Worst mistake you've ever made in the studio?

[AlanTide]

I erased all files from a work HD one time. Fortunately, we had just started the session the night before and was able to rerecord the synth MIDI tracks that were erased.

[macr0w]

I did the same thing once. I copied a bunch of folders from one drive to another and then deleted the originals. And guess what, All the audio files were gone. I still had the pt sessions but no audio. It was mostly my own stuff but needless to say my bandmates weren't to happy. There was some good stuff in there too.

[henryrobinett]

Put my coffee cup in relatively close proximity to my powerbook. Upright bass player on a remote recording gig, placed his bass down and launched my coffee cup like hitting a baseball with a bat. It landed right on the powerbook frying the components and ending the session.

On another occassion I deleted all the files (my project) while doing some house cleaning. Not understanding the program well enough I erased everything. I did have a back up of most of it, but had to recreate much of it.

[seaneldon]

Originally Posted by henryrobinett

Put my coffee cup in relatively close proximity to my powerbook.

you didn't even need to write the rest of that post out. everyone knew the outcome. the hilarious, comedic-television-style outcome.

[henryrobinett]

Originally Posted by seaneldon

you didn't even need to write the rest of that post out. everyone knew the outcome. the hilarious, comedic-television-style outcome.

Yeah. I'm a regular Dick Van Dyke.



It took a little distance to find the humor, even if I could see the humor right away. It wasn't funny for a good couple of months . . .

[AdamLazlo]

My accidents over the years:

- Spilled wine on my console (took a good week to repair and clean)

- I didn't press record hard enough (analog) and missed the band's "perfect take" (after hours of trying to nail it).

- Double booking the studio.

- Erasing part of a track (analog).

- Unsuccessful attempt at gating to tape (in my early days)

- Not taking detailed notes on every session (again, in my early days)

- Recording and mixing while having the flu and an inner ear infection.

- Getting a little too drunk during a session.

I'm sure I could come up with a lot more if I think about it.

-- Adam Lazlo

[severe]

Originally Posted by AdamLazlo

...I'm sure I could come up with a lot more if I think about it.

Nah..you can stop right there. We've already decided to go with someone else.

[not_so_new]

Way back when I was interning for my first studio gig. I sat in every session, I tried to be helpful, made tape dupes, set up mics, all that jazz.

I finally got to do my first session without the studio owner there. He had been working with this project for a few months and they had a bunch of songs done already. He had to take part of the day off out of the studio and decided I was ready to go.

GREAT!

I got the ADAT tapes out (yes ADAT, with no backup yet), got the mic set up before the client got in. Made sure they were comfortable with the phones mix and had what they needed. Pressed record on the first song......

...and realized that all 8 channels of the ADAT were in record from the backup transfer of another band earlier in the day.



F*CK, F*CK, F*CK...

Ok ok what do I do... (looks at clock)

Studio owner is due back in less than an hour....

F*CK, F*CK, F*CK....

LOL

Client was SUPPER cool and understanding. I imported everything into a Session 8 rig and rebuilt the whole first 30 seconds of the song (intro, verse and part of the first chorus) before he got back. That might not sound like much but at the time DAW editing was pretty new and I had VERY little experience with anything including Session 8.

Anyway, the song came out fine, the client was very happy and they said they would never tell the studio owner but I thought it was best to tell him, I am like that.

He was a little pissed that I made the mistake but he was happy that I found a way to fix it and that I was honest. In the end client was happy, studio owner was happy and I worked there for years.

[andychamp]

Just thinking about how clever that locking phantom power switch on the voxbox was.
Like they said in the manual: so you've got time to check if you've turned down your monit...D'OH!
2 new Quested diaphragms, please!

[Jonboy79]

If anyone here has a newer Imac then you know it's power cable goes in right in the middle of the monitor thru the metal stand. Well one day I was recording a great duo from Chicago and was really trying to impress them. At one point we were going to do some scratch vox tracks and I told the singer to go grab the stand. Well somehow the mic cable got wrapped around the Imacs powercord and when he pulled on the stand the computer went out. Unfortunately during the 8 hours of tracking I had never hit save once. Hard lesson learned.

[Phrygian]

Let the singer try mixing after his constant b!tching. Needless to say I proved my point!

[steveareeno]

Was working as a hired gun piano player and was hanging out in the control room watching the engineer. I had this brilliant idea to put my finger on one of the reels of a Studer 1 inch rewinding at high speed.
Something *happened* and the tape spilled everywhere!
Being a piano player, my hands are quite fast and it was never proved I *did it*.
There wasn't a studio within a 100 miles that would let me in the control room after that however

[thecrashfactory]

Did a session one christmas eve for a cool band's first single. Spent the day getting the PERFECT drum/bass sound to disk and several great takes out of them.

Then I backed it up in the wrong direction. I'd brought in a protools session to use in the studio with all teh tracks set up, click at the right tempo etc. I replaced the days session on the studio drive with the empty session on my own drive.

We managed to re-do it in the end, but the vibe and the sound was never quite the same. Always the way, huh?

[cazemajou]

It was with DASH digital tape.
I changed a 30 min reel with a 45 min reel, but forget to change the empty reel ( still 30 min ). Guess what happened 35 min later...

[vernier]

1. Knocked coffee over and permanently ruined an ARP Quadra.

2. Put finished mixes near an exposed speaker and ruined 'em.

3. Got Mike Stone mad enough to beat me up, but talked him out of it just in time.

[vernier]

Btw, great avatar cazemajou.

[thenoiseflower]

[quote=thecrashfactory;834725]
Then I backed it up in the wrong direction...I replaced the days session on the studio drive with the empty session on my own drive.

QUOTE]

I've done this once with my own art, but never with anyone elses, that's too bad man,

I got a rant for that///

DATES on SESSION FOLDER's

IF IT HAS NO DATE, IT MUST BE THE MASTER!

[Dot]

First big paid session as a producer in a major NYC studio around '87. Spent a couple of days in the MIDI suite - which I'd designed - getting all the tracks flushed out. Then took the whole MIDI rig down and moved it to the A room. Hooked everything up. Turned on Amiga computer. No MIDI songs files on the floppy disk. Never figured out where they went. Started over from scratch and tracked all the MIDI stuff in the A room. Sessions came out great, but that time in MIDI Hell was no fun and almost cost me the gig.

I was a radio DJ in college. Started out at the 6AM Sunday time slot. Would play jazz for an hour, and then play these pre-recorded tapes of churches services until 11AM. One morning I started a tape and then ran out of the station across the street for some smokes. Came back and found that I'd locked myself out of the station. Kicked in a door vent and got inside - only to find that the tape I'd been playing for the last 15 minutes was playing backwards. Never heard anything from management about it - and no one called the station while I was there. Luckily the audience was so small probably nobody even heard it. Still had me shakin for awhile.

Oh, a bad mistake - probably the worst - I made was sleeping with this pretty hot and fairly famous chick who I was producing on a development deal. I wasn't interested in a relationship. Sort of weirded her out enough to make her want to find another producer. The project had deep pockets, and I probably lost a good career opportunity.

[joelpatterson]

Um... not having the sense to see that this orangutan squatting on the floor of my drum booth with his 12-string endlessly banging out horrid, jangly, inept "pseudo-songs" was going to be more trouble than he was worth-- which was the ten Ben Franklins that he'd laid out on the desk, on account for his sessions...

[T_R_S]

Leaving the talkback mic on!

[nlc201]

Went out for night out on the town about 7 PM. About 9 AM the next morning, I finally figure that it was probably a good time to stop drinking at this point since I have to mix a track later in the day. I'm not a heavy drinker, so I'm totally stupid and out of my element. Got an hour or so of sleep which didn't do anything for me. I showed up at the studio a few hours later, still drunk (god bless living in NYC and public transportation!). I slide into the studio without anyone really noticing me, like my employer. Thankfully, the client is remote and I'm sending her a file of the mix after I finish so I'm by myself. I throw up the tune and go for it. After 2 hours getting nauseated watching the moving faders, my body tells me that the mix is done. I print it, send off a reference to the client, go home and pass out.


Cut to the next morning. Owww my head. I get into the studio and I have a message from the client to call her. So now I get to find out just how bad the mix really is (I haven't listened to my drunken effort yet). Time to face the crappily mixed music. I call her.

Her: Hey, the mix sounds great but what did you do to the vocal?! Did you use a delay or something?

Me (kicking myself for not listening to it before I called her): Hmmmm....no. What exactly is the problem?

Her: Well, the vocal is late! What did you do?!

Me (clueless with a raging headache): Really? There must have been a problem with the bounce because I didn't adjust any vocal timing (at least I don't remember doing that). Let me open it back up and check and see what the problem is and call you back (get me outta here!!!!).


So I go and listen to the mix which I fortunately still have up in the studio. Sure enough, the vocal is about a 16th note or a little less late consistently through the track. I just hadn't noticed because I was a drunk idiot. For the life of me I can't figure out what happened. So I got the vocal back to its original timing and print it again. I still don't feel well enough to accurately judge the mix except that everything is in sync. It seems OK but I still can't really tell. The assistant says it sounds ok so I send her the new mix with my finger's crossed yet again. I email her saying that I can't explain the problem, it was probably just a computer glitch and I apologized for the error.

She calls me back soon after. "I love it! The mix sounds great and the vocal is good now. No changes!"

You've got to be sh*tting me. The only mix on the entire record that once printed properly had no tweaks! Go figure....... In hindsight, the mix is actually decent. I think it's do to the fact that I didn't have the capacity to overthink anything. But drunken mixing is now a definite no-no for me.......

[KrisNY]

This is nothing compared to most of these stories, but I'm still young... ::crosses fingers::

First time I engineered a session with a particular producer, I didn't realize he ended up keeping a lot of practice takes. I didn't hit record when this woman was practicing this particular passage. I hear him yell, "that was brilliant!" I almost started crying.

[David R.]

Not the worst, but I once forgot to assign the left side of the backup singing to the mix. The chorus kind of lost it's punch.

Didn't figure it out for a couple of days, then d'oh!

[David Lee]

I do live recordings at a nightclub in Santa Monica, We have an artist that we had recorded about 4 or 5 of his shows and arrived at the song list which we would derive a live album out of. well, show 2 of 5 at this point was the killer show. I was doing a little cleaning up in the session, at the time, i was recording and mixing in EMU Paris, and I was going to remove a couple of files that didn't need to be in the session any longer, so i saw them hilighted, hit delete....

it was not just two files, had i scrolled down i would have seen that it was actually all of the files in the audio window hilighted. and i just wiped it all out.

took the drive to data recovery, no good, everything from that show, which was turning out to be a good 2/3'rds of the record, gone.

i still get remided of that from time to time by the artist.

[Jules]

I brought a big act to another studio away from my usual workplace (because that was fully booked.)

The owner / manager / engineer of this new studio was all over the band on a charm offencive - they had some mutual friends and the creep was real quick to name drop - all this during short breaks etc etc (he wasnt in on the actual sessions..) Annoying..

Anyhow.. I found myself double booked as the big act wanted to keep going a few more days..

I made the mistake of honoring my origional booking..

Well.. GUESS WHO engineered for the big band the day I was missing?

Yup - Mr Name Drop studio manager / engineer

And guess who became THE BESTEST FRIENDS with the big band?

I let him steal the client from me..

NEVER returned to that studio..

-----------------------------

I've caught engineers assisting me try to do this on several occaisions - one trick they use is to leave a bunch of CD's of bands they have been working on 'JUST LYING AROUND' the control room - NO NO NO NO as producer we do a LITTLE CLEAN UP JOB BEFORE the session arrives and make the scaming &^%%$%£^ put them away back in the studio office - or his locker - whatever... - Sneaky creeps!

[warhead]

Tracked a jazz gig this past spring, lady named Del Rae who was apparently Grammy nominated in the 70's as a jazz artist (plays piano and sings, had a long career in NY) who has settled down in this little SC town I live in. She picked a few local cats to gig with and they worked up a show for her new album which was to be a live show.

It's all going down on my laptop, and the sounds I'm getting are fine...all is well until DOH! I realize I'm running out of hard disk space FAST. A cell phone call to my brother in law, he runs into my studio and grabs a hard drive for me and brings it down to the gig...shows up like 2 minutes before I run out of space.

The band takes a quick break, and I start hooking up this hard drive to transfer what I've done to it (rather than set up an entirely new session in Nuendo and dedicate the capture of files to the new drive). Total brain fart night...the horn player is literally hanging over my shoulder asking me every 10 seconds "how much longer man, how much longer?!" and I'm pointing to probably 30 minutes left on the transfer to the drive...apparently this guy has shit to do because everyone else including Del Rae seems fine...so he's getting all worked up and they're finally getting a bit worked up because of it too...so I get this bright idea.

I'll just save this as a template in Nuendo, then re-open a new session on the other drive and stop the transfer.

Long story short, I saved it as a template on the new drive and when I started the new session...all of the files are now showing up in the window showing ZERO recording time available. So I go ahead and erase the files from my "template" and bam...now I have plenty of recording time available. Well...

...the files it was referencing were still the old files on the laptop's drive. They get wiped off without so much as asking me if I'm sure or if I realize they're not going to the recycle bin they're GONE!!! One keystroke, and as Ali G says: hist'ry.

I had already started to record again before it started to hit me what happened. That is what happens when you have some dude literally hanging by your ear bitching about needing to start right then...I just wasn't thinking right and honestly it's the first time I have EVER inadvertantly erased a file on a hard drive. I felt so bad...and didn't confirm it until the gig was over so...I had to break the news to everybody. They were bummed but VERY cool about it, the only "good" part is that the playing was really pretty lousy that night and I don't think she would have wanted 95% of it.

There were a few gems though.

The part that I ended up with? Was this...I swear it couldn't have been worse...horrible version of an old standard called "Rocks In My Bed" where Del's husband got up on stage and started howling like a dying cat right into her mic! So all that pressure, all my screwups...to end up with a 100% un-useable take.

She's doing a charitable gig with a new and improved band in about 6 weeks and we're recording again. I have a feeling that first gig was lost for a reason and they can only do better than what they did. Even though I insisted on tracking it for free they still want to pay me so...all is well.

Defacation occurs.

War

[84K]

Agreeing to record a rap session. That mistake only happened once.

[nethereyes]

Originally Posted by 84K

Agreeing to record a rap session. That mistake only happened once.

LOL

And buying ADATs.