Dipshit Moment

Scrubucket7

Scrubucket7

New member
Had my first big dipshit moment today. I was recording vocals for this band. I turned on the wrong mic that was in the room from when we recorded drums. So i had the vocal track picked up by a mic that was 10 feet from the singer without even realizing it until after we had finished everything. Now we gotta go back and do the vocal track again tommarrow.

So whats yer biggest dipshit moment?
 
Pretty much just turning on my stuff..... :D

I've done the same thing, sort of...I was playing guitar, and picked up the sound from a distant mic, when I played about my best. Never got a good sound.... :eek:
 
Oh, I can top that.

I attended Omega Studios' "school of engineering" and for the final project I had to bring in a band, set up the mics, and record them. Everything went fine until it actually came time to record. I forgot to take the Studer out of safe mode. Nothing the band played got recorded. For days I was known as "Mr. Safe."
 
I was trying to record my amp with a preamp and I forgot to flip the impedence switch ....it wasnt a professional fuck up though. It was just at my house hahaha
 
I still remember the first demo I tried to record of our band. I tried to do it at the house we normally rehearse at. I brought an old fostex 4-track recorder in, but it ran on scsi zip drives, which I didn't have at the moment, so I used a couple long headphones extenders and ran it into the nearest computer's line in. The only mics i had were an sm57 & 58, and I got one of the guitar players to bring in a random mic he had lieng around, who knows what it was. To record, we ran two keyboards and an electric guitar into a mixing amp mic'ed with the 57, we mic'ed the drums by setting the guitarists random mic on top of the bass, where it was sticking into the set a bit, and the vocals were through the 58. Then I left my earcup headphones at home, so I was trying to mix it with the only headphones around, which were some crappy earbud heaphones that prolly cost less than 10 bucks. To start the recording, I pulled up a free program called goldwave, which i use all the time for wav editing, to record from the computer's line in, and then ran in to the living room and yelled something so they'd know to start. Also the input the sm58 was going into had a level switch (Low, mid, hi) which I didn't realize, and the whole time I couldn't figure out why the vocals just would not come through loud enough.

Those were some bad recordings...
 
WillyDavidK said:
I still remember the first demo I tried to record of our band. I tried to do it at the house we normally rehearse at. I brought an old fostex 4-track recorder in, but it ran on scsi zip drives, which I didn't have at the moment, so I used a couple long headphones extenders and ran it into the nearest computer's line in. The only mics i had were an sm57 & 58, and I got one of the guitar players to bring in a random mic he had lieng around, who knows what it was. To record, we ran two keyboards and an electric guitar into a mixing amp mic'ed with the 57, we mic'ed the drums by setting the guitarists random mic on top of the bass, where it was sticking into the set a bit, and the vocals were through the 58. Then I left my earcup headphones at home, so I was trying to mix it with the only headphones around, which were some crappy earbud heaphones that prolly cost less than 10 bucks. To start the recording, I pulled up a free program called goldwave, which i use all the time for wav editing, to record from the computer's line in, and then ran in to the living room and yelled something so they'd know to start. Also the input the sm58 was going into had a level switch (Low, mid, hi) which I didn't realize, and the whole time I couldn't figure out why the vocals just would not come through loud enough.

Those were some bad recordings...
Click to expand...
Damn Im still pretty amateur but wow thats insanely bad hahaha.
My first recordings started by connecting my cheap radio shack headphones into the mic input of the computer. Yup pretty shitty indeed.
 
Double booking my studio and having two bands show up at my front door simultaneously was probably my worst.

Second place was doing an entire vocal overdub session where the vocalist was singing into the back side of a mic set to cardioid. And trying to figure out later why there was so much room sound!

Third place was when I was recording and playing piano at the same time, and didn't notice I left the monitors on in the room with the piano, because I was wearing headphones.
 
Our lecturer gave us the classic one of someone selling some microphones for almost nothing because they didn't work - of course, they were condensers, and worked a treat once phantom was switched on.
 
Most of my major screw-ups end up not getting noticed because my acute paranoia usually results in having eighteen backups for everything....

Case in point, I've lost power to a camera in the middle of a video shoot (on the active camera) when some dumbass unplugged our extension cord, and still salvaged the shoot. My paranoia meant that I had:

A. A VCR attached to each camera so I could easily dissolve to the other camera in post production just prior to the glitch.
B. Batteries in the cameras that could take over just by yanking the power.
C. Headsets so we could debug things and get back up and running in under 20 seconds from blackout to having the dead camera back up.
D. Someone to run and fix the power cord.
E. Headsets to coordinate the switch from batteries back to power so we wouldn't be on that camera a second time.

As a general rule, if I only have one of something running at any given time, I'm terrified. You can never have enough:

  • Tapes
  • Mics
  • Cameras
  • Protective lens filters
  • Velcro cable ties
  • Gaffer tape
  • Spare cables
  • People
  • UPSes with the alarm disabled
  • Signs that say "DO NOT TOUCH"
  • Baseball bats for when someone touches it anyway. :D
 
Working an emergency live show, unfamiliar board, no soundcheck. 800 people to see a big regional act. During the first couple of songs, I was cuing a bunch of stuff in the phones, checking levels and FX. The producer comes running up, waving her arms at me. Turns out the solo button not only brings up the channel in the phones, but solos it in the main outs as well. So for the first two songs, the audience heard vocals- kick drum- bass- snare- reverb- delay- reverb- lead vocals- guitars- keys, all one at a time. :p
 
In the days when I used analog, having the wrong track armed to record.... and recording over a good guitar take with a scratched vocal take. :o :mad:
 
MadAudio said:
Oh, I can top that.

I attended Omega Studios' "school of engineering" and for the final project I had to bring in a band, set up the mics, and record them. Everything went fine until it actually came time to record. I forgot to take the Studer out of safe mode. Nothing the band played got recorded. For days I was known as "Mr. Safe."
Click to expand...

that's awesome. i have too many dipshit moments to list so it's kind of hard to pick from the bunch.
 
Me and my guitarist (me being a drummer) set up the drum mics together so I'm not sure who's fault it was, but we were levelling the bass drum mic and getting hardly any punch and lots of buzz. We were stumped until we followed the cables and realised we'd plugged them all into the wrong stagebox inputs - turns out he was fiddling with the snare mic while I was beating the bass drum :o

The other one was when i was recording a distorted guitar with a condenser mic, forgot to pad it, and forgot to set the gain (this was my first ever session behind the desk in a decent studio). I was pushing the faders right up on the channel and the group, and getting hardly any level. It turned out sounding lush though, so I pretended I meant to do it ;)
 
Scrubucket7 said:
Had my first big dipshit moment today. I was recording vocals for this band. I turned on the wrong mic that was in the room from when we recorded drums. So i had the vocal track picked up by a mic that was 10 feet from the singer without even realizing it until after we had finished everything. Now we gotta go back and do the vocal track again tommarrow.

So whats yer biggest dipshit moment?
Click to expand...


no joke, i've done exactly that and i remember just sitting there listening to the first couple takes, and it had been a long day, and i was just like oh my god im the worst ever, i dont know what im doing wrong! these sound terrible! i had him get closer to the mic, use a pop filter then finally i went in there myself and found out the mic he was singing into was running into another channel of preamps! ahhhh that was a long day.
 
tarnationsauce2 said:
In the days when I used analog, having the wrong track armed to record.... and recording over a good guitar take with a scratched vocal take. :o :mad:
Click to expand...
...........guilty.
 
spent 30 minutes trying to track down a hum that was coming through my system. changed mics, outlets, even ran and extention cord across the house to plug everything in to. only to find out i had a fan running in the room i was recording in. (man it was hot that day)
 
I had this genius idea that I could buy some stuff, and be able to record music...

I've used LDC's for OH pointed the wrong way. I miced a kit with the FT and snare mic cables crossed (apparantly, a 57 gets apretty good snare sound from 30" away, although the FT hits were a little tough to listen to...).

Actually, my best one was the first time I did an on location live recording (live as in "in front of an audience of paying customers). I was also running sound, since I own a big pair of powered monitors. Anyway, when I show up, the nook where I was to set up was about twice as far from the "stage" as I was told, and I ran out of cables. I had a little Beri mixer in my pile o' crap, which I needed to submix the drums before my ancient VS880EX (six inputs, I had no external AD for the last two). So I put the Beri in between the stage and the VS, and ran 1/4" cables to connect the two. The VS tried to fall off a table, and snapped the pin from an RCA jack in the right output (which was feeding the PA). Fortunately, with pliers, and a spare RCA-1/4" adaptor, we were in business in a couple minutes. Everything got mercilessly duct tapped after that. Additionally, there were about two outlets available in the stage area. Nobody in the bar could answer complex questions like "what amperage is that outlet rated for, you know, the one with a 900w powered cab and a bass amp plugged into it?" or "where's the fuse box?" Additionally, the band were late, so soundcheck pretty much didn't happen.

I had wanted to record a minute or two, and play it back, to make sure nothing crazy happened, but the lateness prevented my cunning scheme's completion. The VS can not separate the 'phones out from the master, so I would have had to have turned off the mains, listened, repeat. No time. I found that my headphones were totally inadequate for even telling if I had signal, due to the ambient bleed-through, so I had to set all the levels by eye, watching the crude LCD screen (about half the size of a credit card, if you haven't seen a VS880). There was also considerable panic when the band's decision not to bother bringing a keyboard amp, our only potential monitor, revealed itself in full "you need to turn me up" glory.

Anyway, I limped through the live performance, and got home with the six tracks: Stereo drum submix, two vox, guitar amp, bass DI from SansAmp.

1. No bass track. I had the SansAmp off, as the bass player didn't need to be messing around with a pedal. Apparantly, the parallel out does nothing if the pedal's not engaged. So I had recorded 50 minutes of white noise at -6dB (the VS sounds like moist ass at more comfortable gain settings) based on the LCD meters.

2. No overheads. Condensors like phantom power. I never turned on phantom power. The meters all agreed that I was getting sound. The sound was all coming from the kick and snare mic. Wheeee!

The bass player had parted company with the band withing a couple weeks or a month, so I had to learn the songs based on the b/u vocal mic's bleed. They were not tight, and went off of visual cues, and had gotten used to the drummer's wandering tempos. Took me about 20 hours of tracking to lay the 50 minutes semi-convincingly. Oh, and the recording was supposed to be put to video (never happened) so I couldn't just make up a bass part, as it would have to match the player's movements. A couple of silent or near silent count-ins. Fun times.

I also had to mine cymbol sounds from the b/u vocal mic, due to the OH fiasco. I cut everything below about 8k, did some compressing, and blended up the track until you could hear where the cymbols were supposed to be. Needless to say, the b/u vocals are quite sibilant... For those of you playing at home, we are up to four out of six tracks missing or corrupted.

Moral of the story: I suck. However, the band traded me a 16+4 100' snake for the job, and were impressed with what I salvaged. Moral of the story: they suck. ;)
 
ermghoti said:
I had this genius idea that I could buy some stuff, and be able to record music...

I've used LDC's for OH pointed the wrong way. I miced a kit with the FT and snare mic cables crossed (apparantly, a 57 gets apretty good snare sound from 30" away, although the FT hits were a little tough to listen to...).

Actually, my best one was the first time I did an on location live recording (live as in "in front of an audience of paying customers). I was also running sound, since I own a big pair of powered monitors. Anyway, when I show up, the nook where I was to set up was about twice as far from the "stage" as I was told, and I ran out of cables. I had a little Beri mixer in my pile o' crap, which I needed to submix the drums before my ancient VS880EX (six inputs, I had no external AD for the last two). So I put the Beri in between the stage and the VS, and ran 1/4" cables to connect the two. The VS tried to fall off a table, and snapped the pin from an RCA jack in the right output (which was feeding the PA). Fortunately, with pliers, and a spare RCA-1/4" adaptor, we were in business in a couple minutes. Everything got mercilessly duct tapped after that. Additionally, there were about two outlets available in the stage area. Nobody in the bar could answer complex questions like "what amperage is that outlet rated for, you know, the one with a 900w powered cab and a bass amp plugged into it?" or "where's the fuse box?" Additionally, the band were late, so soundcheck pretty much didn't happen.

I had wanted to record a minute or two, and play it back, to make sure nothing crazy happened, but the lateness prevented my cunning scheme's completion. The VS can not separate the 'phones out from the master, so I would have had to have turned off the mains, listened, repeat. No time. I found that my headphones were totally inadequate for even telling if I had signal, due to the ambient bleed-through, so I had to set all the levels by eye, watching the crude LCD screen (about half the size of a credit card, if you haven't seen a VS880). There was also considerable panic when the band's decision not to bother bringing a keyboard amp, our only potential monitor, revealed itself in full "you need to turn me up" glory.

Anyway, I limped through the live performance, and got home with the six tracks: Stereo drum submix, two vox, guitar amp, bass DI from SansAmp.

1. No bass track. I had the SansAmp off, as the bass player didn't need to be messing around with a pedal. Apparantly, the parallel out does nothing if the pedal's not engaged. So I had recorded 50 minutes of white noise at -6dB (the VS sounds like moist ass at more comfortable gain settings) based on the LCD meters.

2. No overheads. Condensors like phantom power. I never turned on phantom power. The meters all agreed that I was getting sound. The sound was all coming from the kick and snare mic. Wheeee!

The bass player had parted company with the band withing a couple weeks or a month, so I had to learn the songs based on the b/u vocal mic's bleed. They were not tight, and went off of visual cues, and had gotten used to the drummer's wandering tempos. Took me about 20 hours of tracking to lay the 50 minutes semi-convincingly. Oh, and the recording was supposed to be put to video (never happened) so I couldn't just make up a bass part, as it would have to match the player's movements. A couple of silent or near silent count-ins. Fun times.

I also had to mine cymbol sounds from the b/u vocal mic, due to the OH fiasco. I cut everything below about 8k, did some compressing, and blended up the track until you could hear where the cymbols were supposed to be. Needless to say, the b/u vocals are quite sibilant... For those of you playing at home, we are up to four out of six tracks missing or corrupted.

Moral of the story: I suck. However, the band traded me a 16+4 100' snake for the job, and were impressed with what I salvaged. Moral of the story: they suck. ;)
Click to expand...

that was a good one. sounds like alot of fun. :D

i owned a vs880 for a short period. god i hated that thing with a passion.
 
I recorded our band live with my Korg D1600 at the sound-guys desk.

At the end of the show I went back to 'power down' the recorder only to find the guy had pulled the plug before I could get there, in his haste to tear down.

It doesnt save the data unless you power it down properly, so we got nothing.
 
TravisinFlorida said:
i owned a vs880 for a short period. god i hated that thing with a passion.
Click to expand...

Ya know, I came close to throwing it in the street, and quitting recording a couple times because of it, but it has its merits. For one, it makes me appreciate the hell out of my computer...

Actually, if not for the unreadable manual, and the universally incompatible recording format, and the instantly antiquated scsi port, it wouldn't be a bad little all-in one, matched to a mixer with decent pres.
 
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