had to set up my rack on a little waiter stand next to me on stage and manually change all my patches from the rack units. My staple clonewheel sound was non-existent and I made my way through that gig playing mostly piano sounds. I had zero stage presence as I was just trying to play my parts from this miniscule keyboard and it was really awful!

 

The second experience was one time I went to see a fellow forumite's gig and was invited to come sit in on one of the band's songs. It was "Play That Funky Music White Boy," an easy song for me to do with the band. I found the clav and organ sounds I would use and the band launched into the song. I was jamming along and realized pretty quickly that something was wrong. I thought the band was playing in a different key than the standard E, because what I was playing was not sounding right at all. I looked at the guitar player and asked him, "it's in E, man!" So then I'm thinking, ok, maybe I had too many drinks and I just can't remember how to play it.

 

After one verse and chorus I suddenly realized that the keyboard was transposed up 4 steps from the prior song. So I was playing the song in Ab, but did not know it! It took me a while to menu dive and find the transpose page to set it back to 0. Then I made it through the rest of the song and took a solo, so it was all fun.

 

I won't mention who this was - perhaps he'll read this thread and identify himself. :wave:

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Twenty or so years ago - we played a street festival in a nearby small town. I had been released from the hospital 3 days before the gig - where I had received a week's worth of IV antibiotics while being treated for a bout of diverticulitis. I was sent home with roughly 4 days worth of oral medication to complete the antibiotics treatment.

 

Well ... it was one of those hot, humid, 90 degree plus July Friday evenings. We had a cooler full of beer to help keep the whistles wet ... I had a beer after setup, another during the first set ... and a 3rd on our first break. 3 - 12 oz cans of lite beer over a 1.5 hour stretch ain't heavy drinking by any stretch - especially for a 250 lb guy. However, we started the 2nd set - and then I felt my lips go numb and I left the planet.

 

The next thing I knew I woke up on a couch in a living room I've never seen before - a woman in a white bathrobe (not my wife) staring at me. It's obvious that I have zero idea where I'm at - and that I have no idea who the woman was. A minute later, the drummer for the previous night's gig walks in clearing up the whole question of who she was and where I was at.

 

My drummer buddy asks me "What happened to you last night?" ... and I had no answer. So, he starts grilling me. "Do you remember tearing down last night?" Answer: No. "Do you remember lying on the sidewalk while the fight was going on?" Answer: No. Then he asks "Do you remember p!ssing on Dave's windshield?" I DID remember that Dave's van was pulled up right behind the stage behind where my keyboard rig had been - and was thinking how could I have done that out in the middle of the crowded street. So I asked "When did I do that?" His response of "In the middle of the 2nd set" - absolutely floored me. Apparently we had been in the midsts of playing when I turned around, unzipped and washed the bugs off my buddy's windshield. The drummer's next line was classic. "We didn't think much of it the first time you did it...." Apparently I did it twice.

 

Well ... as it turns out I had a drug interaction. The antibiotic I had been taking (metronidazole) is highly reactive with alcohol. Apparently, it's actually a chemical cousin to the drug "Antibuse". Although the container did say don't drink while taking this medication - I thought that the warning was because alcohol reduced the effectiveness of the medication - NOT that it would cause be to leave the planet. That was definitely one of those "note to self, let's NOT do this ever again!!!" sort of experiences.

 

On the bright side - my band mates did say that the bevvy of junior high school kids that were milling around in front of the stage felt that the whole thing was VERY rock and roll! ..and when we showed up to play our 2nd show on Saturday night - we had a much bigger crowd. The consensus amongst the band was that the crowd was there to see what I was going to do to top my antics of the night before!

 

The SpaceNorman :freak:
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Went to the wrong gig. Thankfully the right venue was only 25 miles away and I am anal about being early. LOL.

"It doesn't have to be difficult to be cool" - Mitch Towne

 

"A great musician can bring tears to your eyes!!!

So can a auto Mechanic." - Stokes Hunt

 

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My embarrassing moments include an assortment of exposed clams, stuck MIDI notes, starting a song in the wrong key, blazingly loud initial patch volumes, etc. Probably the worst of these was during the mid-1980's when we arrived extremely late for a wedding reception (lovely Chicago traffic) and got set up just barely in time for the bride and groom's first dance. The song was the piano-heavy, "Up Where We Belong" by Joe Cocker. In my haste, I plugged the sustain pedal in the wrong jack, rendering it nonfunctional. Song sounded like chopsticks.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

- George Bernard Shaw

 

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I have a lifetime of embarrassing moments, but one that comes to mind is the night I started off "Old Time Rock & Roll" (Lord, I hate that song!) in the wrong key and got the singer stuck there. One of my bands at the time did the song in C, but the band I was with that night did it in E (the original key?). I brain-farted, played the piano intro in C, and the singer came in with me. When the band kicked in, we all -- except for the singer -- realized my mistake and I quickly jumped up to E.

 

No problem, right?

 

Except that the singer, bless his heart, somehow stayed in C through the whole song. It was like his mental transpose button was stuck. So we played the whole infernal song with him singing two steps down from us. The bassist tried singing the right notes in his ear to get him on pitch, to no avail. He even stayed on C following the instrumental breaks. Weirdest damn thing. After that, whenever that song was on the set list, someone would write "E" next to it in big bold type.

Live: Yamaha S70XS (#1); Roland Jupiter-80; Mackie 1202VLZ4: IEMs or Traynor K4

Home: Hammond SK Pro 73; Moog Minimoog Voyager Electric Blue; Yamaha S70XS (#2); Wurlitzer 200A

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Those moments in the past when one is first learning to improvise in jazz and the elder players are all watching your solo and you lose the changes, have no ideas, and fall out of rhythm and bomb... most embarrassing.

 Find 660 of my jazz piano arrangements of standards for educational purposes and tutorials at www.Patreon.com/HarryLikas Harry was the Technical Editor of Mark Levine's "The Jazz Theory Book" and helped develop "The Jazz Piano Book."

 

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I have a lifetime of embarrassing moments, but one that comes to mind is the night I started off "Old Time Rock & Roll" (Lord, I hate that song!) in the wrong key and got the singer stuck there. ....

 

Sounds like one of my favorite "revenge" moments. After the singer made one too many comments on stage about my hillbilly accent we went in to "Since I Fell For You." I started the song one step high, then jumped back down to the practiced key when the rest of the band came in. It took her a while to find her way home. That may have been one of her most embarrassing moments. :)

This post edited for speling.

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I love this thread. So many non musicians wonder why we laugh so hard at the things in Spinal Tap. I just tell them you have to live it to understand it.

 

Oh, SpaceNorman? You win so far!!!

 

While the thread topic is "most embarrassing moment," I think most of us have experienced the equipment failures, wrong keys, etc.. described in here.

David

Gig Rig:Casio Privia PX-5S | Yamaha MODX+ 6 | MacBook Pro 14" M1| Mainstage

 

 

 

 

 

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Sounds like one of my favorite "revenge" moments. After the singer made one too many comments on stage about my hillbilly accent we went in to "Since I Fell For You." I started the song one step high, then jumped back down to the practiced key when the rest of the band came in. It took her a while to find her way home. That may have been one of her most embarrassing moments. :)

 

Ooh, never &*^% with us hillbillies!

Live: Yamaha S70XS (#1); Roland Jupiter-80; Mackie 1202VLZ4: IEMs or Traynor K4

Home: Hammond SK Pro 73; Moog Minimoog Voyager Electric Blue; Yamaha S70XS (#2); Wurlitzer 200A

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Circa 1978 - playing "Can't Get It Out of My Head"/ELO - time for pretty synthe part - ARP Oddesy's pitch knob was not returned to center - sourest thing I ever heard - red face and flop-sweat.

Professional musician = great source of poverty.

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Just once, I did the unthinkable... I never met the Bride to be and groom... for a wedding outdoors. I am nervous that the person who is supposed to cue me in a timely fashion, will actually do so. Sure enough, I prematurely started Here Comes The Bride for the wrong couple.! She was naturally quite upset. I wanted to crawl under a rock. I do not even recall how it resolved when Real Bride showed up!

You don't have ideas, ideas have you

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. "One mans food is another mans poison". I defend your right to speak hate. Tolerance to a point, not agreement

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Circa 1978 - playing "Can't Get It Out of My Head"/ELO - time for pretty synthe part - ARP Oddesy's pitch knob was not returned to center - sourest thing I ever heard - red face and flop-sweat.

 

My Sequential Circuits Six-Trak went out of tune during a gig... back in the 80's when I started playing live. When it happened, I'm sure my face looked something like this:

 

http://www.kombuchakamp.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Funny-Sour-Faced-Cute-Kids2.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When an eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a Moray.
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1. End of year school concert circa 1971. I was supposed to play the piano with the school orchestra performing a Mendelssohn piano concerto. I had been practicing like crazy, but there was still one section that I just couldn't get right. On the night of the performance we weren't due to play the concerto until the second half of the concert. I was scared stiff that I was going to trip up and ruin the show. Dutch courage was required, and there was a pub across the road. Two pints of hard cider later and I was raring to go! (Britain in the early '70s wasn't particularly concerned with under-age drinking. :o )

 

Almost as soon as I sat at the piano stool, I began to regret my indulgence. I managed to struggle through until I hit the problematic section, which included a cadenza. Mind went blank, fingers wouldn't work, I played a bunch of chords that were more appropriate to an Elton John ballad than anything in the classical repertoire. The conductor (AKA head of the music department) turned to stare. I wanted to crawl inside the piano and close the lid... Goodness knows how I finished that concert. My face was bright red - more from shame than alcohol.

 

2. Being assured by the booking agent for my very first gig as an organist (around 1976) that I would only have to "play a few tunes" and no accompaniment would be required. Was I gullible or what?! More red-faced humiliation!

 

3. Fast-forward a couple more years and I'm sitting in this dive of a pub in Salford (part of Manchester) on a Sunday afternoon, behind some crappy organ. There's a stripper on stage. The drummer and I are supposed to play some suitably sleazy music for her to dance to. I try asking what she'd like, and she makes a mental note of my "posh" southern accent. Come the final denouement, and the good lady removes her panties (to the general approval of the audience), whirls around and deftly pulls them over my head. That's entertainment, folks!

 

What's worse is I know for a fact that that landlord was watering down his beer. Sacrilege!

 

(Interesting that RABid also suffered for his accent, although he clearly had the presence of mind to nip it in the bud.)

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Mine pales in comparison to most of yours, but mine was my first audition for a band, about six or so years ago.

 

I decided to use a laptop-based VSTi system playing VB3 and Pianissimo among some other simple subtractive synths. I was using some M-Audio or CME controller which I have probably since sold or given away.

 

In any event, given that it was my first foray into a laptop-based setup as well as my first try-out in general, I obsessively checked the setup the night before. Turn everything off. Turn back on. Yup, still working. Unplug everything. Plug everything back in to same USB ports. Yup, still working. Disassemble everything and set it up in another room just to prove I can move the setup around. Yup, still working.

 

Get to try-out. Assemble. Start playing first song with them (think it was Spencer Davis Group's Gimme Some Lovin').

 

No sound at all.

 

Fiddle with every wire and knob. Best I can get is VB3 to play transposed down 3 octaves and I can not seem to transpose my keyboard enough to get it into a playable range.

 

I did manage to get Pianissimo working and played the rest with AP sounds.

 

The band was pretty terrible so I didn't feel so bad about it :)

Nord Stage 2 Compact, Yamaha MODX8

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Playing in college in a cover band on a postage stamp sized stage. One leg of my 3-legged drum stool edged off the stage and I fell over off the stage and got knocked out cold when I hit my head. Came back to the stage to applause!

 

Borrowed a friend's Prophet 5 for an outdoor gig. The Georgia hot sun sent the tuning on it flying all over the place no matter how many times I hit the auto tune button. When it came time for the synth solo in The Cars "Just What I Needed" it was about 8 semitones off in the stratosphere.

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circa 1972. Neil Young's "Harvest" album had just come out and my bandmates and I decided to play "Heart of Gold" uplugged at the annual minstrel show - yes, they still had these in rural New England in the 1970s. I was to play the harmonica intro and when the big moment came, I whipped out my harp and stuck it in my mouth - upside down! It took about 1.5 notes for me to realize what I had done, but out of youthful pride or nervousness, I thought I could pull it off playing backwards. Needless to say it went from bad to worse and people (rednecks) in the crowd were howling. I eventually had to admit defeat and turn the dammned thing over - to the added amusement of all.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

-Mark Twain

 

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I have a lifetime of embarrassing moments, but one that comes to mind is the night I started off "Old Time Rock & Roll" (Lord, I hate that song!) in the wrong key and got the singer stuck there. One of my bands at the time did the song in C, but the band I was with that night did it in E (the original key?). I brain-farted, played the piano intro in C, and the singer came in with me. When the band kicked in, we all -- except for the singer -- realized my mistake and I quickly jumped up to E.

 

No problem, right?

 

Except that the singer, bless his heart, somehow stayed in C through the whole song. It was like his mental transpose button was stuck. So we played the whole infernal song with him singing two steps down from us. The bassist tried singing the right notes in his ear to get him on pitch, to no avail. He even stayed on C following the instrumental breaks. Weirdest damn thing. After that, whenever that song was on the set list, someone would write "E" next to it in big bold type.

 

Not a big fan of Old Thyme R&R but. does that opening piano lick go

11111 b7 6 5 OR 55555 4 3 2 dumb ass question. but I can't recall.. and PTS disorder happens when I attempt to think of some songs like OTR&R.

I am guessing 11111 b7 6 5

and once again, the original key is?

You don't have ideas, ideas have you

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. "One mans food is another mans poison". I defend your right to speak hate. Tolerance to a point, not agreement

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