Your musician pet peeves

Musicians who play with distortion with no treble, so It's incredibly loud, but no one can here the actual notes over the drummer or the singer, so all you hear is some kind of controlled feedback that is the guitarist.

I mean, come on, if Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher can make notes and pick slides sound intelligible over all THAT distortion, I'm pretty sure anyone else with an overdrive pedal can.

Musicians who play with distortion with no treble, so It's incredibly loud, but no one can here the actual notes over the drummer or the singer, so all you hear is some kind of controlled feedback that is the guitarist.

or just guys with no treble in their sound in general... the guitar produces a great range of frequencies and I like to hear all of em

WHEN YOU POST A THREAD ASKING FOR REVIEWS OF A PRODUCT (SAY, A PIECE OF RACK GEAR) AND PEOPLE RESPOND WITH "I HAVE A [different model number] AND IT WORKS GREAT!" .......................

.........................................................

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest.

Get it off your chest, nickgrooves, that's what this thread is for :-D

Haha so in other words when people completely ignore the question you're asking?

Kinda reminds me of people who see you trying to set a better tone to your pedal, and when you test it out, they trash it.

I'm moving knobs, quit it, guys. I know the distortion sounds like crap, but that's what happens when knobs get moved. They make different noises, and they won't always appeal, but obviously I'm busy trying to find a good sound and your arse doesn't help.

But Nick is right, though it's never happened to me. Frankly, why would someone waste time looking for a model number when they can review the product?

IT WORKS GREAT!

Sigh

Kinda reminds me of people who see you trying to set a better tone to your pedal, and when you test it out, they trash it.

I'm moving knobs, quit it, guys. I know the distortion sounds like crap, but that's what happens when knobs get moved. They make different noises, and they won't always appeal, but obviously I'm busy trying to find a good sound and your arse doesn't help.

People who don't have recall sheets drawn up for their gear even though their rig has 8 billion parameters between pedal board and amplifier controls!

Guitar gear with too many pointless parameters and controls.... also recording gear or ANY GEAR for that matter that gives you so many options that there are more ways to make yourself or the project you are recording sound BAD than there are ways to make it sound good. It becomes a bit of a needle/haystack scenario, whereas less options that will always sound pretty decent but are not meant for CORRECTION seem to encourage you to play well or to spend ore time positioning the microphone correctly! Or they do me.

Guitarists who spend more time practicing their 'passionate solo faces' and 'manly but sensitive corporate rock backstage nookie pose' than they do practicing the guitar. This goes double for singing guitarists.... most of you guys are guilty of this and you KNOW IT!

here's one more on the flip side... male guitarists who claim they focused on electric guitar out of a love of rock music and NOT because they were too nerdy and awkward to pick up girls without some rock 'n roll street cred... even if you were a crusty-punk in school playing chick-unfriendly hardcore with dense but sophomoric sociopolitical undertones in sludgey drop tunings, just owning a strat was a step up from being a mathlete. And we all knew that when we made the jump to electric... even young men I knew who questioned their sexual identity or orientation before graduation were thinking about being cooler for the purposes of sex when they got into electric guitar and anyone who says otherwise is lying. Maybe they weren't 100% on the girls part of the equation, but a socially acceptable date for jr prom was CERTAINLY a goal, even if they were more into the capt of the football team for drunken shenanigans in the back of the limo later. Man, I coulda stayed a violinist/violist.... well, I did not. Orchestra nerds did not get girls. Well, not attractive ones anyway! Though a stream of hot girlfriends and 1 failed marriage to a retired stripper later I really wonder if I was better off playing classical and being afraid to talk to the pretty girls....

thank you

Guitar companies that refuse to come up with new body designs. There's only so many variations on the figure 8 shape we can make. It's time to make some new bodies.

Collectors who are willing to pay way more for an instrument than it's worth. Wal's and Alembic's used to be 3,000 brand new. That's what US Citizens paid after the shipping from the UK and hand crafted basses. When Wal went under, they went through the roof in value. Most go for $9,000 USED! That's just stupid. For less than $3000, you could just pay a luthier to make a body and neck to the specifications of a Wal, drop in an ACG preamp, and buy some mudbuckers with exposed poles. Done. You would have a Wal clone. That's of course if you feel you NEED an exact Wal sounding/looking bass. You could make your own design all the way around for $2000 or less. TOOL fanboys are partly to blame for this rise in price as well. You get a beginner bass player with money in his pocket who loves TOOL and you have the perfect storm of ignorance on the issue. They will believe that the only way to obtain the TOOL sound is with a Wal. You have to have one. If TOOL is the only band they really practice playing, they will spend whatever it takes to get that Wal. It's disgusting. There are other famous Wal users out there. Geddy Lee, Paul McCartney, John Entwhistle are some of the biggest names but none of them bring in the devout zealots to the Wal system more than Justin Chancellor. He's not even that amazing of a bass player.

Collectors who are willing to pay way more for an instrument than it's worth.

worth is a collective social construct, you can have an opinion, but in a market economy actual worth is a democratic proposition for better or for worse

Musicians who barre in unnecessary situations.

No, you do not barre an open D chord. Stop it.

You see that power chord? It requires three fingers. Stop barring the 5th and octave.

E inversion to high up the board? Practise. BUT DON'T BARRE THE BLOODY CHORD

The worth of an item is whatever someone's willing to pay for it but this can be controlled. There have been companies that continually offer the same item for the same price whether or not it's sold out. This keeps the interest on the item up and the price down. Fender has my respect for doing this with the SWR gear. They purchased the company that was already sought after, repackaged their new Rumble Combo V3 with the SWR circuits, and kept the price down. In Wal's case, they were out of business and had no control over the prices as they were all used. Always gets my gruff though when people collectively make bad decisions and allow inflation like this. We as buyers have the power to hold back on purchases and force the price of gear to go down but there are far too many people who think selfishly or simply don't know any better and pay whatever is asked.

Fender has

Musicians who barre in unnecessary situations.

No, you do not barre an open D chord. Stop it.

You see that power chord? It requires three fingers. Stop barring the 5th and octave.

E inversion to high up the board? Practise. BUT DON'T BARRE THE BLOODY CHORD

you are kinda wrong about everything you are saying here, Narcy.... you very well may want to barre an open D to free 2 fingers for extensions or licks rather than have only that pinky free.... the people who barre their index finger in the 2nd fret to play a 1st position D are doing it the CLASSICAL way, versus the folk guitar way. I try to decide how to play 1st position D in whatever way feels most convenient for its use in the context of the part I am playing. Learn all the rules but then remember there are no rules and they are just tools.... or maybe I am a tool, but in this case I am also right and you should think this over.

I guess my next pet peeve is guys who have A, B and C down but try to take the whole alphabet...

Always gets my gruff though when people collectively make bad decisions and allow inflation like this. We as buyers have the power to hold back on purchases and force the price of gear to go down but there are far too many people who think selfishly or simply don't know any better and pay whatever is asked.

Fender has

I understand your pain! But iron curtain electric guitars were crap, so in order to have good instruments regularly produced for us we are stuck with this very questionable market economy....

Haha so in other words when people completely ignore the question you're asking?

Yes, that is one of my pet peeves. But specifically, when I ask a question about model "A" and someone says "oh yeah I have model "B" and it works great."

That's when you know you have someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. They generalize everything.

That's when you know you have someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. They generalize everything.

ain't that the truth, my universal pet peeve as a human is the rest of my species

• Plays an Ibanez RG with 09 strings almost touching the fretboard, pushes the gain to 11 on both the amp and the pedals, scoops the mids, listens to Dream Theater, his idols are Vai and Satriani, claims that Carlos Santana is overrated, never heard of Frank Zappa, thinks the quality of a given piece of music is defined by the amount of notes a player can fit in a nanosecond, and can't pull a decent strum to save his life.

• Funk/Jazz bassists trying to play rock music

• People who can't see the point in replacing strings more than once a year

• The technique police

• Bad contacts (cables, instruments, you name it)

• Active guitar pickups

• Every guitar design that came after 1990

• Bad contacts (cables, instruments, you name it)

does that include booking agents, management and A&R reps? I mean, you said I should name it.

Haha absolutely

• Active guitar pickups

• Every guitar design that came after 1990

I'm a bit stumped on these. What's your beef against active pickups and guitars after 1990?

Also, my comments aren't being posted. My reply to JimMarchi1:

Barring a normal open D chord is unacceptable, but barring an open D to reach other notes is, and I failed to mention that.