Sorry, Stevie. It's blues harp or nothing.

But, seeing as you ask, I don't hope for a revival of 1980s syn-drums and drum machines any time soon.

I love the trumpet but the saxophone has never done anything for me. Squaling and farting along on all rock records, only in small doses on jazz & soul do I tolerate it. John Coltrane I appreciate but I won't listen to him for long. Give me Lee Morgan any day.

I sneer at your cowbell suggestion sir. Have you never heard latin jazz/soul? Honky Tonk Woman is an example of how not to use the cowbell. This is Mongo Santamaria:

I'm pretty sure that on the first 'Wind In The Willows' album (Debbie Harry's first band)someone was credited with playing the Tibetan Anus Flute. I don't think the world would miss those...

As used to great effect on 'Wild Thing' and 'California Dreaming'; all the charm of a small child learning the recorder.

@Steve Turner
Q) "Name me a piece of music other than Honky Tonk Woman where a cowbell has benefitted the sound."

A) (Don't Fear) The Reaper.

This should explain
http://www.funnyhub.com/videos/pages/snl-more-cowbell.html

Surely the intro to Mountain's 'Mississippi Queen' and the bit where the acoustic preamble and angular electric squalling gives way to the blistering riff of the song-proper in Jethro Tull's 'Minstrel In The Gallery' (or, if that was too complicated to follow, the bit at the start of the single-edit) are prime cowbell moments?

admittedly a bit limited in scope, but used frugally and well it's sublime. Dare one suggest its gone a long way on a little?

Sorry, Mr McKay, but oboe is a classical instrument and has no place poncing up unclassical music. True too, (ex) Mrs Kirkpatrick.
Burn the oboes!!!!!

I can't express strongly enough how much I despise(d) everything about this instrument and all that it represented. It was an instrument seemingly created for nerdy, techy bores and fret-widdlers who subscribed to guitar-player type magazines in the '80s - people who could probably 'play', but who had almost certainly nothing to 'say', or nothing that anyone in their right mind would want to listen to. It was the bass equivalent of that 80s guy who played his electric guitar like a piano and popped up on TV for a while - kind of clever but pointlessly so. NOBODY on earth played it except for (a) the bloke in Kajagoogoo, whose fame decreased exponentially with his favouring of the Stick, (b) the bloke in 80s King Crimson (but then you'd expect that, wouldn't you?), and (c) a rathey geeky chap - a friend of a friend - who lived round my way. The fact that I can't remember his name possibly says something!

How come Mike Oldfield doesnt announce them in Tubular Bells in the manner of 'two slightly distorted cowbells"?

or, a normal bass being thwacked by Mark King's thumb. Horrible.

How the heart sank during an 80s dominated by the dreadful sound of fretless bass boinging away on Paul Young and John Martyn records plus the endless echoing enormo-snare sound of tinny drums on records by Simple Minds and, after a while, virtually everyone else. No, there was nothing redeeming whatsoever about recorded music in the 1980s. It was a living hell.

Who says I need a reason?

And Tony Levin does great things with the Chapman stick so I'd request a reprieve on that.

I'm sorry, even if he was Beethoven we'd still have to banish the 'Stick' to oblivion. Schubert wrote one sonata for the 'Arpeggione' - a cross between guitar and cello which was fashionable for about 10 minutes in the 1820s - which is now played by cello but still referred to as the 'Arpeggione Sonata', without which reference the instrument, pointless and absurd, would be utterly forgotten.

That latter fate - given that Schubert isn't currently available to pen the 'Chapman Stick Sonata' - awaits the wretched Stick.

Nothing more annoying, though I didn't mind them in Fitzacaraldo, but can't stand them anywhere else.

attached to Chris Martin

or, more specifically, the plastic crescent shaped tambourine played by singers with nothing better to do.

A proper tambourine is circular with a drumhead!

So many sessions ruined by people who can't play but do.

Obviously.

it's noise gets on my wick, but not as much as the fact its players call themselves flautists - why not fluters or flutists? Then there's the dance fluters in do when they are 'getting into the music' -immobile from the waist down, rocking/twisting/swaying in the middle, eyes firmly shut. I don't recall whether Fotherington-Thomas played an instrument - if he did, I'm sure he'd be a flute tooter.

Howsabout the "keytar", hideous keyboard slung around the neck and played like a gee-tar. Vile, vile, vile. I'm getting images of Earth, Wind & Fire.......

What did happen to jazz/rock?

Steinberger guitars. Eeeuuurrrggh.

and anyone who plays it clearly have no place whatsoever in the rock pantheon...

Anyone whose heard the Magnetic Fields would surely shout down the ukele suggestion..... surely?

I would suggest that stupid, water-thin lap-slider thing that turns up on country records and hawain music. can;t bear it.

...makes a musical skid-mark in my world.

who attemtps to make music WITHOUT instruments...

flying pickets

bobby mc ferrin

anne briggs without the nice guitar stuff behind her...

please. enough.

The first glimpse of a 5 string electric bass at a gig guarantees:

1. terrible overall sound. Dunno why, just does.
2. bass player with ideas above his station - solos, chords, etc
3. probably 2 keyboard players
4. percussion workouts, possibly before aforementioned bass solo
5. constant threat of gaudy burst of "funky workout".

What is wrong with an old Precision? Answer - nothing at all.

...but how you play it. I love the saxophone as played by Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins and a host of other Jazz greats, but cannot think of a single rock record where I wouldn't rather the sax wasn't there - and that definitely includes Pink Floyd.

Similarly, I have a problem with the pedal steel guitar of the out and out country variety - but I am happy enough when it is in the hands of someone like Daniel Lanois.

Not because I dislike it, I just can't think of any records that have one, ergo, it's out.

Saw The Who live the other night in Adelaide. Pete Townshend obviously wants Gibson guitars removed from the face of the earth after he gave a heckler what for in response to a request to play one.

Has anybody mentioned the lagerphone yet?

...'sitting in his Sheraton Gibson playing his Gibson...'?*

[* I'm afraid you'd need to own his solo LP 'Who Came First' - which nobody in the world does - to appreciate the reference.]

In the dark period of history pre-dating the discovery of the potato, the lute was the refined instrument of an otherwise brutal era. Back then it was typically played by men in curly shoes, for the benefit of young noblewomen who were destined to be married-off to French aristocrats, before dying in their early 20s of womb blight, or scurvy of the bosom.

At some point in our nation’s history, the acoustic guitar eased ahead of the lute as the instrument of choice for the solo troubadour. Amplified music kicked a carpet of cigarette ash and soiled groupies over its memory.

To modern ears the lute is a sexless instrument, played at chest height, limited to expressions of courtly love and interminable dirges concerning My Laird’s Falcon and the like. Its antithesis - the electric guitar - is an instrument of pure sex. Seemingly weighted down by its own depraved, hell-bound gravity, it sinks naturally to groin level and is at its very best when played with legs splayed wide apart, accompanied by lascivious gyrations of the hips, and a roving ‘come backstage after the show and bring your mother’ eye. No one in their right mind would throw their underwear at someone who played a lute like this, except as an ironic gesture, rooted in a genuine disdain of the performer.

Rather than shuffle off to the graveyard of obsolete instruments, the lute has embraced it status as a cultural anachronism: In the 21st century, lute recitals are sometimes used to torture parties of children on school trips to castles and National Trust properties. The instrument’s continued existence has allowed Sting to claw back some of his ebbing credibility by recording an album of Early English music. This luting of the past is apparently intended to confer scholarly depth on a man better known for dreary, middle of the road AOR and hollow boasts of epic tantric shags.

Standing within earshot of a lute will cause some people to regress to the level of a medieval simpleton who uses the word “mayhap” in sentences, refers to women as “comely wenches” and pretends not to understand what a radio (or” sorcerous talking box”) is. The spontaneous ultra-violence instinctively meted-out on such individuals will eventually wipe this unfortunate trait from the collective gene pool. However the widespread availability of lutes in our society is doing little to speed the process along.

Somebody is going to chime-in and attempt to argue that lutes never really went away; that the guitar is the descendent of the lute; that the Fender Stratocaster that was drenched in lighter fluid and then set on fire by Jimmy Hendrix is technically an electric lute.

Maybe it’s time for us to take a leaf from Hendrix’s book. If your care about the future of music then you must burn your parent's lute.

I have a load of lute recordings - in a master's or a maverick's hands it's an instrument of awe-inspiring sublimitude and rich musicality. Forget the fol-de-rol purveyors of faux medieval mediocrity and anything at all thatinvolves lute with vocal - invest, instead, in the amazing recordings of Nigel North (4 volumes of 'Bach On The Lute', including the incredible 6 cello suites specially transcribed, and 3 - with more volumes to come, apparently - of the complete instrumental works of John Dowland). And who can deny the legend that is Julian Bream? Or indeed the Dutch god of the strings Jan Akkerman - and speaking of whom...

but how i wince when it's time for a theramin solo at a gig
all that hand waving and those stuck-in-a-glass-box shapes
wrapped up like 'ethereal' is a good thing

...let's do away with the Hurdy Gurdy too.

(Was there actually a hurdy gurdy on it? I suspect not, sadly.)

in tandem with an accordion.

There are an enthusiastic tribe of buskers currently infesting the areas around Waterloo and Hungerford Bridge. Their favoured instruments are the accordion on which a small repertoire of tunes are stretched howling for mercy across it's rack of keys.

This wouldn't be so bad but the vogue is for them to be accompanied by a percussionists of limited rhythmic feel pounding what can only be described as fuck out of an empty plastic jerry can in 'time' to the frenzied tootling.

It's hell on toast to have to walk past at 8:30 in the morning in a foot tunnel with it cannoning at you from all sides.

I'm always tempted to lift a few coins out of the hat at their feet as recompense. There isn't a jury in the land that would convict me.

...the Polish Accordion Agency which looks after the pitches in Belfast doesn't have such a pool of virtuosity at its disposal. There's this bloke ALWAYS outside No Alibis bookstore in Botanic Avenue (University/coffee shop area central) who is the WORST musician in the world, on any instrument. I don't think he even tries. If I heard him even attempting to improve from atonal wheezing, I'd be inclined to give him cash, just for the effort...

Incidentally, speaking of No Alibis - the 'Hi Fidelity' of Belfast bookstores (characterful staff, wacky customers, regular folk/jazz/blues gigs in the evenings etc) - it's just been 'fictionally immortalised' in a book by Colin Bateman, 'Mystery Man', wherein the owner of the store (store has same name/location, owner's name changed) becomes an unwitting detective.

Has this happened to anyone else known to the Word massive - somebody fictionalising a pal in a very thinly veiled way in book/film/etc?

But I would banish auto-tune forever. Records where everything is auto-tuned sound sterile and oddly painful to hear. We'll look back on this era and remember this effect with the fondness we now hold for Simmons Drums (i.e. not very much).

I think a certain amount of out-of-tuneness actually makes a record sound good, and I don't mean completely out (as in Wylie or the bloke from the the Lighthouse Family), but slight. In much the way that the pairs of strings on a mandolin make it sound bigger because they are slightly out against each other.

Well, I know what I mean anyway!

...infecting recordings by all and sundry circa '84-'87, was the fretless electric bass, often played by the same man: one Pino Paladino. Not only was it an instrument whose sound induced an instant physical queasiness, but its playing apparently required that the player be wearing a pastel-coloured blazer with pushed-up sleeves. With the single exception of Jaco Pastorius--a classic case of the exception proving the rule--no musician should have been allowed near this thing, nor ever should be again.

And hey, all you uke haters, check out anything by the wonderful Beirut and hear just how wrong you've been.

Truly an awful sound, veritably the diced carrot in the pool of vomit that was the '80s.

"the pool of vomit that was the '80s" still gets regurgitated on a regular basis - but I'll still willingly get some on my shoes again, despite this being the era when I just gave up on music for a while.

At the risk of undermining the fun aspect of a thread like this, isn't it a case with most instruments of bad workmen rather than the tools? Yin and Yang? I'd never rule any instrument out of play... even if it works just the once.

For example, Jaco Pastorius, the quoted exception to most of the fretless bass debate above, can provide both a gourmet experience and its pitfalls (sometimes a bit over-rich, with too many courses), while plenty of others only provoke the gag reflex with their use of the same ingredient.