Tell us about your Biggest Mistake while recording on location!

[npulsipher]

I'm just interested to see what the biggest mistake you've ever made while doing a live recording.
The kind of thing you only do once because it was so stupid.

My big mistake was not putting the mics on shock mounts when they needed it. They were on a stand that was on the same platform as the choir. They were performing a program that involved several people walking down to the front and reading narations. So through the whole recording it sounds like the t-rex scene from Jurrasic Park each time someone walks down to the front of the stage.

[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.

[666666]

Originally Posted by npulsipher

...My big mistake was not putting the mics on shock mounts when they needed it...

I do not do remote recording professionally, but I've made a similar mistake while attempting to do remote recording. A double-whammy mistake in fact... had no shock mount and no wind screen... was indoors in a club, the floor seemed solid and nobody was stomping around or anything... did not detect a draft... it all seemed fine at the time... got home, the recording had a rumbling / roaring throughout, ruined the entire recording. It was somewhat "subtle", but enough to render the recording useless in my opinion. It was determined later that the club did have some positive ventilation happening (subtle draft)... as well there was a train station two blocks away, etc... I was not able to detect any issues at the time, but something surely created a destructive rumbling / roaring throughout. So the lesson I learned, always use a good deal of shock absorption and wind baffling even when you think you don't need it.

Another big mistake I made once... was recording into a good CD burner / recorder.... had it sitting on a stage where the band was playing... the vibration from the stage caused the unit to stop recording... I guess the disk started skipping etc and the unit freaked out, etc... I did test this later and indeed the vibration caused the unit to shut down... I don't use that recorder anymore, replaced it with a compact flash type unit with no moving parts.

Yeah, coming from studio recording, remote recording might initially seem to be simple, but a remote environment brings with it many wacky variables and challenges... you need to be skilled and quite brave to do this type of recording... especially considering it's usually a "one shot deal", no second chances. My knees shake just thinking about it. Ok, I'm a sissy, I admit it, I'll go crawl back into the studio now.

[NorseHorse]

I was recording some kitchen foley the other day and forgot to hit RECORD.

Sounded great on the headphones and the "Record" button on the R-44 flashes red when you're on PAUSE during a recording. However, it needs to be solid red, not blinking. Luckily, I remembered this after ONLY twenty minutes... Do't! That's what I get for rushing the set-up (five minutes from in the door till "go").

No harm done at least. We just redid some of it.

Other mistake: using a pair of JM27 SDC's on a gig. It was basically the equivalent of using C1000s as a main pair...

[jnorman]

i had to do a live gig at an amazing old large cruciform church for a flute and harp duo. i had been in this venue before and knew it has outstanding natural reverb. in effort to keep gear to minimum, decided i would use a simple ORTF pair. however, there was a large audience, and i was not able to set up mics where i needed them, and had to place the mics right at the stage lip, and were only about 4 feet in front of the players. the captured sound was WAY too close/intimate, and i lost all the wonderful natural reverb of the space. the mics in the video camera i used for the video part (maybe 20 feet back) captured a better sound than my main pair. i really struggled pieceing together that mess.

[slaphappygarry]

One stupid stupid stupid mistake when i started out. I forgot to unfurl my power extension reel of cable. It heated up and, halfway through the recording tripped the breakers on the unit. Power dead. You could smell something was way wrong about 10 seconds before it tripped and I burned my hand trying to get it running again. It took a few minutes to cool down before I could use it again. Game over.

Except I had a backup system running so I was saved having to own up to anything but the assistants of that evening wont ever let me forget that one....

G

[d_fu]

Originally Posted by NorseHorse

I was recording some kitchen foley the other day and forgot to hit RECORD.

I forgot to hit record both on the the PC and the backup during a live concert... Took half a minute or so until I noticed. I was too busy listening... I hope this won't ever happen again.

[mixedupsteve]

Originally Posted by NorseHorse

I was recording some kitchen foley the other day and forgot to hit RECORD.

Sounded great on the headphones and the "Record" button on the R-44 flashes red when you're on PAUSE during a recording. However, it needs to be solid red, not blinking. Luckily, I remembered this after ONLY twenty minutes... Do't! That's what I get for rushing the set-up (five minutes from in the door till "go").

No harm done at least. We just redid some of it.

Other mistake: using a pair of JM27 SDC's on a gig. It was basically the equivalent of using C1000s as a main pair...

Mine was SFX related too! I do sound at a theatre and I use Qlab to fire FX. I always use the mouse button. Hold it down on the Go button and release to fire. The mouse was acting up so I remembered that you could use the spacebar also. Right before the mark I held it down and it fired off 8 consecutive cues. Mostly thunder and lightning.

RTFM!!

[Remoteness]

I feel you on that one fellas.

We have a rule at Aura-Sonic; we "roll" (press record) at least five minutes before the downbeat whether we have to or not.

press

Originally Posted by NorseHorse

I was recording some kitchen foley the other day and forgot to hit RECORD.

Sounded great on the headphones and the "Record" button on the R-44 flashes red when you're on PAUSE during a recording. However, it needs to be solid red, not blinking. Luckily, I remembered this after ONLY twenty minutes... Do't! That's what I get for rushing the set-up (five minutes from in the door till "go")...

Originally Posted by d_fu

I forgot to hit record both on the the PC and the backup during a live concert... Took half a minute or so until I noticed. I was too busy listening... I hope this won't ever happen again.

[iluvatar]

I was partly responsible for leaving the cam-lock tails tied into the panel box at the end of the show. Boss had to call the manager of the hockey arena at 2am to open the place back up so we could get them and drive that night to the next show.

-Dan.

[Jim vanBergen]

doing a remote recording so close to the stage I could not get enough isolation to hear what I was really mixing until it was too late. Harsh but good early career lesson: I could not charge for the session, as I thought it just sounded horrible afterwards. Fortunately, this client trusted me and we did the next gig with good isolation with ideal results!

[ghellquist]

My biggest mistake?
To start doing this thing of remote recording. Should have kept away. Would have saved a lot of money, a lot of grief and part of my sanity. On the other hand, I have had a lot of fun doing it as well.

// Gunnar

[Thomas W. Bethe]

A couple of dumb mistakes.

Loooooooong time ago I was doing a live concert and was recording to tape. I got to the venue setup and then realized I had forgotten the tape to record on. I was 25 miles from home base. Luckily the radio station I was working for was located a few blocks away and I was able to borrow some audio tape from them.

We were doing a concert in a church. The setup went well and everything was working without a problem. In the heat of setting up I had forgotten to tape our power supply cord to the wall. It was taped down across the aisle but not at the AC socket and one of the kids going to the bathroom in the middle of the concert pulled on the power cord, it fell out of the socket and knocked out our power. Luckily we were running on a UPS so nothing happened. It did teach me a very valuable lesson.

We were doing a concert outdoors. I had windscreens on all the microphones and all the microphones were on shock mounts and the sound was great through the headphones. When I got back to the studio I heard some low frequency noises throughout the recording and realized that I was picking up some wind noise through the cords going to the microphones even though I had a service loop on each of the microphones somehow the wind was moving the cords enough to make some low frequency noises through contact with the microphones. I was able to use a hi pass filter and get rid of the noises.

We were doing a concert and I had an assistant helping me. He was going to record the concert and I was going to take notes and help him learn how to do the recording so he could do the next one by himself. We got the setup done and we were talking about when to start the recorders and all of a sudden the concert started with the band coming down the aisles playing their instruments. This was five minutes before the concert was scheduled to begin. We both stabbed at the record buttons but we lost the fist 15 seconds of the band playing, I was later able to do some very skillful editing and no one was the wiser.

We were doing a concert in a church and got all setup. About 15 minutes from the start of the concert an older priest comes down the aisle and says that we will have to move our equipment to the foyer. He will not budge - it has to be done and done now. We disassemble the equipment put three more 50 foot cords on the microphones and move out to the foyer. One problem there was no power in the foyer and we only had one 50 foot extension cord with us in the church that was not long enough to reach the wall socket in the church. Luckily we found another younger priest and he was able to get us another cord and when he brought it back to us asked us why we had decided to move. We told him of the older priest telling us to move and the younger priest told us that the other priest was retired and had some dementia and still thought he was in charge. If we had come to the younger priest he would have said where we were was fine. Lesson learned.

Get to a remote recording gig. We go to plug in our equipment but for some strange reason I decided to check the voltage. It was a good thing I did. Someone used an Edison grounded 15 amp 110 volt AC outlet but it measured 220 volts on my volt meter. Someone in the venue had rewired it for a large floor machine and never tagged the outlet as being 220 volts and it was completely against NEC. It was a good thing we did not plug our rack into the socket or some of our equipment would have been toast - literally.

Another AC power horror story. We had to piggy back off a wall outlet for the power for our recording setup. The outlet was also feeding the stage monitor setup. We plugged in and a we got a lot of hum from our system and from the stage monitor system. (they were sending us a feed) I got out my handy dandy grounded outlet checker and found that the neutral and the ground had been swapped when they installed the outlet. We turned off the power I redid the outlet and we were back in business. It is a good thing that they did not reverse the ground and the hot. Oh well.



Lots more but....gotta work.

[BLP]

Hmmm, biggest mistake? Only one out of so many

I'd have to got with "letting the cello player put his EQ in line before the DI". I was doing this jazz/latin/world music combo with an orchestra for a live, one-off show. The cello player plugs his cello pickup into his EQ, then into my DI. Why, in God's name, did I ever let that happen?!? Fast forward to mixing: "hmmm, why can't I get any articulation out of them cello?" *flash back to sight of EQ, highs cut completely* "DOH!!!!"

Never again...

[Tomic]

Originally Posted by NorseHorse

I was recording some kitchen foley the other day and forgot to hit RECORD.

Sounded great on the headphones and the "Record" button on the R-44 flashes red when you're on PAUSE during a recording. However, it needs to be solid red, not blinking. Luckily, I remembered this after ONLY twenty minutes... Do't! That's what I get for rushing the set-up (five minutes from in the door till "go").

No harm done at least. We just redid some of it.

this has happened for me several times with the ZOOM H4 recorder...very irritating

[thedoner]

Double Whammy of unbridled stupidity here...
When I was first putting my remote rig together, a friend of a friend asked me to record and artist on his label at a club in NYC. The budget was less than half of what I would usually charge. So I agreed to do it as a favor, but told them I would only bring my backup recorder as the primary, as opposed to my full system. They agreed.
So I do the gig with no backup and...get this...NO UPS!!! You can see where this is headed right? Of course, there were voltage fluctuations and the HD24XR kept dropping out of record in the middle of the set. I had dropouts on at least four of the songs, which rendered them unusable. The moment of that first dropout was one of the worst, sinking feelings I've ever experienced. Having to tell the client what happened afterward was no picnic either.
They would have had every right to drag my name through they mud, not pay me, and bludgeon me to death with a bar stool. (Ok, maybe not that last bit). But amazingly, they were actually really cool about it, apparently they were unhappy with the performance as a whole. I even got paid. ...I was luckier than I had a right to be.
Lesson learned though...NEVER under any circumstances, do a gig without full redundancy and a UPS!!! And if the price falls that far below your rate, don't take the gig!
-G

[Corran]

Funny this thread shows up. Yesterday night I made two horrible mistakes that I have never done before.

Firstly, I was recording my fiancee's college performance recital. On her final piece I was so flustered messing with a video camera that I forgot to press record on my HD24 and missed a whole movement and a half. I was (am) devastated - I have never done that before and it seems like the absolute worst mistake ever. Sounded wonderful too in the cans. I'm still really pissed at myself. I'm slightly glad to see I'm not the only one. BUT there was no redo. The one good thing is the video recorder was rolling so I have that audio at least.

(Remoteness, your 5-before rule is really good and I usually adhere to a similar rule...).

Second was almost as bad. Previously mentioned video recorder ran out of tape in the second half of the recital (another persons, this was a shared recital) because no one told me the whole thing was going to be almost 2 hours. I am currently looking for a camera (I was borrowing a friends, hence no second tape) and this has convinced me to get a hard drive camera for up to 20 hours of recording or whatever.

I've been relatively good about making no mistakes before last night. I think I've learned my lesson.

[bitman]

When I was just getting started I used a really crappy Tascam usb hissamp
with long input cables. To make things worse it was a stuffy chamber orchestra gig and the end result was hiss city.

The resulting de-hissed version was really bad too. I shudder when I think back on it.

The other stupid thing I did was do to a house to get some piano tracks and only brought one ADAT tape and it was.....

Bad.
tutt

This is going to be a good thread.

[joelpatterson]

I refuse to answer, but it might have had something to do with when the HD24 tells you "No Drive Selected" and you see... suffering succotash, there are no caddies in the drive bays! And you say to yourself, "well that's good, because there's another thing I WILL NEVER LET HAPPEN AGAIN!"

[Shadow_7]

Inadequate windscreens (for central Texas)

Mic Stand too short and IN the audience. Although most have been pretty courteous so far, except for the guy taking pictures with his cell with sound effects enabled. And going out of his way to take them close to the mics.

Not enough batteries. Or no intermission to make the swap.

Lack of proper shock mounts.

Not enough rope / sandbags to keep the rig properly orientated unattended.

Not really mistakes since I'm not doing this for money yet. But things that need addressing before a backup can even be considered in my case.

[Remoteness]

I cannot speak for everyone else, but having all sorts of accessories, accoutrements and such is all part of our backup plan. Make no mistake about it; backup is not a dirty word at Aura-Sonic Ltd.

It's not just whether or not your have an extra recorder or two; it's about carrying extra windscreens, pop filters, shock-mounts, extra harnesses and snakes and stuff.

An assortment of adaptors for your stands, clamps and claws is a must at our facility.
You just never know what you are going to be up against while on the road.

And, you cannot forget the expendables like batteries, tape, markers, trick line, rope, et cetera, etc.
This list can go on and on… Hey, I have a roll of “TP” in the trunk of my vehicle for when backups are NOT an issue.

You can never be too safe in our world of remote (or location) recording.

We are continually building our kit (in each truck and portable rig) to handle just about every dilemma we have encountered in the past and probable future.

IMHO, it's not just about the extra physical apparatus you bring for technical support; it's a mindset and encouragement that you bring to your client, crew and fellow associates when you advance, prep and perform the job at hand.

It’s like being the technical benefactor making sure your equipment, crew and client are supported and protected to the best of your abilities with no excuses.

Just some food for thought for you fine Remotesters out there in the world.

[Remoteness]

Originally Posted by iluvatar

I was partly responsible for leaving the cam-lock tails tied into the panel box at the end of the show. Boss had to call the manager of the hockey arena at 2am to open the place back up so we could get them and drive that night to the next show.

-Dan.

IMO, if this scenario had to happen, leaving the tie-ins behind is still a lot better than pulling the Cam-Loks (or audio snake for that matter) while the truck is on air or in use.

Ouch!

[tsvisser]

I tried to record my college roommate having sexual relations. As I was pulling the mic cable from the tape recorder over towards his room, I found out that it was too short. As I was struggling to find a way to get it around the furniture more efficiently, he walked out and found me cable and mic in hand.

Those were the days before I could afford wireless or portable field recorders.

[mrsteaks]

I drove an hour to gig, unloaded the car, started my setup - and realized I'd forgotten my microphones........ A rolled up card board tube doesn't work.

[d_fu]

Originally Posted by mrsteaks

I drove an hour to gig, unloaded the car, started my setup - and realized I'd forgotten my microphones........ A rolled up card board tube doesn't work.

I arrived on location without my big stereo bars once. Was able to put something together with some smaller ones. Waiting for the day when I'll leave all my mic stands at home...
I also once left the cardbus interface card for a Multiface in another laptop at home. I called up a local music shop (they knew me, I used to live in that town), amd asked them to send me a cheap stereo USB audio device with mic pres by taxi. It arrived just in time. Since that day I have an Edirol stereo SPDIF USB thingie with me all the time, as last resort...


D.

[David Spearritt]

I've arrived at gigs without any mikes a few times. I drive like Fangio back to get them. Also arrived without tripods a cupla times.

Also done what Daniel did quite a few times, been listening intently and really enjoying the sound, failing to press record.

Made lots of mistakes. Its a bit boring listing them all.

[iluvatar]

Originally Posted by Remoteness

IMO, if this scenario had to happen, leaving the tie-ins behind is still a lot better than pulling the Cam-Loks (or audio snake for that matter) while the truck is on air or in use.

Ouch!

Yeah, no kidding.

Story going around from the same company (but before I started) - somebody went to take the box truck to go get food before the show started, forgetting that the truck's bumper was being used as a tie-down point for the stage roof. tutt

-Dan.

[Thomas W. Bethe]

Not really my mistake but...

I was recording Cleveland Opera. We were also doing an ISDN remote broadcast with the local NPR station. 3 minutes from the end of the Opera an IATSE stage hand goes out the wrong door trying to get away before the crowds leave. The telco wires were stung across the door. Without thinking he gives the wires a good pull so he can get out of the door and we go off the air. Luckily we had the backup DATs of the show and they could re-air the show later. Bummer about the live show the audience missed all the credits and the closing lines of the opera and the post opera show. The union rep was cool about it and told us that this guy was suppose to work after the opera so with his sneaking out before hand he would probably not get paid for the gig. YES! there is some justice left.

[rumleymusic]

Another "Forgot to press record" one here. It was a live performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 that was to go on a CD. I did manage to save it however, because there is a repeat in the first movement and I took the first few measures of the repeat and mixed it into the beginning. No one was the wiser

[rumleymusic]

I arrived on location without my big stereo bars once. Was able to put something together with some smaller ones. Waiting for the day when I'll leave all my mic stands at home...

I go through my check list 5 or 6 times before I leave, though it didn't help when once I forgot that I removed the 1/4" adapter on my headphones (which of course is not on the list). I ran around looking for a radio shack and found one, bought an adapter, and found out when it got back on location that the damn thing was faulty. Only one channel worked. Luckily one of the stage hands found an extra adapter so I could actually monitor the concert. I hate Radio Shack.