Stupidest things WE'VE ever done durring a session

[Mudnoc]

OK....now this OBVIOUSLY didn't happen in the studio but I couldn't resist.... Years ago a group I was in was opening for Chico DeBarge (anybody remember him).... Now the show was in Louisville, KY at the stage on the riverfront..It was in the middle of July (extremely hot out).... There were 5 members in our group along with 2 hypemen (per se) We come out all energetic trying to get the crowd excited...One of the members is slinging his water bottle at the crowd.... Little did we know that besides getting the front row wet he also managed to get all of Chico's keyboards wet as well (3 of them) They were obviously completely runied... Needless to say Chico's show was pretty much an acoustic one after that....

[slaves666]

I was forced to consolidate a PT session, since I don't have PT, I borrowed an Mbox from a friend, installed it, did the consolidating.....and I thought everything was fine. Once I returned the next day to start work in Nuendo, it crashed....again and again. I uninstalled everything. The artist was like, "what's wrong with your Nuendo. You should use Pro-Tools all the time". I almost punched him. After a reformat, everything was back to normal.

[stevep]

Originally Posted by toddro

Don't run a "down-and-out" pass pattern when it takes you near the 2-inch machine and your quarterback has less than perfect accuracy (and Brett Favre velocity) - especially when the machine is in high-speed rewind and the football lodges between the reels and the meter bridge acting as a crude mechanical brake, launching your master tape throughout the control room...

I did it, and the results are not pretty

WoW !




.

[bogeyeater]

my first string arranger gig as a callow youth. b sides, major label. stressy band.

quartet in and set, quick run through, half an hour to spare before the producers rock up. ooh look, someone's left the butt end of a wee spliff in an ashtray in the telly room - that might just help take the edge off a bit.

3 puffs later i'm f*ucking flying.

i can barely communicate with the control room when they show, my heart rate's racing through the roof, i'm sweating buckets, paranoid as hell, virtually hallucinating crouched in foetal postion in the live room while we lay the tracks.

unbelievably, nothing went wrong. it sounded cool - band happy, producer thumbs up. phew.

[andytheswede]

I just learned It’s good to use the search function BEFORE you start a thread, so if I get bashed for posting here as well you’ll know why.



Ok here we go,,,
I’ve just built this fairly professional pimped up vocal booth (whisper room style, if ya know what I mean), lots of acoustical foam etc etc.

So I’m sitting in there with a whole bunch of microphones that I want to try out with my new pre-amp and compressor (ADK ap-1 and ADK cla-1) that I just bought from Larry Villella at ADK.

I have this pimped tube mic in my lap (on my dick is a more correct geographic description), plugged into an old preamp that I’ve put together myself a year back and recently opened up to “fix” a disturbing brmmmmm kind of sound. It was bad soldering and I fixed it, so I thought!!!
All of a sudden the mic becomes electrified, where are talking 220volts right in to my weiner, first I screamed like a little girlieman(sorry to much SNL), I mean we are talking serious barbeque here, and then after checking that my penis wasn’t actually on fire , I laughed my arse of, tears in my eyes cause it hurt so much.


Ps
The compressor did a helluva job on that recorded scream, im definitely keeping this unit

[thedoner]

Originally Posted by Cosmonauta

option-click a fader in ProTools without take notice "all" tracks were grouped is a classic for me.

I love this thread!

Me too for the option-click fiasco plus these brainfarts:
1. When I first started using ProTools, before I knew about setting up session templates or importing session data...I had just finished recording basic tracks for a song with a new band I was producing. Did a "save as" so I could get ready to record the next song but keep the tracks and track names. Did a "clear audio" and chose "delete" instead of "remove", which of course wiped all the files off the drive completely. My assistant had one of those slo-mo movie moments as he saw what I was doing and screamed Noooooooo! a moment too late. Band was pissed, and never equaled the takes I erased.

2. Early nineties jingle session with a big name NY session guitarist, wasnt getting any sound from his gtr so I hit the Mic/line while switch on the console troubleshooting and sent a 120db feedback loop into his headphones. Headphones went flying, player screaming, mass hysteria. Not super bright!

[boothboy]

I told whitney houston it wasnt my turn to babysit her husband, then kicked her dog accidentally, oops! as bobby was pissing himself( literally urinating) while singing this unbelievably bad take, at 4 am completely drunk after a seven hour bender at the local pub,

[boothboy]

I was an assistant 12+ years ago & the engineer/owner told me to place the coles(4038) ribbons on the kit for overheads did that plugged in the cables to a live +48v pre-amp did that watched the engineer turn pale white and then burst into flames while screaming at me ( good thing the phantom wasnt functioning properly on that box ) iu to this day will not touch those f@#king mikes!!

[Dschillinger]

How about this one. First six months of me as a tape op. 80 musicians in the studio and the engineer about to do a drop in. As the drop gets closer and closer the engineer makes no signs of doing the drop. Of course I knew exactly where the drop was so i jumped for the button, problem was it was the stop not the record button lol. Now its funny, back then i just wanted to die. Just imagine 80 musicans, one producer and one engineer all starring at me in disbelief. e

[gsilbers]

simple stupid one..


recording a singer overdubs while poeple behind me talking....

record one take and the singer stops almost at the end and says "how was that?"

next take same thing but ended saying " thats cool, let me do it again" a few seconds later


i put those takes in other tracks to be doubled/harmonized w/o editing the ends.


so the next 10 takes was myself recording dead air listening to the previous takes and answering the same "how was that?" which i replied in the TB, its fine but lets do one more and then the "its cool ill do it again" which i TB'ed "ok" and kept doing it over and over

[gsilbers]

another similar one but the other way around

singer records a take for harmonies and says something like hell yeah

next take/track/harmony double same thing ending with "i liked that,,,,

next take/track same thing but answering his own "i liked that" with .. "i knoow.. isnt it cool"

next track/harmony he aswers his "isnt it cool"

and same deal for about 5 other tracks answering and saying stuff to himself w/o realizing it was him and not the other singers in the TB.. we where crying of laughter...

[Thebassist]

Agreeing to record rappers.

Period.

Always a bad idea. The studio owner gave a set of keys to one of the in house producers she thought she could trust.

I lost: Rode tube, Blue baby bottle, TC verb, etc. No big deal on the prosumer stuff...

They also took a hard drive with the only copy of about 80 original compositions. This was the foundation of what was to be a killer solo album. 3 Years later I'm still reconstructing the stuff.

F*CK recording rap. Every engineer I know who records rap has horror stories.

[Gzmo]

Once i had a huge classical recording session.I left the studio late evening my collague came in for a mixing session for the whole night.
Started next morning with the tracking again in a rush!
Total recall back, all channels check on the console.
Ok lets go.
After a while my upper bass 4/5 shows some idiot waveform in PT.....
....mix bus o/p was patched to daw input 33-34 where it must come in........arrrgghhhhooops my mistake!Producer was angry a little bit!
I will always remember to that

RoB

[Arkestry]

. . . but mics and recording were involved.

Years ago I was the board operator at a radio station. The public affairs host I was was working with on this particular day usually does his show live all the way through. However, today the first segment of the show was a pretaped interview. He was especially pleased with this interview and felt it was going to be "hot".

Anyway, the host does the show's intro, throws to the interview, I push play and we're off to the races.

Cool, that gives me about 20 minutes to search through a CD that I need to play a quote from later on in the show. I turn down the control room speakers a bit and start listening to the CD through the cue. So far, so good.

Now, for obvious reasons, the host always hands me his cell phone to keep in the control room before we start the show. This time was no exception.

After 5 minutes of unsuccessfully searching for the quote on the CD, the host's cell phone rings. Hmmm. I look at the clock, determine that we have 15 more minutes in autopilot and decide to "be helpful". I bring the host's phone to him in the studio which he accepts and answers, and then I go back into the control room and intensify my search for the elusive quote.

By now I have turned the control room speakers all the way off and am glancing occasionally at the meters to make sure we're still on the air.

After another five minutes of searching, I notice that we are getting quite a bit of phone calls on the in-studio phone. I attribute this to the "hot" interview. Maybe I should answer the studio phone and accept the inevitable praise for the riveting interview. What the hell.

Caller: There is an open mic!

Me: (thrown a little by a thick east indian accent and thinking he's referring to the call-in part of the show) No, we will open up the phones in the second hour.

Caller: NO, NO, NO!!! There is a live mic in the studio and I heard some velly BAHD words!

Me: Uh . . . thank you very much . . . click

. . . NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Knowing exactly what I was about to find, I looked down at the board and in a nauseating flash spied the glowing red "on" light. I never turned off the host's mic - an SM7 that is about 6 inches from his mouth as he carries on an animated, profanity punctuated, personal conversation on the cell phone that I handed him 5 minutes ago!

Far too little too late, I cut the mic just as the show's producer walks through the door (as if on cue). I tell him what has transpired and, knowing all too well the host's off-air vocabulary, he promptly collapses onto the control room floor.

I scoop up the shuddering mass of flesh that the producer has become, deposit him in a chair and begin the agonizing 45 minute wait for the first hour to end so we can finalize the aircheck and survey the damage.

Though there was one fairly unambiguous F-bomb, it wasn't the FCC violation fest it could have been. Much of the 5 minutes or so that was in question was just an unintelligible mash up of the original interview and the host's phone conversation. Certainly not stellar radio, but it never came back to bite us.

Since then I've made it my practice to avoid saying anything near a mic (whether I believe it's on or off) that I don't want to share with the entire world.

Oh yeah, I can't remember if we ever told the host. I'm thinkin' we didn't.

[six_wax]

I feel like I do at least one blue ribbon, nigh career-ending, should-be-session-killing idiot maneuver every freakin' day. Most days I get away with it and nobody notices.

I like to think this sheer paranoia makes me better...

Then again, perhaps I should seek professional help.

[NorseHorse]

Recording a recital live. Forgot to plug my laptop in and it crashes halfway through. I've done this twice. Let's not talk about it anymore...

[newyorkbrass]

I started a brawl in the studio with the lead trumpet player. Fists and stuff was flying everywhere.

I once asked a musician backstage - Q: "I see so and so's name on the list of musicians... I hear he is a terrible ball scratcher is that true"
A: "Why are you asking me ask him... (point at the fellow he is drinking with)"

Once recorded some modern classical music for the music academy. After 2 hour of random notes, I decided to need to go. The guy said "If u leave - u will be cut out of my moderm music scene" I said as I walked out the door "I hope that is a promise..."

When I was in the air force band there was a pretty female singer that the whole band had at least 1 ride. The commander didnt know this and was in love. Needless to say life became hell after he found out.

I use to record in a studio in Tel Aviv that the owner lived in a room in the back of the recording room and used to come out in a bathrobe and toothbrush as the player are playing to say hi

The same owner had a client that asked - "Can I hear that song one more time" He replied "This is a recording studio not a listening studio"

I once told a producer "Listen to the tracks well... concentrate - its the last time anyone will ever hear this track again...."

Man there are some shady studios in this world... The air force band use to pee in a piano in one of the army bases and use the xylophone as a loading ramp. loaded the band's equipment on the singers acoustic guitar which later broke during performance...

[jjblair]

Had a clusterfuk session with no asst. THings were hectic, and I had no time to print tones before the session, so I did it afterwards at the head with a large piece of leader between the tones and the first song. Something distracted me, and I record over part of the beginning of the first song on the reel.

Oops!

Here's my other favorite story about stupid things done on a session:

We're recording in Johnny Cash's log cabin, across the street from his house. I'm trying to arrange mics, and they have these cheap stands that have seen better days, and I'm trying to set up my U47 for Johnny to sing into. The videographer is filming Johnny, and asks him about the guitar he's playing. Johnny starts telling him that it's the signature Johnny Cash Martin guitar that was custom made for him. He has it flat across his lap, and at the very second he says, "This here is serial number one," the stand with the U47 falls over that I just put next to him, and the mic lands squarely on the guitar, and puts a dent in the glossy black finish.

It was like one of those commercials that goes "Ever want to get away?"

[jjblair]

"This is a recording studio not a listening studio"

I'm using this, every chance I get.

[jacktrade]

Last week I was with a client tracking bed tracks of midi piano and vocals to send to the drummer in LA.

We got through 4 songs after about 4 hours (we were writing/arrangeing them as we went), and Cubase decides to crash. Reboot. Load session. Crash. Reboot. Repeat. Things have been wonky since the last osx update.

Anyway, I finally got Cubase to open and not crash, and the four session files are nowhere to be found. I always save them in the song folder on my work drive, and they appear next to the audio folder and edit folders in there. They're all gone. Not a big deal for the VCL's since I can grab them out of the audio folders, but the midi wasn't exported so it was gone with the session files.

We end up having to redo all the piano work.

Next day:
I discover that all the "lost" session files were saved as default to another project's edit folder. Don't know how it happened, but we didn't end up losing a lick of work.

Brand new client. super demanding. I don't know what loses more face, losing the work, or f ing up my directory paths. I'll just blame the crashes I think.