# The show must go on By Warren Pridgeon | Published 2026-07-27 | Category: Life Canonical: https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/blog/the-show-must-go-on --- Ever been standing with a countdown timer running and something critical isn't working? That was me. The clock read 4:59, I got onto the stage, and discovered my guitar sound was deader than a dodo. Everything SHOULD be working. Guitar: volume maxed, flipped between pickup settings... nothing. Amp on and not on "standby"... no sound. Check that the tuner pedal isn't activated... nothing but the sound of silence! When that timer hits zero... there's a four count by the drummer and *I* have to play the intro... I got into deeper debugging... down on my knees, not to pray... well not only. The congregation was ready. My equipment... wasn't. Bomb technician mode on, pulling cables, checking power bricks. Unplugging and replugging cables. A pedal board is multiple pedals chained together, each pedal roughly 4 points of failure: the input, the pedal itself, the power plug and the output. Too many suspects to interrogate, not enough time for good cop, bad cop. ![A guitar pedal board on a dark stage floor: five pedals chained together, with a tangled pile of blue and white cables heaped across the top of it](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/uploads/dc6c10f16a644c298cf2d493b2529fca.jpg) That is the actual board. Not a photo from that night, obviously, I had other priorities at the time. Count the cables. Now imagine finding the wrong one, in the dark, on your knees, with a clock on the screen and the congregation watching. With basically no time left to investigate further I made an executive decision... I pulled the cable from the last pedals output and put it straight into my guitar. I had no effects, but I had sound. One, two, three, four and GOOOOO. During the first song I glanced down at the crime scene, and there it was. The very first cable in the chain, sitting less than HALF A CENTIMETRE from fully plugged in. It looked connected. It was NOT. Four minutes of systematic rewiring, yet 5 millimetres from success. Every developer on earth has met this bug. Hours of investigation, and it's a loose plug. A missing semicolon. A space in a config value. The lesson I took from it wasn't "check the cables first" (but still check the cables first). It was that when the countdown is real and about to hit zero, you stop debugging and ship the smallest thing that works. Root cause is a luxury for after the show starts. ## The electrician in the rafters That wasn't even the most chaotic one. We were playing at a conference at our church. The church was mid large renovation, so this was kind of a celebration also. During the band warmup the electrician had been scrambling around working on the wiring. The power tripped a few times, we were all on edge because of that. We started the first song, and electrician was up in the rafters busy electricianing. ![Warren on stage playing a blue electric guitar, head down, with lighting truss and cabling directly above him](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/uploads/e1d0e622c6e84c50a8439bf8aec7d96d.jpg) You're in charge of what you can reach... and I'm not tall enough to reach into the roof. The electrical was the electrician's job. The sound was mine. And... wouldn't you know it... the power tripped... AGAIN. When they got the power back on again my amp lit up... sweet. I looked down at my multieffects unit and saw... darkness. The last time the power had gone down it took my effects unit's power supply down with it. All my curated sounds, the delays, reverbs, drive tones... poof up in smoke like the smoke that had just escaped from the power supply. You don't have a whole lot of time to diagnose issues in a situation like that. Luckily the amp was alive. So once again it was "direct into the amp" time and restart the song. This brought a new dance move to the playing. My different sounds (clean and drive) lived in the dead pedal and there was a mere tapdance involved in choosing which you wanted. With the pedal dead I had to spin around, skip over to the amp and switch between the clean and drive channels. By hand. Mid strum. If you've ever nursed a system through the night running the broken scheduler's jobs by hand, one at a time, you have stood exactly where I was standing. Fallback mode with reduced features. The congregation thought I was just extra spicy that night. lol. ## Five strings If you've ever played music live you'll know that things happen. Usually at the most inopportune time. Guitar strings love to snap 1 verse into the first song, just as the momentum is building into the chorus. Now, if you're playing in churches you generally don't have a guitar tech on hand with your spare guitar ready to swap out. This is the undercover rock star, serving the people kind of playing... not the big arena 5 or 6 guitars back stage kind of rock star. ![A blue electric guitar with a snapped string sprung loose off the fretboard, curling up and out of the top of the frame](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/uploads/b36b42709dfc45dd83bc8edeafd08089.jpg) You don't stop, you play around the missing string. This becomes REALLY fun if there's an instrumental or solo that involves said string. Chords you can easily gippo... a missing g-string (which is way better than an extra one. HAHAHAHA) just turns your chords into power chords, and in a full band nobody even notices. The instrumental is where it gets spicy: half your brain holds the chords leading up to it while the other half frantically transposes the solo away from the string you no longer have. Hardware failure, no redundancy, no downtime window. Graceful degradation, in the flesh. ## The capo on the wrong fret The best one isn't even my failure, and that's exactly why it's the best one. I was playing alongside my dad, who accidentally slapped his capo onto fret 3 instead of fret 2. The band generally doesn't monitor each other to check that capos go onto correct frets. The song started and something felt off. I generally play electric guitar and mostly without a capo, so I shifted my chords one fret higher and instantly I knew what had happened. I looked over at my dad and saw the capo was one fret too high. The other guitarist had a puzzled look on his face. ![Two photos of the same guitar neck side by side, labelled Capo on 2nd and Capo on 3rd. In the left the capo sits above the third-fret dot marker, in the right it sits across it, one fret lower](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/uploads/cf561e1dc9474c9db586d84e30bfa5c7.jpg) Left is where the capo was supposed to be. Right is where it actually went. That is the whole thing. One fret. And from the audience it is not a small difference, it is a completely different key. If you've ever debugged an integration where every system swears it's healthy and the output is still garbage, you know that exact feeling in your stomach. At that point I'd found the solution, and when you're mid resolution it doesn't matter who or why what matters is getting what needs doing, done. I transposed on the fly to match the new key. The band eventually got on board and we got through the song. At the end my dad realised, a shrug and wave and the next song kicked off. It happens. What matters is sorting the issue and moving forwards. Adaptation over attribution. The client's data was wrong, the deadline isn't moving, and blame ships nothing. ![A four-piece band playing under a thatched roof, Warren on the right behind a music stand of chord sheets, another guitarist on the left](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/uploads/0f6b2705756b4ef3860782b77b235dee.jpg) Look at the music stands... they hold chord sheets. The great thing about chord sheets? You can get pretty much any song in any key. And you can find about a gazillion interpretations of every song, with the changes between chords indicated in different places. This leads to fun and games when it comes time to play live, people show up with different versions of the chords. The singer goes "I can't sing in this key" and you have to transpose on the fly. When you play live the transposition muscle is a muscle you end up training whether you choose to or not. ## Same nervous system, different instrument Did I ever think that this training would be training me for software development? Not in a million years. But in life, many skills are transferable across disciplines. Courage under fire, coolness under pressure is something you develop with time... and being under pressure. The skills learned through 15 years of playing live in various locations with various challenges are the same ones I use when a client's system falls over at the worst time. Keep calm and carry on. Figure out what is broken. Find a fix that gets it up and running again. It might not be the perfect fix, but if it gets the racecar over the finish line you can figure out the why and prepare better for it. The right fix isn't always the "perfect" one that solves ALL the problems in one go (although it's epic when you get that right). When the paw-paw hits the fan (and you're lucky enough that there's no loadshedding so it's spinning) plans need to be made because the show must go on! ![Warren on stage in a hood, playing a guitar whose extended neck glows like a red lightsaber, above the words "The show must go on"](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/uploads/f3302393044946019a4250cbc433f953.jpg) *(Yes, that's a real lightsaber. It's a still from my Imperial March cover over on [Warren's Music Corner](https://warrenpridgeon.co.za/go/lightsaber). Revenge of the Fifth, naturally.)* So when a system goes down and I'm the one answering the phone, it helps to remember: I've done live triage with an electrician in the rafters and a congregation watching. Your outage, at least, isn't ticking down on a big screen. That calm is for hire, by the way. It lives at [OrganiCode](https://organicode.co.za), where the instruments are uglier and the encores are called "support contracts".