Doo-Mass Award

[up-fiddler]

OK - So today I spent 35 minutes going through my signal chain to find the bad chord, connection, equipment, etc. When all was said, swore, and done the problem was that I hadn't depressed the L-R button on my board and couldn't pan the signal to an odd channel. I'll start out with the award. Do what you can to top that and earn it for yourself. Have fun, up-fiddler.

[Creamyapples1]

I think this link will explain it all.

[fazil]

I recording an entire songs drum tracks while there was a bad cable on the kick mic and not noticing it. The kick sounded like a big "crrrrck" for at least half the time. I thought it was the bassist playing along on a scratch track who was making the crrack noise.

I didn't notice it before removing all the drum mics and recorded the other tracks. The drummer was awful and this was the best track he could ever play.
I had to replace almost every single kick hit with a sample from the soundcheck. (drumagog didn't work for this). I think I slapped my head each time for every kick I replaced.


Then the other time I noticed my soundcard didn't work... The last 4 tracks on my ews88mt din't record. I did everything i could, I was at the point of buying a new soundcard until I noticed I reversed the outputs and inputs!

[Dogman]

Hell...I constantly, hit record, and lay down a good riff, or vocal track, and later notice that the track I recorded, wasn't the one I wanted.
Just silence. The next take isn't so good....

[wesley tanner]

i believe i've made all those mistakes. I've even brought up the levels on my talkback mic because it was inaudible, then unmuted it when I realized it was muted and hurt myself with feedback. that's a mistake you only do once. DUH MUH ASS

[chris-from-ky]

I've recorded say a guitar track 100 times until it's perfect and then moved on to vocals or something and forgot to switch the mic inputs on the mixer so the guitars are playing back just fine until I hit the punch in for the vocals to start and the guitars that we worked so hard to get right disappear. Doh!!!!

I really do too many stupid things to keep track of them all. No pun intended!

Chris

[David Katauskas]

Laying a new guitar track...feel pretty good about the performance...then realize that I hit 'Play' on the sequencer instead of 'Record'. DOH

[ericlingus]

lol. The last one i've done. I'm new to recording so I havent had much of a chance to do something stupid yet. I've yet to make a serious recording. Just learning how to use cubase LE first. I'm almost done reading the operation manual!

[jonnyc]

I just had a little episode last night. My Behri headphone amp wasn't feeding any signal. I checked the cables going to my interface, switched out extension cords, changed headphones, bitched, complained, you name it. After literally scratching my head for a minute I realized I never turned the power on. There's nothing like looking like a moron in front of a band that just paid you to record.

[Dogman]

Originally Posted by jonnyc

I just had a little episode last night. My Behri headphone amp wasn't feeding any signal. I checked the cables going to my interface, switched out extension cords, changed headphones, bitched, complained, you name it. After literally scratching my head for a minute I realized I never turned the power on. There's nothing like looking like a moron in front of a band that just paid you to record.

Just tell em that button has always scared you....

[noisedude]

Originally Posted by jonnyc

I just had a little episode last night. My Behri headphone amp wasn't feeding any signal. I checked the cables going to my interface, switched out extension cords, changed headphones, bitched, complained, you name it. After literally scratching my head for a minute I realized I never turned the power on. There's nothing like looking like a moron in front of a band that just paid you to record.

Routing, track selection, mis-cuing, these are all things I've done. But THIS is the one I really identify with!!!!

Also the other week I was routing an outboard preamp into my DAW for recording, and using its parallel output to go to the desk for monitoring purposes. Except I selected the wrong input in the software and I ended up recording the direct output of the channel on the desk ... effectively recording my bass through two preamps, and without checking the gain-staging at the desk because all I needed was a fader level to send to monitors!!!!

A complicated mistake but when you realise what I did and how redundant it made my nice channel strip you'll understand why I was glad no-one else was around to hear me figure out what had happened!

[c7sus]

Originally Posted by wesley tanner

i believe i've made all those mistakes. I've even brought up the levels on my talkback mic because it was inaudible, then unmuted it when I realized it was muted and hurt myself with feedback. that's a mistake you only do once. DUH MUH ASS

I did that to my kid.

OUCH!

[up-fiddler]

Yeah. People are making me feel less alone but not much smarter. Obviously this thread could be for serious blackmail. The major feedback thing is one of my favorites. I must enjoy hitting the UNmute without lowering levels because I do it all the time.

[EddieRay]

Last month I tried recording a demo for the band I'm in. 8 track ADAT. It was at a gig and we got there early to record before the gig started. We barely had time get everything set up.

I put an SM57 in front of the lead guitarsist's two-speaker cab. He forgot to tell me had a 2nd cab connected which causes one of the speakers in the 1st cab to disconnect. Guess which speaker I had the mic on.

Plus the stuipid bass player didn't tune up properly. Um, I'm the bass player.

[LemonTree]

I got my AUX sends mixed up one day and wondered why every patch on my lexicon mpx 100 sounded exactly the same. then realised I was feeding signal to the Alesis instead......

I love that split second when your sphincter relaxes and contorts uncontrolably just before you realise what the problem is

I do stupid stuff all the time. I once spent ages setting up a headphone mix with AUX 1 depressed on the board to send to the headphone amp then proceeded to plug a set of phones in myself and set the studio out to L/R for a quick listen myself and not switch it back to AUX 1 for him.....

Done a mixdown of 4 songs one time with the talkback mic engaged being sent to the L/R buss

running out of beer mid session is another big one

[noisedude]

Ok I got one tonight. I had all my tracks running to groups and then to the main stereo buss ... or at least that was the plan. I couldn't understand why my 'Vinyl' sound plugin didn't seem to be sucking the bass drum out in the same way it was taking the snare. After twenty minutes of frustration I realised there were two problems. Firstly, the snare was going straight to the master buss and not to the drums subgroup. Secondly, and crucially ... the drums group wasn't going to the master buss at all but being sent straight to my primary sound card outputs! They were arriving at the same fader on my desk so I hadn't realised they were being summed by my Delta!

[LeeRosario]

My biggest mistake was joining the music industry workforce in the firstplace.



JOKES JOKES!

[Halion]

Trying to figure out why the headphones weren't working for half an hour, just to figure out the monitoring button was off :|

[up-fiddler]

Originally Posted by LemonTree

running out of beer mid session is another big one

My new personal favorite

[up-fiddler]

Originally Posted by LeeRosario

My biggest mistake was joining the music industry workforce in the firstplace.



JOKES JOKES!

Because it feels so good when we stop........

[IronFlippy]

Of course I've done perfect takes, but have forgotten to prep the track. And I've also accidentally deleted the good track instead of the bad one (that was the last time I ever did any destructive editing). Can't say I've ever done any ridiculously dumb things. Oh, on my first recording, my bassist brought in an old ribbon mic (a bad one, so no harm) and I used it for a bass drum mic. Ouch. Luckily, it was bought at a garage sale for $5 and it didn't work properly in the first place. I researched it after it died, dreading it was a good mic. I was relieved to find that the company was a complete no-name. I can't remember it now, though, sorry.

[Frank Sheehan]

I will give you the short version.

I kept having errors when attempting to back up my songs to DVD from Cubase. I tried everyting over the course of 2 weeks. Finally a tech friend came over and after 4 hours of pissing around decided he needed to take the tower home. He was going to back up or do something first and he said, "Hey, your clock says it's 2038", I said "Yeah, that thing's been acting up forever"........ The look on his face was priceless. He works with me so of course he told everyone what an idiot I was. He was right, but I did point out that he's a tech, and he only found it after 4 hours of work, and giving up.

DUMB ASS (es)


BTW, I still don't know why the clock acts up.

The monkey never learns

[noisedude]

Might be a dodgy battery on your motherboard?

[mithra6]

I have a Line6 Toneport which is a USB interface. I booted up the PC, and the Toneport wouldn't come on. I kept unplugging the USB cable and plugging it back in. I couldn't even hear the little noise the PC makes when you plug in a USB device.

I scratched my head for about 15 minutes until I realized I had an identical USB cable plugged in for a device that wasn't on (hence no little PC bleep). I had the wrong damn cable plugged in!

[NegadivOne]

I recently went through an episode when i tried recording with my new line6 guitarport for the first time. I use cool edit pro to record, but i couldnt get signal from the guitarport for the life of me. I tried for a day and a half to get that thing to record. I uninstalled and reinstalled both cool edit pro and the guitarport about 3 times each, each time i made sure to set the guitarport as the audio source for cool edit. I even had to call up my guitarist who also has a guitarport for advice and he had no clue what to do. Eventually i realized that all i had to do was open up cool edit pro BEFORE the guitar port. Works like a dream now...