What is the stupidest accident you've had with you gear?

[space6oy]

ehm ... found a sneeze on a nord lead ... thought it was the cat's "deed" ... beat the s**t out of it .... found out that it was my unlce ... damn, poor cat

Once had the MS20 fallen from the top tier on MS2000, broke one key on 2000

you beat your cat for sneezing? someone ought to drop a CS-80 on you...

[rhino]

after a dress rehersal for a theater gig, i took my keyboards home, but left my two 15" speaker cabinets at the venue, chained to a stair rail backstage. lost the key. had to unscrew the handles.

[kyodai]

The stupidest thing I ever did was I started unplugging cables from my mixer with my monitor's still on and the mains faders still up, Blew out my right monitor. took me a few seconds to figure out that it was gone too but the mix just didn't sound right.

learned my lesson tho.

[WhinyLittleRunt]

Walking with the guitar plugged into the amp and not realizing the cable wasn't 50 feet long and I pulled the amp right off the chair it was on, slamming the amp to the floor and impaling the front panel with the plugged in cable! Granted, I was 17 at the time and the chair was my "amp stand" however the amp cost $150 to fix which was a lot for a 17 year old, but the worst part was that it happened the day of a gig and I had to scramble and rent a suckass Peavey amp to replace it for the gig. Then we didn't even get paid... That was a good day!

[Phollop Willing PA]

We had to evacuate a forest fire and had five minutes to get out. I packed the car with my signed Voyager in it's case, signed Theremin in it's case, a binder full of original CDs (not safetied - which I put in a laundry bag and then as an after thought, my Roland MC 505 (modified with a new LCD display and chocked full of original patterns), my dog and my Mom (who was visiting and already packed for the airport) - yes in that order.

After the airport run, I stayed at my friends place in town, all the while keeping an ear on the fire's progress. At my friends place, I pulled out my 505 Groovebox and all the knobs were bent and falling off. Apparently the binders had banged against it and damaged the knobs. Arrghhh! So the next day I send it to Long and McQuade in our town and they take two weeks to send it to Roland (apparently they don't fix gear in house anymore since they bought out the local music store which did fix in house).

It just got back to the store after 4 months!!!!

L&M are the Walmarts of music in Canada and the repair service is so downhill since they bought out the independents.

I guess there's a couple of stories here. One is, pack gear properly and another is the nostalgia I have for independent music stores.

Oh yes - repair is about $260 and my house was spared from the forest fire.

[D-Collector]

A lot of comic (also tragic) incidents so far...
I guess when looking back, you can laugh about these things.

Keep 'em coming !

[cornutt]

Wow, I haven't done anything like that. Worst thing I've ever done is plug an IC into a socket backwards -- did that last year with a breadboard and fried an old 1458 opamp. Nothing that can't be replaced, though. When I was moving the JD800 downstairs last year, I banged its side into a corner of the wall. The JD800 was fine; the wall, not so much. Had to patch it.

One time, many years ago, I went to band practice with a bandage over a cut on my finger. At one point during the practice, I did a glissando on my 106 and ripped the bandge off and opened up the cut. By the end of the song, I had bled all over the keyboard.

[cornutt]

I dropped a CS-80 from a 5th floor balcony. It crushed a car to smithereens. The CS was fine however.

Let me guess: You were hauling it up the side of the building with a crane, and Wile E. Coyote was standing under it.

[hageir]

I'm smart.

[Christopher Winkels]

My worst was entirely my fault. I was seducing a female friend of my brother and had brought her 'round my bedroom so that I could play Mr Lover. Alas, we'd had a few refreshments and in the process of making my move I knocked over an entire Modcan modular system.

It was fortunately unharmed; the moment, however, was killed. We had a laugh but it completely ruined the atmosphere.

I did cop off with her friend later that evening though....

[balma]

NEVER PUT A LAVA LAMP NEXT TO YOUR GEAR.

caps lock intentional

[cornutt]

Awright, dagnabbit, you guys jinxed me. I was just finishing off the power supply connections for a new block of my modular. And I failed to notice that I had the + and - 15V reversed on my MOTM-990 distribution board. So when I powered it up, it blew all of the filter caps.

The garage really stinks now.

[D-Collector]

My worst was entirely my fault. I was seducing a female friend of my brother and had brought her 'round my bedroom so that I could play Mr Lover. Alas, we'd had a few refreshments and in the process of making my move I knocked over an entire Modcan modular system.

NEVER PUT A LAVA LAMP NEXT TO YOUR GEAR.

caps lock intentional

Please tell us about this!

[redroomrecordings]

I once plugged in the wrong a/c adaptor to a kstation and didnt notice until i smelled something burning and saw smoke coming from it....surprisingly it worked fine after that, except for the fact that if left on for a while the patch would start to self edit, which was actually kind of neat sometimes, but annoying when recording.

the dumbest thing though was with my virus c rack. i use it to add tempo synced delay to my live vocals. one show my back up guy had all the gear on a pretty high table with the c and another virus on a tilted stand i made. my mic cable was plugged in the back and at the very last moment of the show i sort of went crazy and somehow managed to kick the cable and send the virus c in flight about four feet out and then straight down to the stage. luckily it landed bottom down and on a pile of cammo netting that was part of the stage props hiding gear, and even more luckily it didnt pull a bunch of other gear with it.......this is why i am trying REALLY hard to find rack ears for the c (see gear wanted )....on the plus though people thought it was intentional and pretty bad a*s looking.

[aXL]

I have a slight subversion on this: Gear has damaged me once. I was setting up a small PA in the lounge at the boarding school I attended last year, and I had a speakon cable slung over my neck. Back at the mixing table, the guy rigging the FOH mixer yanks the other end of the cable... really, really hard. My neck was bruised for weeks afterwards, looked like someone had tried to garotte me backwards

Though the final day I got to throw a TV out the window of my friend's room, three floors down. My big rockstar moment