Worst guitar sound you have heard in person?

[TheCheapGuitarist]

Worse sound ever was deliberately bad... a guitarist/vocalist I was playing bass with at a trio gig was losing his audience big time, insulting them down the mic for not liking his music, and when they started to heckle back he set his amp for the most horrendous harsh distortion I have ever heard and turn it to 11. The audience left, and not long after so did I. We no longer work together

You can only do the kamikaze thing once, so jump in with both feet and own that shiznit!!!

 

[Manual Slim]

Electric acoustics plugged direct to the board at an open mic night are unbeatable in this category.

 

[Guitarteach]

I was in the beam of a Boss Katana amp.. what an absolutely sh*t tone!! Like an overblown transistor radio.
Just nasty.

 

[hamerfan]

Fender CyberTwin made 2000-2004 (first edition)

 

[badscrew_projects]

Can't say the worst ever (for that I have my first ever teenage gig guitar sound that would be a solid competitor) but for the past month the one that stands out is:

A Jazz jam open night, that guy playing an old fancy 70's Ibanez look-a-like Alembic solid body, using his bridge pickup only and all fed through a teeny tiny cube practice amp screaming its guts off. It was... memorable...

 

[Bob M]

I played with a guitar player that had some kind of Line 6 amp. It was harsh just terrible sounding. Then he got a Fender Mustang amp and it got worse! All the while he was complimenting me on my sound. He never asked me about my rig. He just kept buying stuff that didn’t work.

 

[TheCheapGuitarist]

Electric acoustics plugged direct to the board at an open mic night are unbeatable in this category.

Acoustic pickups have always been horrible and have only improved slightly over the years.

 

[Recce]

Sound guys usually tell me mine is terrible, but i like it that way. And when they ask me to lower the trebbles, i answer them would you ask jimi hendrix to do such a thing ? Just to have a little fun in an otherwise tense soundcheck.

The answer to your question is my response for worst tone is basically anything by Hendrix. Worst sound ever.

 

[Recce]

I once saw Neil Young and his wife Peggy (RIP) walk out on stage in the middle of a James Taylor concert. It was all set up. They weren’t stage rushing.. Early 2000’s.

Neil had a beat to hell D 45 with a wireless pack on his strap, and what looked to be a sunrise in the soundhole.

When he started playing, it sounded like an acoustic guitar. A really really good acoustic guitar right in front of you.

Dude ! What the hell ?! It’s not that hard ! Neil has had really really good acoustic guitar sound consistently through his career. No matter how he chooses to put it across to the audience..

It just boggles my mind when I see top level acts pull out an acoustic guitar in the middle of the show and it sounds like s***.
In 2022/23 !



I saw the black keys at their home shed near Akron this summer. They were great. The sound was freaking horrible, and I knew if Dan Auerbach was out on the lawn with the rest of us. He would’ve raised holy hell.




Yeah, I saw them at the first lollapalooza, and I always thought of it like the dying death throes of the rackmount era.

It wasn’t horrible horrible but it was sure as hell not organic sounding…

I don’t know about Neil Young but I do know James Taylor has tweaks on tuning an acoustic so the guitar sounds good. i am pretty sure James Taylor wouldn’t let Neil Young come out unless his guitar was properly in tune.

 

[Recce]

In the late ‘70s I went to a benefit concert in Nashville. Waylon Jennings and B B King. Waylon opened up the show. I was sitting on the third row and Waylon’s Tele into a Twin Reverb was ear piercing. I’m sure he could see me wincing from his way to bright sound.
Then B B and his band took the stage and his guitar was smooth as silk.

So you prefer Lucille? You know a Gibson ES-335>

 

[421JAM]

Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins at Lollapalooza 1994. The entire band's sound was garbage. Everything turned up louder than everything else. I guess they thought playing way too loud would make up for the fact that they were following the Beastie Boys at the peak of their powers as a live act, and they knew they were going to fall flat no matter what they did. So they chose to be as annoying as possible.

 

[Fiesta Red]

I saw the band Living Color in the early 90's. Vernon Reed had terrible tone.

I saw Living Colour open for the Stones in 1989 (Steel Wheels tour)…I heard the bass and drums…

Could not *distinctly* hear the guitar (I heard a noise that wasn’t bass and drums, but could not really hear any notes, riffs or phrases).

On multiple occasions, I have noticed that unless EVERYTHING set up is “exactly right,” those pointy-headed shredder guitars will often get swallowed up in the mix—that could have been part of the problem…I think Mr Reid was using an ESP of some sort back in those days.

Likewise for the singer—I was aware of a sound, but couldn’t hear or understand him.

It was disappointing—I liked the band’s recordings before (and after), but it was almost like they made the sound guy mad and he was getting revenge.

 

[Old Deaf Roadie]

Come to my house and I'll show you how bad it can get...

 

[Fiesta Red]

In advance: TL/DR

In the early days of my band (the Screamin’ Armadillos, established 2003), the other guitarist’s rig was almost an exact opposite of mine…

I had my Fender 63RI Vibroverb, he had a Roland JC120; I used effects you’d mostly see on a blues/country player’s rig, he used a lot of stuff a shredder would use; and although we both had G&L F-100 guitars, ours were VERY different—mine was dead-stock and his was modded like crazy with different pickups and the coil- and phase-taps disconnected, plus the differences in the guitars themselves—neck profiles, fretboard material, hardtail vs rubberbutt…

But we blended super-well; we’d played together for several years and knew how to bounce off each other—musically, timing-wise and even tone-wise—to where we could both be heard without stepping on each other’s territory. Our shared love of the Stones seemed to help us in this regard. We had that Musical ESP you sometimes get with other guys…I loved that lineup of the band, because the drummer and I had Musical ESP (still do), the guitarist and I had Musical ESP, and the bassist was just perfect.

He’s one of the best guys I ever played with for backing me when I was playing harp/harmonica. He instinctively knew what to do—which was funny because he wasn’t naturally a blues player, he was more of a hard rock/metal player.

It helped that he was a MONSTER player—when he was focused and dialed-in, he could basically play anything, and could “fake it” when he didn’t know the song. He kinda spoiled me, because I eventually figured out that not everyone could do that.

The only issue we had with him was the fact that he was a bit thin-skinned (especially about family) and he drank too much…he also played LOUD (he was a contributing factor to the problems with my left ear—not the sole problem, but a contributor), but we were able to rein him in a little bit on that front.

Then he decided to branch out on his instrument choices, just for a change-up.this sounds like a good thing, but it just didn’t work.

He’d played my fiesta red 62RI Stratocaster a few dozen times and loved it, so he decided to get a vintage-styled Strat; he preferred maple fretboards, so he got a black MIA 57RI…it looked great and sounded better.

But the “tonal thickness” difference between his G&L (Gibson PAF-style-reissue humbucker in the neck position, some kind of Seymour Duncan hard rock/heavy metal bridge pickup) was a little hard for him to handle, so he had his brother (an above-decent guitarist and amateur guitar modifier in his own right) put a set of Fender Texas Specials in there.

He brought it to our next rehearsal…It buzzed like a high school freshman after his first six-pack of Coors Light. Just plugging it in made a racket like a guy standing in a roomful of neon signs.

I politely asked if his brother had grounded the pickups properly…the “thin-skinned/family is always right” part of his personality kicked in and he said, “He’s done this a thousand times, of course he did it right!”

Just to prove my point, I asked if I could play his new guitar—I handed him my Strat and he handed me his. Suddenly, his rig sounded good and mine was Buzz City.

He refused to admit his brother did it wrong, and his Strat went back into the case for the rest of the rehearsal. Next gig, he brought it out and it sounded good. I think he took it to someone else to check his brother’s work. Fortunately, he fixed the problem instead of powering through it.

Eventually he tired of the Strat and traded it in on a gold top Paul Reed Smith. David Grissom was one of his heroes (he even played quite a bit like Grissom in phrasing and licks), so this was a logical move…on paper.

The tone was so bright you had to wear shades. Even he admitted it…he put it on the neck pickup (still too bright), so he dialed the tone knob way down, but then it sounded muddy and muffled. He tweaked his amp, tweaked his pedals, changed settings on the guitar…and it was either an ice pick or a puddle of mud. This time he asked me to play it through my rig to see what the problem was—and it was the same issue. It played beautifully—a really well-made guitar— but it sounded bad.

I don’t know if it was wired wrong or what, but that one was a huge disappointment. He was almost crushed—he’d traded off that Strat AND a big chunk of change, and it just didn’t sound good. He went back to his G&L, which I think he still uses to this day.

Unfortunately, his drinking got worse and worse and worse and we eventually had to fire him (“you can’t fire me—I quit!”) after he almost ruined three gigs in a row. It took almost ten years before he’d talk to me again—and then, it was just civil conversation, not friendly. We’re now polite friends, but don’t play together anymore.

That was sad, because we’d grown up together and played so well together.

“Oh well.” (Peter Green)

 

[Danb541]

I saw Living Colour open for the Stones in 1989 (Steel Wheels tour)…I heard the bass and drums…

Could not *distinctly* hear the guitar (I heard a noise that wasn’t bass and drums, but could not really hear any notes, riffs or phrases).

On multiple occasions, I have noticed that unless EVERYTHING set up is “exactly right,” those pointy-headed shredder guitars will often get swallowed up in the mix—that could have been part of the problem…I think Mr Reid was using an ESP of some sort back in those days.

Likewise for the singer—I was aware of a sound, but couldn’t hear or understand him.

It was disappointing—I liked the band’s recordings before (and after), but it was almost like they made the sound guy mad and he was getting revenge.

Actually maybe that's when I saw them too. I went to the Steel Wheels concert in 1989 in Vancouver BC.
The sound was so bad I don't even remember where I saw them for sure. lol.
Regarding the Stones concert... What's funny is I was 19 years old and my friend and I took a bus up there from Oregon because we thought the Stones were getting old and wanted to be sure to see them before they retired... that was 33 years ago.

 

[Fiesta Red]

Regarding the Stones concert... What's funny is I was 19 years old and my friend and I took a bus up there from Oregon because we thought the Stones were getting old and wanted to be sure to see them before they retired... that was 33 years ago.

Me too! Same year, same age (19), except mine was at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.
I thought, “This might be my last chance ever!”

 

[Modman68]

Davie Allan and the Arrows… played a gig with them once in the early aughts. My god.. such loud AND ice picky fuzz. Utterly painfull.

When I was 15 and just starting to play, I used to have a transistor bass amp with a 15” that I would pound the front end with a Zeus mini amp. That was a squealing harmonic mess.