I like the baritone sax and the tenor sax, but any register above that, forget it - especially the soprano sax and all those lite-jazz wankers that play one.
Not crazy about flutes, either. The most egregious misuse of flutes has to have been The Tonight Show Orchestra under Doc Severinsen, where they used flutes to play what would have been a string section part.
Don’t like pan pipes, especially the synthesized kind. For that matter, I don’t like most of the sounds you can get out of every digital keyboard on the market. 999 presets, 990 of them sound like ass and are never used - except by newage (rhymes with sewage) wankers and their “atmospheric” wankfests.
Also not crazy about the Farfisa organ, unless it’s on a Sir Douglas Quintet record. Actually, I don’t really like the sound of most organs that aren’t a Hammond B3 (sorry, Kalhoun.) Especially any “home” organ by Wurlitzer or Yamaha.
And I hate every digital impersonation of a Fender Rhodes piano that isn’t sampled from an actual Fender Rhodes piano.
The only good use for an accordion is to throw at a banjo.
Synthesized horns are the worst, followed closely by synthesized strings. They ruin otherwise good arrangements. They give me the distinct feeling of mock crab in grocery store sushi rolls. Yuck. Paul Shaffer’s band on Letterman is particularly egregious.
I think any instrument played poorly is obviously hard to listen to, but there are two that stick out – trumpet and violin. I can’t stand being around either one if not played by a competent musician.
I think the B3 sounds pretty distinct and I can take it in a limited role, in small doses. Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shader of Pale” was overplayed growing up. I never got into the Jimmy Smith/MMW jazz organ thing either – there is a local group who does a similar thing with a Fender Rhodes and it is so much better. Drop Trio is the name of the group, funk jazz jam stuff without any pretension. Amongst my favorite band is Stereolab, so that tells you that I really love those other organs/early synths as well (Farfisa, Moogs).
I play classical Indian music (sitar), so I have a love for sitar, santoor, shennai, and all of the other instruments that many feel icky about.
Still don’t like the bagpipes, even after having lived in Scotland. Screeching noise.
The organ can be okay in rock music, but other than that I don’t like it.
I wouldn’t have thought of it, but someone mentioned the harmonica above, and I’m not particularly fond of that either. It always irritates me a bit when Bob Dylan starts playing harmonica in one of his songs.
Even in the hands of an expert the violin disturbs me. And yet, circumstances compelled me to sit through many a middle-school and high-school orchestra performance, where the instruments were not played by anything close to an expert and in the case of the jazz band the violinist was miked.
(So were the flutes. I used to play flute and I know the secret of getting two flutes to play together in tune. You have to kill one of the flutists.)
Oddly enough I like the fiddle, though. Can’t really explain that one.
Accordions in mariachi music.
Where I work, the hispanic gentlemen in the kitchen choose the music and it’s CONSTANT mariachi. Makes me want to smash the speakers in. I had no idea before this that Mexican people actually LIKED that awful stuff.
And I used to like accordion.
I love bagpipes, though. And piano and organ (in the right hands) and oboe.
I have something personal against pianos. When I was 6, I started taking horseback riding lessons, and was the happiest little girl in the world. My mother hated the idea of her ‘dainty little girl’ preferring to ride horses rather than do any of the little girl things she so wanted me to do. But I was a tomboy through and through, and had no desire to do anything but be with animals.
I took the riding lessons for about a year…until the first time I fell off the horse. My mother went into a blind panic, despite my instructor assuring her I was fine, if you’re gonna ride, you’re gonna fall, etc. Hell, I climbed right back on and was ready to go again. But Mom made up her mind-I was not going to engage in such a dangerous hobby, and she did not allow me to go back.
To replace my riding lessons, they signed me up for piano lessons.
I cannot begin to tell you how much I despised this. The teacher came to my house once a week. They bought a piano. I was mad to sit at said piano 1-2 hours every single day to practice. I sat at said piano and cried, every single day.
After MAYBE a month of this, they relented and I no longer had to take the lessons. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to go back to the riding lessons. To this day, piano music brings this all back to me.
A comedic musical acquiantance of mine has a song that is recorded as a deliberately cheesy fake-sounding bossa nova, and when the lame synth flute solo starts, the recording itself fast-forwards you through it (even pausing a few times to make sure it hasn’t finished). It’s one of the funniest musical jokes I’ve ever heard. I’m too lazy to see if it’s available on th’ Innernet, but he records as L.E.G. Slurp and the song is called “Growing Old.”
I’m a guitarist, but 99% of jazz guitar irks me – and that 1% is mostly occupied by Django Reinhardt.
The only instrument I can think of that just annoys me is almost any context is the hammered dulcimer, which combines the worst qualities of the harpsichord and the spoons.
Does anyone else hate xylophones and vibraphones? You don’t hear them much on the rock station, but there’s lots of xylophone and vibraphone jazz out there. Nothing’s more annoying than vibraphone jazz.
I’m gonna get called a heathen for this, but acoustic guitar. I really don’t like the sound. Electric is okay, but I just find acoustic… ick. Not only is the the preferred instrument of talentless hacks everywhere, it sounds muddy and ordinary even in the hands of a professional. And it’s also a really ugly shape.
Trumpet. There’s something harsh about the sound that grates on me. It’s not the style of playing, it’s the sound itself.
For what it’s worth, I’ve got some serious tone deafness going on, and I have this pet theory (completely made up in my own head) that I’m hearing something in the trumpet that is normally masked by the nice, melodic sounds that other people apparently hear.
I have played and loved piano for years, and for a short while, worked in a piano store. That was one story I heard over and over: someone came in to look at a piano, mostly women, wondering if they should learn to play, and explaining how they were forced to learn at age 5 and quit through sheer hatred and disgust.
Some parents just don’t get it: they think playing the piano is something you learn to do, like learning to change a diaper, that you get good at it because it’s a life skill and will help you find the Right Kind Of Husband.
No, dumbasses, it’s something you do because you enjoy it. If you, dumbass parents, thought it was such a valuable freakin’ skill, how come neither of you play? How come neither of you know diddly-dink about pianos? You just want your house to have beautiful music happening in it — so sit your ass down and learn it. Don’t force indoor-sitting-at-keyboard torture on some energetic child.
Me, since I write and compose all kinds of music, I don’t have a dislike for any particular instrument thus far mentioned. They’re all useful in a song somewhere, at some point, for something. The instrument I loathe has not been mentioned: synthetic 70s disco drums. No song is ever made better with electronic disco drums. Bew, bew, bew! No guts to 'em at all.
I despise bagpipes. They sort of mosey around whatever note they’re trying to hit, and eventually, sometimes, they hit that note once all the other nearby ones have been attempted.
I’m not real fond of the human singing voice, in most instances, for the same reason.
I like flutes, because they generate about the closest to a pure tone of any instrument I can think of. So I like them for the same reason I dislike bagpipes.
And I’d be disavowing 35 years of my musical tastes if I didn’t admit that I love the B3.
Perhaps your saxophone experience may have included too much cheesy porn!
An effective cure for this unfortunate malady might simply be several hours of listening to Ben Webster, Lester Young, and Paul Desmond…
Then, and only then, you will be ready for some early Coltrane … preferably before he hooked up with Impulse and/or Pablo Records. Stick with his Prestige and Atlantic recordings, as long as they’re (prior to “OM”).
