5 Of The Weirdest Interactions With Brands I’ve Had As A Demo/Review Guy

While I love my job, being a demo artist is not always rainbows and butterflies.

To celebrate my 5th year of my guitar journalism career (Jan 2019-Jan 2024), I thought we’d take a look back at some of the more humorous and unexpected parts of the job. I foolishly got into this business thinking it would be only smooth sailing. How could writing about my favorite bands, guitar gear, and making videos go wrong?

Oh well it can. Between accusations of theft, the threat of lawyers, and insults to my intelligence, I’ve had quite the interesting email inbox these last 5 years. I won’t go into too much detail about everything crazy, and I won’t name any names (at least until I retire from this biz). But I will let you in on five of the funnier interactions and experiences that punctuate my day-to-day career doing guitar demos, articles, and content.

And please, this isn’t a thread of me complaining. I love this job, and I’d put up with all of this again just to keep doing it! But it doesn’t make these situations any less funny/interesting/worth talking about.

When CEO’s can’t read

This was the most recent one and it definitely has gotten a chuckle from me. A certain CEO from a mid-sized pedal company emailed me YEARS after I first reached out to him and was left on read. He said they had something coming out that I could help launch if I was willing to sign a NDA. All normal for the business so far.

When the legal docs show up, they’re made out for a different company with guitar in their name, not Ultimate-Guitar. So my first thought is, damn this guy absolutely meant to email them and accidentally emailed me. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, I respond and tell him he’s made a mistake and to please send the correct docs. He says “oops, no problem, will fix it right away”….

It’s been weeks, almost a month now. He totally meant to email Premier Guitar’s tech editor, not me! Wish he would have just admitted to that in the first place but always humbling when someone reminds you that you’re not worth their time!

My reviews accused of causing a brand “damage”

I won’t be identifying the brand, reviews, or guitar gear in question here. But back when we used a number rating system for reviews both at Ultimate-Guitar, and here on my website, I gave a guitar a score of a 7 out of 10. Quite a good score, thoroughly above average, and even remarked how much I enjoyed the instrument despite a few issues with setup that could be easily corrected with time.

Oh boy did that send the president of a mid-sized guitar distributor down a war path. Between suggesting that I had no idea what I was talking about, and mentioning that you wouldn’t judge a car because it had low tire pressure, it was an interesting conversation.

The truth is, there is no “correct” way to review and demo gear. I take it out of the box, let it acclimate for a day or two, and then plug it in and review it. I am reviewing the product actually as it should arrive to my home. Many guitars are capable of being much better if I took the time to adjust every truss rod or set them up to my liking. And if playability is a little off, it’s not like I’m going to bash the product for that. It’s usually not more than a passing comment followed by “but if you get this set up, it’s a killer guitar”.

This man was so bothered that I didn’t do a full setup myself of his products before I reviewed them, but last time I checked, he’s not paying me to be a guitar tech. In fact, he didn’t pay me at all! But he did accuse me of causing short term damage to his brand and company, which is something I don’t think is really possible considering only a few thousand people seemed to care enough to click on reviews of his products….

Do you want to talk to the lawyers?

I’ll say the least about this one to prevent further instigation or threats, but yes I was once threatened with “talking to the lawyers” if I didn’t amend a news article I put up online. It wasn’t really a news article even, as it was more of an opinion piece. And trust me, it hurts to admit I had to edit the article instead of standing my ground, but once my boss got involved, I basically had no choice. But yes, you can get real legal threats (even if they are hollow, they’re still scary) when working in the guitar industry!

You are costing this company a lot of money….

Another recent one that had my head spinning. A company set up a pickup so FedEx could come retrieve and return a guitar back home after I had finished reviewing it. This is totally normal, I don’t get to keep 90% or more of the guitars I review and demo. However, the company never sent me the shipping label for the guitar’s return.

So FedEx comes, obviously won’t take the instrument without the label, and the company emails me the labels 30 minutes later after FedEx is gone. Not a problem, we can try again tomorrow right? Wrong!

Apparently, this is my fault, as I failed to deliver the guitar to FedEx when they arrive. Despite my pleading that it literally doesn’t matter if I don’t have the shipping label, they insist it’s my fault and I’m costing the company another big fee for shipping costs and home pickup. I try to cordially explain that they literally caused this, to no avail. After several more threats of me having to pay for the new shipping pickup, or buy the guitar outright, they finally conceded to reschedule pickup and thankfully the guitar made its way home. But oh my god, I have never struggled to have a logical conversation to much in my life.

Did you ever return that guitar?

This one is less strange, but is the most common of them all. Months or years after a review, a brand hits me up and says “hey man, can you please ship us back that guitar”. And every single time, I shipped the guitar back MONTHS ago, right on time as promised. Somehow, they seem to continuously lose things that I have proof of delivery for. Here’s the UPS picture of it on your warehouse floor dude. Here’s the name of the employee who signed it for it. I have never forgotten to return a thing, because I have horrible imposter syndrome and have a crippling fear that someone will sue me.

Probably because of a previous entrant on this list.

But every time, they come back with a meager “huh, yeah seems like we did get it back but now we can’t find it”. Every single time. Are you other demo people just not returning gear? Why do they even assume the issue is me, and not them? Some of these companies I’ve worked with for years now, and had dozens of their guitars come in and out, without any issues. It’s comical how often this happens, but I suppose when you’ve reviewed over 100 guitars there are bound to be a few issues that arise.