Horror Stories...

Uladine

Uladine

New member
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this post, but I know everyone in here has had some frustrating times in home recording that they may want to share. I'll go first...

Back in august I recorded a metal band on my vs-1880. The band loved the results, but before we got around to tracking all of the vocals, they parted ways with their singer. No big deal for me, I already got paid with a guitar that the guitarist gave me for the recording. While they were searching for a new singer their guitarist told me about how he was about to order a nuendo system. Thinking he was wanting to record the band himself, I backed up all of their material to CDs and put them away.

Fast forward to a day ago. I put my VS-1880 on Ebay so I could get money for a PC DAW. I tell this band's guitarist about it and he says "Is there a way you could back up our stuff so we can put our new singers vocals over it?" I say "Yea I can transfer it to my mom's computer with cakewalk and put it on my new DAW when I get it." Later that night someone buys my VS with buy it now, So today I had to rush over here to try to back everything up. Of course my moms computer is way to slow. So guess what I get to do now?

I am in the process of burning an audio CD of every song, but to keep the tracks seperate, I am putting guitar 1 on the left channel of song 1, guitar 2 on the Right channel, Kick on left channel of song two, snare on right etc etc etc... So each song is going to end up having about a 12 track CD all its own. I just hope when I get my PC DAW I can import all of the tracks seperatley so I can mix it :confused:

Ok lets hear some more horror stories. I know some people have more interesting ones than mine...
 
I was recording the chick once, she was a real bluesy singer/songwriter and she was awesome. The only thing was that she did everything on the spot. She very weird about how she wanted to be recorded too. She wanted everything to be done...right then. If she made a mistake on the vocal, then it got left in there.

Anyway, we were doing a marathon session. It was amazing. Hell, she even inspired me. I found that during breaks, I was writing music! We get done with the session, which was about 12 song's worth. And she was gone. She says: "Ill be back in 2 weeks to pick up the mix."

SO, the next day...I go to work on it.

BLINK.

My computer just all of a sudden reboots. Im like: "What the hell?" Anyway, I wait for it to come up and start where I left off.

BLINK.

This time it just shuts off. I try to get it back on and nothing. I immediately rip the drive out of the machine knowing that the machine is screwed. Put it in a backup. Nothings on it! Nothing. Its blank. No files. I take it to work and try it on several machines. Blank. I can access it, but nothing is there. I remember thinking: "I am soooo fucked."

I take it to a disk recovery place. They recover nothing.

Now I start trying to figure out how I will tell the client that she has NO recordings. I call her up and tell her what had happened. She rips into me bigtime. The worse ass-chewing I have ever recieved. After I get off the phone with her I was sitting and looking at my computer which lay in the middle of my control room. I remember looking at it and thinking I cant believe I fucked this all up, she is going to spread this all over town, and hey...how come there are TWO more drives in that machine.

Light Bulb.

I rip the other drives out of the machine. I plug one of them in my backup. OS. DAMN. Plug the other in...

Tracks, beautiful tracks.

So, I call her back and say:"Gotcha! Boy, I had you steamed." She started laughing and said she was going to kill me. After we got off the phone I grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of Jack and sat on my back porch for the rest of the night.
 
I would have to say that my worst thing so far was when I first got into DAW I had never touched a computer for recording let alone know how to record and save stuff.....

When I was done my first song which took me about a week of every evening recording, I was so happy... This was my best song to date.....The vibe was finally flowing out of me, the sound was there, I was almost kissing the computer screen, thanking it......

I saved my session on cd R..... I was suprised that it only takes one cd per song... wow!....

So I put that away, and I figured I will mix it at a later date... So I go and wipe it off the HD, and then start a new song... and another week goes by....

I decide, Hmmmm I wouldn't mind mixing that first song now.....

Load it up and hit play.... The regions, plug-ins, and other session infor is all there... but no fucking sound.......

I was so stupid with DAW at the time, I didn't even realize that you have to also save the audio files...... DDDUHHHH!

Logic would dictate that a recording session is a whole session like in a big studio, and saving that session saves everything... well unfortunately It don't work that way.....



I have re-recorded the song, but just can't get the vibe..... It sounds like im recording a given assignment, not like real sounds and feelings flowing out of me (which is what I like to hear in my music)......

AAARRRR!!!!!
 
Man... I learned the same lesson the same (hard) way. Fortunately, it was all my stuff and not anyone else's. I couldn't imagine losing someone else's performance like version2 thought he did.
 
Seanmorse79 said:
Man... I learned the same lesson the same (hard) way. Fortunately, it was all my stuff and not anyone else's. I couldn't imagine losing someone else's performance like version2 thought he did.
Click to expand...

Especially one that was pretty much done on the spot...lyrics and all. :p

It sucked.
 
Couple of friens asked me to help them record a demo of their group. Nobody had ever done such a thing, so we went ahead unprepared. First week took some "general" recordings, getting everybody to play together with as much separation as possible, so we had a backbone to hang the rest on. That went OK, and we took a backup.

Next week, we recorded drums for real and took a second backup. A couple days later the drummer left for the states for 2 years. In a couple of following sessions, we got all the rest recorded. Because it became to large to backup with CDR's, we just went on without backups.

After a couple of weeks we would start mixing. But before that, I added a drive to the machine to make a spare copy, just in case. Now this was W98. And the main drives are scsi. That spare drive was a ide, to save a bit. When the extra drive was formatted, everything was formatted.

Luckily we had the backup of the drums, so after a break to digest the loss, it all came well after all. Except that the group split before the demo could be used.
 
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