No more Mr Nice Guy

[tauzero]

I've always been one who's happy to lend gear. I know there are strong opinions either way, and I wouldn't advise anyone else what to do. Last night, we supported a Blur tribute band at the Robin 2 near Wolverhampton. I'd had a message late in the afternoon from our guitarist, asking if it was OK if the bassist borrowed my cab. I said yes, got there, passed the cab (Barefaced BB2) over to the bassist, and also lent him a speakon-jack speaker cable.

I wanted to leave before the end, and our guitarist said he was happy to take my cab back to his place just down the road from me. So he did, and then I got a message from him to say the bassist had forgotten to give him the speaker lead but had put it behind the bar. After work today, I took a 15 mile or so detour to pick the lead up, got home, then went to pick up the cab. The guitarist brings out the cab, but the immaculate Roqsolid cover is missing. To say I am p!ssed off is an understatement. The guitarist has messaged them to ask about the cover. I am not a happy bunny. Stuff lending gear to anyone else.

[Dan Dare]

I know one doesn't like to appear mean, but lending gear is a no-no for me. If I'm there and someone wants to play through my kit, I'll say yes if they ask nicely (and preferably buy me a pint), but that's it. I never let anything out of my sight. Too much of my hard earned at stake and people aren't always careful with others' stuff.

[CamdenRob]

Ah it’s difficult isn’t it... no one really wants anyone else using their gear but it does look a bit arsey to flat out refuse. Trouble is you don’t know if whoever’s using it can be trusted to sit on the toilet the right way around let alone understand how a bass amp works... Maybe there should be some sort of widely accepted interview system in place. 

“Hello potential rig user. What’s your preferred setting for the bass knob”

”...on full like all the others innit”

”Access denied”

😐

[steantval]

I would be having a word with your guitarist, he is just as much to blame, he should have made sure he had all of your stuff before leaving the venue.

[tauzero]

8 minutes ago, steantval said:

I would be having a word with your guitarist, he is just as much to blame, he should have made sure he had all of your stuff before leaving the venue.

He didn't realise my cab had a cover on it or that I'd lent the other bassist a lead. I never thought to mention it as I assumed that the other bassist would take as much care of my gear as I would of someone else's.

[Reggaebass]

I wouldn’t be too happy with that either, has the guy got no respect for other people’s property,  the least he should do is replace what’s lost .

[chris_b]

I don't lend gear.

No one treats someone else's gear like their own and I've seen plenty of people mistreating their own gear so why would they bother about yours?

 

[la bam]

3 hours ago, CamdenRob said:

Ah it’s difficult isn’t it... no one really wants anyone else using their gear but it does look a bit arsey to flat out refuse. 

The best way to look at it is it's even more arsey not to bring any gear and expect to borrow someone else's.

[tauzero]

1 minute ago, la bam said:

The best way to look at it is it's even more arsey not to bring any gear and expect to borrow someone else's.

In this case, the bassist thought his cab was in the band van. For convenience, we both used his head.

[chris_b]

3 hours ago, CamdenRob said:

Ah it’s difficult isn’t it... no one really wants anyone else using their gear but it does look a bit arsey to flat out refuse.

No. .. I don't think it does.

In the days of smoking in pubs, I was in a house band for a jam night. I got up after the last players had finished and found a lighted cigarette smouldering away on the edge of my cab!!! It hadn't burnt down far enough to do any damage and I considered the guy who left it a friend.

You can't trust anyone, so never lend or borrow gear and never be embarrassed about saying no.

 

Edited July 26, 2019 by chris_b

[Muppet]

Did the other guy know your cab had a cover with it?  It's probably still at the venue surely? 

[Vinny]

There's a good way round this, if anyone asks me to borrow my rig I just hand them a 9 quid DI box and watch the confusion.

Sometimes if they've managed to irk me in some other way I 'forget' to put the battery in.

Ain't I a stinker?

[Jus Lukin]

-

Edited March 3, 2022 by Jus Lukin

[stewblack]

It is painful whenever altruism is repaid with carelesness. But being kind and sharing is always a good thing, for you and for others. I hope this incident doesn't change that side of your nature. 

[SICbass]

+1 ^

[uk_lefty]

I'll lend out my rig but only to people I know OR if the person running the sound is the guitarist from my band. Though a punk band did decide to max the input volume on my Ashdown head at a festival last year and it was permanently in the red, I wasn't too happy about that but you can't really go up mid set and ask them to be flipping sensible with the gear can you? Was paranoid about the amp for the rest of the night, hadn't had much sleep and during our "headline" set when the smoke machine went off I had kittens!! 

[casapete]

Slightly OT, but anyway !

A few years ago we let a DJ use our big PA at a function in a large Manchester hotel. Gave him strict instructions to not max it out with his crappy DJ mixer. All was good until we’d done our set, to a storming audience. The DJ followed us after our set, but as we were getting changed I noticed the level rise a lot. Got down to the function room to hear it absolutely blasting, but with a lack of top end. In an attempt to go down as well as our band,  the tw*t had blown the horns in the rig. After a few weeks of heated exchanges with the DJ’s management we eventually got the repair bill covered, but so much hassle. Never happened again.

I have occasionally lent my rig to other bands, but fortunately the need to do rarely happens doing our sort of gigs. Funnily enough though, last week it may have been required, but as the bassist in the other band was stage right and I set up stage left it wasn’t worth the messing around. Must admit was quite relieved TBH as didn’t know the guy etc. 

We did a glitzy industry awards do in the 90’s at a flash London hotel. Lots of minor celebs and some name acts / musicians in the audience. Couple of weeks before the gig I get a call from the bassist playing for one of the acts, asking if he could use my rig. Seemed an okay guy, so I told him what I’d got and he was grateful as he was only doing a handful of songs with a thrown together band and it would save him the hassle of lugging stuff into  central London. Then he asked what bass I used, and could he use that? Told him politely that I’d rather he brought his own if that was okay. Then it went a bit odd, with him asking what year my Precision was (a 63 as it happened...). Told me his was a 62, and ( unlike mine) in the original finish . I replied that he’d obviously be better off using his then, and didn’t lend mine to anyone (let alone such a kn*b head). Anyway, after all this I thought he’d maybe be a good player so watched him on the gig, and he was decidedly average at best! 

[taunton-hobbit]

I never, ever lend money or kit - at best it causes amnesia.............

😎

[Newfoundfreedom]

2 hours ago, hiram.k.hackenbacker said:

....and I thought this was going to be Alice Cooper related 🙃

Yup. Me too.

[ahpook]

Not that any comments to this effect have much effect on threads such as these, but I've loaned equipment at about two thirds of the gigs I've played and never had anything broken or mislaid.

 

[Newfoundfreedom]

I worry about things more the other way around. I could almost guarantee if I touched someone else's gear I would somehow manage to damage or break it and end up being financially liable for something far more expensive than my own gear. 

Nope, I'll stick to my own battered cabs and budget amp thank you kindly. 

[tauzero]

9 hours ago, Muppet said:

Did the other guy know your cab had a cover with it?  It's probably still at the venue surely? 

I passed it up to him on the stage (as they were just starting to soundcheck when I arrived) with its cover on. Apparently he folded up the cover and put it under the drum riser. Whether it's still there is another question.

[converse320]

I ran a small building/development company for many years.  I started out happy to lend tools out, but found it never ended well.  The last straw was a friend who borrowed a super-expensive fine-finish sanding machine.  They said they wanted to use it to refinish a kitchen table.  So it came back in its box, with about 100 dead sanding disks in the box, and a strong smell of burning electrics.   It was completely destroyed.  "Yes, started playing up when I got to the last corner of floor" she said.  "I'll happily pay for it to be fixed."   Stupid woman had sanded the whole of her downstairs floor with it, using 400 and finer grit!!!   When the repair quote came back, she suddenly remembered it hadn't been working properly when I lent it to her.   So to save embarrassment, I just stopped lending.  

[Ed_S]

We supported a semi-famous guitarist from the states doing a solo tour across Europe with a band of hired guns, and on the day of the show got told by their tour manager that we had to provide literally everything apart from guitars, cymbals and sticks because that's all they were carrying with them to save on transport costs. We told the guy that they'd need to go and hire or borrow some amp heads and a snare drum, which they somehow managed to do, but they never said so much as 'cheers' for the rest and their drummer also spent a significant amount of time telling ours how much he, let's say, 'disliked' his kit. They weren't particularly good, and at the end they just waltzed out and disappeared.

My most recent irritation was turning up to a battle of the bands with very limited gear storage space and a 'heads and breakables only' policy on the pre-gig info from the promoter, to find that all the other bassists had their rigs with them. I didn't twig why until it was our slot and I asked where the house cab was. "It's away being fixed mate - it's been dead for weeks", was the cheery response from the promoter; nice of him to tell everyone. I have a sansamp on the end of my board so I just went straight into the desk and got on with it, but I could barely hear myself on stage so I got eye contact with the soundman and gave him the universal 'point to my ear, point at my bass, point at the monitor wedge, point upwards' thing, which, given that he gave me the also-universal 'thumbs up' thing, suggested he'd understood and I'd soon be able to hear. It wasn't the case - I played the rest of the set by the numbers and thought 'sod it'. We went through to the next round of the competition, but later I read a review of the gig which said that the bass was drowning everything out during our set, so I can only put two-and-two together and guess what had happened there!

I guess that my point across those two anecdotes is that you should stand your ground with what you are and aren't willing to lend, because very often you won't get any thanks for it, and that even when I turned up to a gig without enough gear through no fault of my own, my first instinct wasn't to go to the other guys and try to borrow their stuff.

[odysseus]

I don't let my gear out of my sight....