blow up a keyboard

[jimbyjoe]

well i started it over in the anniversaries thread:

 

what's the worst thing(s) you've done to equipment that's not yours, particularly keyboards?

 

at a youth thing at my old church, one night i broke about 5 keys on my pastor's korg 01/W. that was sort of ok. about 1 month later i took the church's KORG x-3 to a youth camp. on the final night i got the keys solo i had been waiting all week for. it went for WAY too long, and as anyone does in a caffiene-induced prolonged keyboard solo, i resorted to endless keyboard-length glisses, which resulted in about 10-15 keys getting broken. i wasn't the most popular person when i got back . and i also managed to blow up a keyboard that belonged to a group touring from the US. our electricity runs on 240V over here. so i plug their keyboard straight into the wall. then the keyboard doesn't work. i didn't realise it ran on 110V.

 

when playing bass and singing at a high school gig, a friend of mine thought it would be funny to turn a strobe light on right in front of me on stage. very good idea, seeing i have epilepsy that is photosensitive-induced. as i go to angrily kick the strobe, the cable running from the bass to a newly repaired peavey TKO bass amp (which is sitting about 3-4 foot above the ground) reaches its length. then i hear a very loud thud, and see the look of incredible shock on the face of the bloke who has borrowed the amp off someone. fortunately it didn't (thank God) get damaged, and i actually ended up being in a band with the other bass player, playing keys. and no i didn't have a seizure, though i did lay into my friend quite a bit.

 

so what have YOU done that will make us cringe?

 

pray for peace,

kendall

[coyote]

I once participated in a winter street festival that ended up destroying a grand piano.

 

The piano needed to be moved from a public facility to a street corner, so the choir could have accompaniment. The front legs & pedals were removed (causing a fair amount of damage), and the rear leg w/ its tiny wheel was left hanging out the back of the van to roll in the street.

 

By the time the piano was moved 3/4 mile, then reassembled, it was a wreck. An hour later the choir came, and the director sat down to begin accompanying them.... of course the piano was hopelessly out-of-tune from the battering it had received. Horrendously out of tune in fact. Unfortunately it was NOT a professional choir - they were relying on the piano to find their pitch. What a mess.... furthermore, the temp was roughly -10 deg.F that afternoon. The trombone band couldn't play either because the spit would instantly freeze in the mouthpieces. A couple of guys actually got the mouthpieces frozen stuck on their lips! Not a pleasant day musically.

 

BTW - by the time the piano arrived back at its starting point it was nothing but garbage - totally destroyed.