Tell us about your Biggest Mistake while recording on location!

[Lifted]

Originally Posted by henryrobinett

Biggest mistake? Having my coffee cup too close to the computer. Close enough for the bass player to launch it, with the neck of his bass, across the table, another table I THOUGHT was a safe distance away, right onto the laptop, killing it and ending the session immediately; forcing me to cancel session until I could acquire a new computer.

I've learned to never drink coffee in the presence of bass players.

DAAAAAAAAMN dude. That's one of the reason I'm thinking of getting a coffee table little bit away from my computer in case it spills. I'm paranoid, cause I spilled shit, PLENTY OF TIMES

[Schaap]

No spare fuse! A band did mess with the ACpower somehow and a fuse blew out the preamp. In the (desperate)end we put a coppercoin in the preamp. Worked great!

[Plush]

1. Using a portable dat machine that jammed on me.
2. Using a portable dat machine that recorded the program with the meters moving and then there was nothing recorded on the tape. (Panasonic portable)
3. agreeing to record playas who could not play.

[barbarrick]

I was hired to record a huge 5 church choir concert in a great sounding church a couple of years ago. I had to get a friend of mine to hit record that day as I was at another gig. Everything was set up, levels great from the rehearsal etc. Then the night of the show it was hot in the church so they put up 2 oscillating fans in front of the choirs. So I got home and loaded the session in to the computer in my studio and heard a huge WHOOOMMPH every 15 seconds through the hour long show. A bitch to edit out!
I'm lucky the diaphrams in the Dragonflys survived!

[tourtelot]

Got into a knife fight with Neil Young's monitor mixer. Fortunately, no blood was spilled.

D.

[Hashbrown]

Went to track a friends vocals for his album at his house an hour away from mine.
Got there and realised i didn't have the power supply to my Macbook Pro. I had left it at work for the weekend so couldn't even go back and get it.

Not a lot of people in SA use macs, so it took half the day to find one to borrow, and missed out on some good tracking time.

At least he was a friend and i was doing it for free, but it was embarrassing to make him put up with my stupidity.

I've also gotten to a place and found that instead of bringing a stereo jack to male XLR, i had female XLR and no turnarounds. Doh!

Also forgot a headphone amp once and had to buy a shitty one from the local music store on the way.

Making mistakes makes you realise that time is money and mistakes are time.

[Hashbrown]

Having said that, the battery life on my Mac is quite impressive!

[Jarp2600]

Not my mistake, but worth mentioning imho.
Halfway a pretty large stadium concert, one of the spotlight-operators at the FOH platform apparently finished his job for that night, and decides to disconnect the spotlight, so the lamp could cool down already.
Unfortunately, he picked the wrong plug, and pulled out the entire power line to the FOH console. WHAM, and silence.
The singer didn't notice in first instance, and simply kept on singing.

It actually made me wonder what sense 3 PSU's would make, if you connect them all to the same power line.

[loujudson]

Back in 2004 while tracking a project for a friend who lives an hour's drive away, I forgot the laptop for the banjo tracking session - I was working in Protools with 002R. She was desparate to get something down while the banjo player was there, all ready to go, so she made me record him on an ADAT (the only time I ever used one!) while my GF went to get the Powerbook... Banjo player instsed on using the cheap pickup he had taped on the head, and it sounded terrible.

Spent hours getting the ADAT tracks into PT, and in the end the producer only wanted to use three notes as an accent in a bridge. Waste of time, nearly...

Since then I am careful to not forget anything, and have just gotten a second iLOK and a smaller bundle of Waves for emergencies, as the iLok is the one thing I still leave behind occasionally.

arrgghh.
L

[loujudson]

Originally Posted by tourtelot

Got into a knife fight with Neil Young's monitor mixer. Fortunately, no blood was spilled.

D.

What kind of A KNIFE FIGHT IS THAT??? What were you doing, FOH? How did it start? I'll try to avoid both of you, just n case... Mack.

L

[Thomas W. Bethe]

Just doing the gig was a big mistake.

I was doing a recording in an old converted theater. The manager of the theater is a real piece of work. He conveniently forgets a lot of things the day of the show. He has messed us up more than once so...

We had asked for a pre concert meeting with the manager, myself, my assistant and the people we were doing the recording for. I had problems with this person before and wanted everything worked out before the concert. We ALL agreed on what we needed and what he would provide.

We get to the theater the day of the concert and the space he promised us for setup was not cleared and there was a large video projector sitting in the space. We tried to ask the manager when the projector would be taken down and he said he was "busy" but would see to it shortly. 30 minutes later we were still waiting for him and it was getting closer and closer to show time. I went to find him and told him that we were still waiting and he turned to one of his helpers and told him to strike the projector so we could setup. We got set up. The theater was suppose to provide us a feed from their board for the announce microphone and for some hanging microphones we were using for picking up the audience since he did not want to have us fly our own microphones or have any of our microphones in the house. The "audio engineer" running the board was maybe 14 years old. We gave him some cables and asked him to give us a direct feed from the console which he did not know how to do. We then asked for a sub mix output which he again did not know how to do. We finally got a stereo output from the main outputs. As soon as we plugged in our cords there was a large hum from the concert sound system. The manager came running over to us and said we were trying to sabotage his sound system. I pulled out a ground lift adapter, put it on the AC feed for our console and no hum problem. The manager just glared at us. We got setup and ready to record. The recording went smoothly until the end of the first half when we all of a sudden lost our sound board feed. I looked over at the young person running the board and noticed that he had the master fader at zero. I asked him what he was doing and he said it was SOP to kill the master between groups. We get the rest of the performance recorded and it sounded good.

My assistant had gotten upset at one point during the setup when the manager was giving us all types of grief and had made a few remarks that the manager did not like so he told my assistant that he was persona non grata and asked, no told him to leave the premises. Since my assistant was doing the video that would have not worked too well. I went to see the people we were working for told them and they went and had a loooooooooong talk with the manager. My assistant stayed but we were told that since we had given the manager so many "problems" we could not work in his theater again as long as he was there.

This same person had on previous occasions yelled at us for not bringing a table (which we had always gotten from him) and had put our power on a dimmable circuit so as the house lights went down so did our equipment power source.

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to work with people that are trying to make your work a lot harder.

We still work with the group that did the concert but we don't do any of their concerts in this venue.

[loujudson]

Originally Posted by Thomas W. Bethe

I was doing a recording in an old converted theater.
edit
Sometimes it just doesn't pay to work with people that are trying to make your work a lot harder.

We still work with the group that did the concert but we don't do any of their concerts in this venue.

I know it would not be appropriate, but if I lived anywhere near you I'd be asking offlist what venue this is so I could make a point of never attending or hiring that place! What a horror story.

L

[hakanai]

first mistake - booking a gig on my girlfriends 30th birthday
second mistake - forgetting my headphones and having to ask her to run to my place in brooklyn and bring them to me in midtown manhattan. she was not impressed but we had a laugh about it over dinner. (luckily it was an afternoon gig)

oh and forgetting the shock mounts for my main pair on a different gig. i think i was the only one who appreciated the ridiculousness of seeing my expensive german LDC's being held to the stereo bar with brown packing tape.

[guosh]

1. forgetting the size limit of a file on my harddisk when recording 24/192 - lost half the show because the file was not able to save
2. clapping when i have my laptop on my lap - harddisk took a few jinks and it died the next day

[Doughboy]

We brought our recording equipment to a gig, and then payed a guy $50 or so, to just sit there all night and hit the record button before the beginning of the song and the stop button at the end of the song.....he appeared very serious and competent at these two tasks......he never let his mind wander from his job.

On review of the tape.....we realized we should have told him to punch in before the first beat of the song....and to let the recorder keep playing after the last note of the song....because every single song had a second missing from the beginning and the ending strum cut off.

[DannyL]

Two things:

Once were doing the NHL All Star Game at a very famous venue. We were using a rack of mic pre's and DA's to distribute the effects mics signals to all the broadcasters. There was a laser show as part of the player intros, after which the house electrician disconnected the AC power for the laser lights AND our pre-amp rack (which was taped into place and carefully tagged w/ florescent tape) POOF..out went the mics, took me about 45 seconds to get from one end the arena to the outlet to reconnect. When we asked the electrician why he disconnected our power he shrugged and said he did'nt know, and it wasn't his fault. My mistake was not using chains and a pitbull.

I used to make recording of Hasidic bands at various halls around NYC, mostly in Brooklyn. The owner of one such venue was a renowned pain in the gluteus maximus. He was forever scaring people off with his bad attitude and screaming fits. The promoter hired us because we were te only people who could happily ignore him. He would tell us to secure all our cables while telling us not to use any gaffer tape....it would destroy the alleged beauty of his venue...I told him that his venue was dirty, looked awful and had many code violations which I would be happy to point out and report, if necessary. Once, he started screaming about something that had nothing to do with us and threatened to kick us out of the building. I showed the three electrical outlets I had repaired that day and wrote him a bill for at least 5 times the value of the "work." He relented and let us finish the job. Eventually he was cited by the Board of Health for kitchen violations. About half a dozen of his staff reported him. He is long out of business.

Danny

[tmrstudio]

I did a live recording at a church a few months ago. I made the mistake of using my mixer on stage to record to Alesis HD24s and sending mix stems to the FOH engineer using the existing wiring and PA in the church. Their wiring was horrible and was not labeled properly. We wasted so much time. The house engineer was complaining because he didn't have enough control over the mix. Never again!

[cdmack]

Last week I inadvertently discovered the "safety mute" function on the ULN8 whilst adjusting the monitor volume. 3 minutes of lost performance later ( a rather well-played Beethoven piano concerto) during which the system was rebooted twice, not knowing why everything had blanked out we were back in business.

Note to ULN8 users: Be very careful not to press the "mute" and "dim" buttons next to the monitor control simultaneously during tracking!

[hywyn]

Having worked for weeks with the same camera and config, the cameraman wanted to shoot a ptc at the end of his lens so, i hook up a long XLR cable (no confidence monitoring). We'd done this a few times but on this occasion I failed to do the right checks and hadd panned my feed to the wrong XLR stereo output.
First cock-up was in omiting to check playback and the second was relying on camera to say all was ok, meaning audio-level (he obviously thought I was being polite).

[hywyn]

Originally Posted by hywyn

Having worked for weeks with the same camera and config, the cameraman wanted to shoot a ptc at the end of his lens so, i hook up a long XLR cable (no confidence monitoring). We'd done this a few times but on this occasion I failed to do the right checks and hadd panned my feed to the wrong XLR stereo output.
First cock-up was in omiting to check playback and the second was relying on camera to say all was ok, meaning audio-level (he obviously thought I was being polite).

scratch that,... first cock-up was not checking my mixer settings and then the final cock-up was being 3000 miles from home tutt

[boojum]

Originally Posted by hakanai

<snip>

oh and forgetting the shock mounts for my main pair on a different gig. i think i was the only one who appreciated the ridiculousness of seeing my expensive german LDC's being held to the stereo bar with brown packing tape.

That's mine. Fixed it with gaffers tape looked awful but it worked. Who said gaffers tape was NG???


Oh, yes, and I have trouble with a runt of a guy who is stage manager at a gig I am doing tomorrow and Sunday. Whines about mics stands and sight lines. Luckily for me the chorale director told him in no uncertain terms that the mic stands go wherever I want them. She likes the recordings. ;o)

[Bflat]

I recorded an orchestra this past weekend for a school (and was actually getting payed a real wage.) Turns out there was no lighting person on hand so someone went in the booth and just hit buttons until the house lights turned off. Also turns out the edison plug my recording gear was plugged into was wired directly into the house lighting dimmer system! As the conductor lowered his hand to trigger the first note I watched the lights go dark in the house... and on my audio gear, as I had no UPS! For the next 2 minutes, I was the crazy guy in the background running frantically with a 50 ft power cable trying to find a working outlet. I missed the first 3 songs and my name was mud until the conductor agreed to re-record yesterday. Phew.

Lesson learned.

[Bflat]

Originally Posted by cdmack

Last week I inadvertently discovered the "safety mute" function on the ULN8 whilst adjusting the monitor volume. 3 minutes of lost performance later ( a rather well-played Beethoven piano concerto) during which the system was rebooted twice, not knowing why everything had blanked out we were back in business.

Note to ULN8 users: Be very careful not to press the "mute" and "dim" buttons next to the monitor control simultaneously during tracking!

Ooo. Thanks for the heads up!

[sonare]

Asked the otherwise-competent assistant to put the Mk21 caps on the Schoeps bodies and commenced recording-- only to discover later that he attached one Mk21 and one Mk4 (they look the same, right?) and in the scramble of the moment I did not hear the difference on a string quartet in a nasty acoustic.

MORAL: always double-check important things AND listen more carefully!!!

Rich

[d_fu]

Had to record two performances of a new composition. First show Friday evening. Went home that night, decided to leave one or two cases that I hadn't used at home. Next concert on Sunday morning (today...). About an hour before the beginning, I listened to the first recording for a moment, when suddenly Samplitude stops and tells me it can't play back... Apparently, the external PSU of my audio interface crapped out (after years of faithful service)... Couldn't even test whether it was the interface itself, because the other breakout box for the same system was, well, in one of the boxes I left at home.

Fortunately, I did bring my other laptop with a Firewire device which also has ADAT, and it worked just fine. Without that, I would have had only my Forstex D 160 16-bit backup.

When I get a new external PSU, I'll get yet another one or two for backup...