A Musician's Worst Nightmare

Air Raid Siren

Air Raid Siren

Maidens' Vox
Apr 26, 2004
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I happened across this footage of Van Halen while I was surfing around online. The commentary was quite interesting on what actually happened - kinda gives you a behind the scenes perspective that I thought some of you might find interesting.
I have to take my hat off to them as a band for soldiering through it to the end! Puts new meaning to the phrases 'the show must go on' and 'sh*t happens, don't it?! :zombie: :loco:

Just Kill Me Now
 
What a trainwreck. Since they kicked Michael Anthony to the curb after 30 years of solid bass playing and killer backing vocals :mad:, all I can say is it couldn't have happened to a nicer band.

Interesting technical analysis though and yes a nightmare for any band.

Jim
 
hmm I was believing the technical analysis right up until the guitar solo, and it sounded wrong. Even if the keyboards were to blame the guitar solo would have sounded right surely?

I dunno never come across this before, and I would have thought that with all the gear for a van halen show they would not rely upon a single person setting the pitch for the over dubbed keyboards???????

To me, I would have said his guitar was tuned incorrectly.
 
What puzzles me is that if you were playing and noticed something terribly out of tune like that, would you try switching guitars or at the very least, WHY would you keep playing the whole song knowing it was that out??? It has the entire keyboard track to carry the tune. Guess he just had to play that solo eh? Was it that you just can't hear the bass enough that it didn't sound out like the guitar, or did it just blend in? I cringed big time and felt bad for them all, I love Van Halen but this was terrible! Poor guys and audience!!! LOL! Thanks for the post Aja!
 
Doodoobubbachuck said:
What puzzles me is that if you were playing and noticed something terribly out of tune like that, would you try switching guitars or at the very least, WHY would you keep playing the whole song knowing it was that out??? It has the entire keyboard track to carry the tune. Guess he just had to play that solo eh? Was it that you just can't hear the bass enough that it didn't sound out like the guitar, or did it just blend in? I cringed big time and felt bad for them all, I love Van Halen but this was terrible! Poor guys and audience!!! LOL! Thanks for the post Aja!
Click to expand...

That's what I thought too. If Eddie had stopped playing, it wouldn't have been as much of a train wreck as it was. The bass was nowhere near as bad as the guitar.
 
Doodoobubbachuck said:
What puzzles me is that if you were playing and noticed something terribly out of tune like that, would you try switching guitars or at the very least, WHY would you keep playing the whole song knowing it was that out??? It has the entire keyboard track to carry the tune. Guess he just had to play that solo eh? Was it that you just can't hear the bass enough that it didn't sound out like the guitar, or did it just blend in? I cringed big time and felt bad for them all, I love Van Halen but this was terrible! Poor guys and audience!!! LOL! Thanks for the post Aja!
Click to expand...

The sound man should have put a pitch transposer on the keyboards to bring it into key with everyone else. Duh! Rookies...

A mediocre engineer such as myself would have thought of that:p
 
If the playback issue was the real culprit switching guitars would've done him no good anyway. There probably wasn't time to troubleshoot and see what was happening. Stopping the show and dinking around with the gear is not always the best way to handle something like this, especially on the closing song of a concert. It would have made a bad situation only more painfully obvious. When you're already committed and the song is going by (and it goes by faster than you would think - although I 'm sure it seemed like forever to the band!) sometimes the only option is to live in hell until it's all over. I think they made the only choice they could under the circumstances and conditions by finishing the song and the show. But I have a feeling somebody was fired after that one.......
 
Air Raid Siren said:
If the playback issue was the real culprit switching guitars would've done him no good anyway. ......
Click to expand...

That's a given, he must have checked his tuning somehow during the dilemma and figured that out or just knew it wasn't his guitar or you'd think he would attempt a change out to rule that problem out. Oh well.......they survived!!
 
Oh well what the hell. At the end Roth saves the day with his hilarious enormo dick horsey ride.. Made me forget all about how bad the song sounded.
 
Excuse my ignorance, but the guitars sounded horrible, and I can't figure out why. The site says the intro was run at 48K sample instead of 44.1, but I don't know why that would cause a difference. Did cause a pitch shift the guitar couldn't match? I think that even without the keyboards, the guitar sounded really bad as it was.
 
darthrya said:
Excuse my ignorance, but the guitars sounded horrible, and I can't figure out why. The site says the intro was run at 48K sample instead of 44.1, but I don't know why that would cause a difference. Did cause a pitch shift the guitar couldn't match? I think that even without the keyboards, the guitar sounded really bad as it was.
Click to expand...

The guitar and bass would use a standard tuning, which would be in tune with the keyboards. Somehow the pitch on the keyboards was changed by about 1.5 semitones, which would make it impossible to tune the guitars on the fly to match the keyboards. That's why I suggested the engineer use a pitch shifter on the pre recorded keyboard part to bring it into tune with the guitar.
 
"As a seasoned kayboardist, I can tell you exactly what happened on stage with the sound….the keyboard gat a electronic spike, or midi malfunction, and temporarily went in to a altered key, or semikey in this case. Keyboards are strange electronic beasts, and are subject to lots of abuse…although I’m sure VH’s techs have surge protectors on all their stuff(LOL). I’ve had people brush by my boards on stage live, and put my stuff out of key, hitting the transpose button! It’s boring and techinical, but that’s what happens. The easiest way to fix that is to reboot the board, or turn it off, and turn it back on….I wonder why the techs, of the live keyboard player didn’t figure that out after a few bars…..which makes me think it wasn’t a live player, but an out of control sequenence on a computer,which is harder to fix live in front of 17000 people!!!"

That's funny, how does someone hit the transpose button? They're always on top, then you have to cycle through a menu to get to the transpose function, Even if they could are they also accidentally going to hit the arrow keys to actually change the key after accidentally cycling through the menu? I've had a Korg X3 since the mid 90's and nothing ever changed the pitch, or went wrong in any way.
 
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