J
jaynm26
New member
Tell the funniest stories/events of the most hilarious moments in your studio. Project Studio or Pro Studio give detail of bloopers and fu-pas of you yourself and others. Let the LAUGHING BEGIN! 
M
moresound
Loud Sun Studios
It all began $20,000. ago - and I still need to know - What is the best under $100. microphone for rap vocals!
J
jaynm26
New member
Guess Im first up!
As an eng you always have to work with other 3rd party producers from artist that work with you. A lilttle funny incident of trying to get the items I needed to start the mix on the song.
Me: Hey when you get the chance ask your producer for the stems of the tracks cause you know this is just a two track. Send all WAV files preferably.
Artist: Huh? That is the Track. I think? Thas the MP3 version thas the complete beat right there.
Me: No I need the stems the actual instruments so I can mix the entire song together I need all the instruments. Just ask your producer for the stems he will know what im talkin bout
Artist: I thought that was all the instruments but ok
(Next day...)
Artist: He said that is all the instruments that is his newest version and he said that he uses MP3 cause its sounds good and he can email it.
Me: No the stems I need the actual stems you know all of the individual instruments that make up the beat Stems, instruments the mixdown I need the mixdown of all the stems? I understand bout MP3 is used for but with stems I need the WAV file because it is better quality of sound.
Artist: Ohh ok!
(Next day...)
Artist: He said that is the complete mixdown with all the instruments and he email me the WAV file for it
Me: For what the instruments? the stems?
Artist: Ugghh the song, oh yeah he said what are stems?
Me:
Me: Tell him whatever he is using Reason, FL studio all the little instruments he used to make the beat I need those so I can mix the ENTIRE song together and the file I need those little individual instruments in is WAV files the mix down of all the stems? you got it now?
Artist: Ooohhh Ok, Ok I got you!
(Next day...)
Artist: He said he dosent know how to do that he never does that
Me: Get him on the phone
(litteraly 4 hours later of using Team Viewer to Remote into his system and trying t figure it out my self ( I DONT KNOW HOW TO WORK FL your the producer not me lol) Then I pull up instructions on how to extract the instruments of beat as WAV files with FL)
(Next day...)
Me: Me tell him I didnt get those in the email to re send them. Oh yeah send me the BPM & Bit Depth & Sample rate of the session so I know what Sample Rate I have to import them
Artist: OK
Artist: He said he didnt use no beat machine he just used FL Stuido to make the beat
Me: OMG! No the actual BPM the Beats Per Minute of the song he did the beat in so we can start, and the Sample Rate
Artist: Ohhhh OK! Ok!
(Next day...)
Artist: He said the beat will work in any BPM he never set it to any Beats Per minute or whatever
Me: Thas impossible so we can make this R&B song a Dub step Techno beat by setting the BPM to 200 BPM if we wont. NO! Every song has there on BPM its BPM signature 4/4 the actual rate the beat is played in you know 1-2-3 Forget it! Forget it! I'll look at the manual online it has to be somewhere on his daw where he can see it plane as day (to myself heck does he mean he didnt set a BPM). Ok Did you at least get the sample rate and Bit Depth?
Artist: Oh yeah he said he didn't use any samples all real original sounds, oh and he said what is Bit Depth?
Me:
As an eng you always have to work with other 3rd party producers from artist that work with you. A lilttle funny incident of trying to get the items I needed to start the mix on the song.
Me: Hey when you get the chance ask your producer for the stems of the tracks cause you know this is just a two track. Send all WAV files preferably.
Artist: Huh? That is the Track. I think? Thas the MP3 version thas the complete beat right there.
Me: No I need the stems the actual instruments so I can mix the entire song together I need all the instruments. Just ask your producer for the stems he will know what im talkin bout
Artist: I thought that was all the instruments but ok
(Next day...)
Artist: He said that is all the instruments that is his newest version and he said that he uses MP3 cause its sounds good and he can email it.
Me: No the stems I need the actual stems you know all of the individual instruments that make up the beat Stems, instruments the mixdown I need the mixdown of all the stems? I understand bout MP3 is used for but with stems I need the WAV file because it is better quality of sound.
Artist: Ohh ok!
(Next day...)
Artist: He said that is the complete mixdown with all the instruments and he email me the WAV file for it
Me: For what the instruments? the stems?
Artist: Ugghh the song, oh yeah he said what are stems?
Me:
Me: Tell him whatever he is using Reason, FL studio all the little instruments he used to make the beat I need those so I can mix the ENTIRE song together and the file I need those little individual instruments in is WAV files the mix down of all the stems? you got it now?
Artist: Ooohhh Ok, Ok I got you!
(Next day...)
Artist: He said he dosent know how to do that he never does that
Me:
Get him on the phone(litteraly 4 hours later of using Team Viewer to Remote into his system and trying t figure it out my self ( I DONT KNOW HOW TO WORK FL your the producer not me lol) Then I pull up instructions on how to extract the instruments of beat as WAV files with FL)
(Next day...)
Me: Me tell him I didnt get those in the email to re send them. Oh yeah send me the BPM & Bit Depth & Sample rate of the session so I know what Sample Rate I have to import them
Artist: OK
Artist: He said he didnt use no beat machine he just used FL Stuido to make the beat
Me: OMG! No the actual BPM the Beats Per Minute of the song he did the beat in so we can start, and the Sample Rate
Artist: Ohhhh OK! Ok!
(Next day...)
Artist: He said the beat will work in any BPM he never set it to any Beats Per minute or whatever
Me: Thas impossible so we can make this R&B song a Dub step Techno beat by setting the BPM to 200 BPM if we wont. NO! Every song has there on BPM its BPM signature 4/4 the actual rate the beat is played in you know 1-2-3 Forget it! Forget it! I'll look at the manual online it has to be somewhere on his daw where he can see it plane as day (to myself heck does he mean he didnt set a BPM). Ok Did you at least get the sample rate and Bit Depth?
Artist: Oh yeah he said he didn't use any samples all real original sounds, oh and he said what is Bit Depth?
Me:
J
jaynm26
New member
@ moresound
hahaha!!!!
hahaha!!!!
Track Rat
Just Your Average Sized Member
I think I've told this story before but what the hell.
I was doing a session with a song writer/friend of mine who has tracked here many times. So he's doing this tune he wrote and for the intro, he wants to record a shotgun blast to use for some dramatic effect. Now I live in kind of a rural area with a State Park directly accross the street from me where a lot of the local kids like to go at night and party.
So I say OK and I set up a mic outside and he steps out and lets go a round. Of course it pegs the meters so I turn down the gain and have him let rip with "take two". I got a dandy recording of his shotgun. Fast forward about 45 minutes. We're busy tracking away on his tune when I hear a familiar sound in the headphones. It's two way radio traffic interfering with the headphone amp. Two way radios JUST LIKE THE COPS USE. So I open the studio door and look out at the street in front of the studio and sure enough, there's four cop cars and they have two car loads of local teens who where up in the park smoking dope laying on their stomachs for a nice felony stop. Needless to say, we both laughed so hard we almost wet ourselves.
I was doing a session with a song writer/friend of mine who has tracked here many times. So he's doing this tune he wrote and for the intro, he wants to record a shotgun blast to use for some dramatic effect. Now I live in kind of a rural area with a State Park directly accross the street from me where a lot of the local kids like to go at night and party.
So I say OK and I set up a mic outside and he steps out and lets go a round. Of course it pegs the meters so I turn down the gain and have him let rip with "take two". I got a dandy recording of his shotgun. Fast forward about 45 minutes. We're busy tracking away on his tune when I hear a familiar sound in the headphones. It's two way radio traffic interfering with the headphone amp. Two way radios JUST LIKE THE COPS USE. So I open the studio door and look out at the street in front of the studio and sure enough, there's four cop cars and they have two car loads of local teens who where up in the park smoking dope laying on their stomachs for a nice felony stop. Needless to say, we both laughed so hard we almost wet ourselves.
Jeff Ling
New member
Wow... Makes my head hurt!
M
moresound
Loud Sun Studios
Just gotta know mike .....Where you monitoring the recording of the shotgun with headphones. 
Track Rat
Just Your Average Sized Member
I beg your pardon, what did you say?
getuhgrip
Bring Back Transfat!
He's not makin' much sense today. And he's picking on everybody's spelling!
I think he just jabbed you for 'where" vs "were".
Stop it, Henry! Leave us alone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
BTW - Hey, Track Rat
J
jaynm26
New member
so we got "jokies" right here in the thread lol love it lol,,,eat that track rat how s that for spelling lol
Guitargodgt
New member
This is pretty much what I run into all the time. Especially drummers, they are allergic to new heads for some reason.
RecordingMaster
A Sarcastic Statement
My band recorded at a local "studio" with an "engineer"who was probably in his late 40's or ealry 50's. He's been playing guitar all his life and back in his hay day was on tour with some hair band that never really made it. Anyways, he was great at getting a good guitar tone, had tons of gear and tons of guitars, pre's everything. He actually used to work for Harman (who owns DBX and JBL, etc), so he had "unlimited" access to gear. He made his garage into a "studio" and was great at pretending it actually was one...until we began tracking.
Almost every take, halfway through, he'd realize he forgot to hit record, and he didn't know how to have us track to a metronome. After doing all the drums and half the guitars, he realized the drums weren't usable (quality wise) and had us redo them. Well, he took forever to return our calls, had an Elvis clock on the wall with swinging legs that swung for each second. He never returned emails and his email address kept changing. Including his cell phone number. His friend comes to visit him and says "so I heard you're not at Harman any more". Let's say he was pretty embarrassed in front of us, as he had JUST told us he'd been busy at work all day at Harman and had to work late, and didn't have time to mix our stuff yet.
He finally furnishes a copy of our initial mixdowns and instructed us to listen to it everywhere and make a general checklist of tweaks we'd like to hear. We sent him the checklist . After months of not hearing from him, I finally get a hold of him. I asked, so are we able to come and get the revisions? He says yes, then is not home upon my arrival.
Months fall off the calendar with no calls returned. Finally he picks up and says, "Oh man I've been done that for a while. It's been ready for you to pick up". So I pick it up from his mail box one day. Funny thing was, this was supposed to get our final approval THEN go out to Mastering at a certain place (great place) in Nashville which will remain unnamed. I read what it says on the disc and it says "Final complete masters". I smile thinking "oohhhhh it took so long because he re-mixed it and sent it out for us to mastering as a surprise". I pop the cd in my car stereo on the way home. What do I hear? NOT mastered and has not been remixed. Actually I don't think he did much else but panning and volume adjustments. Maybe some outboard compression at tracking. He ended up dumping all of the ghost tracks, the ORIGINAL drum takes that he was supposed to delete, AND my new drum tracks - all together jumbled into each song on the same disc...for each song. I think this was his was of saying "I give up".
After getting a hold of him a few months later, he says "Oh no I listened to it and those are your mastered tracks. I made sure before giving it to you. What you are hearing is just different effects I thought would be cool on the drums and such. Sort of like a Zep type thing". Well it was NOTHING like Zep. Ghost tracks in the background, us talking throughout the whole thing, cracks and creaks, guitars being tuned, 2-3 drums tracks all at different speeds being played at the same time (since he didn't know how to record us with a metronome), etc etc etc.
How can anyone out there actually say they'd WANT to run a business like that? More of a headache than anything. Woosh. Looks like some venting must've been in order! haha
Although I do retain some bitter memories and feelings as you can see above, now that it's all over...we do find it quite COMICAL. His name has now become a verb for making any stupidly extraordinarily absent-minded errors in the studio! And it really pushed me to start my own...not just for my own use or band's use, but for gradually letting in clients on a choice by choice basis.
Almost every take, halfway through, he'd realize he forgot to hit record, and he didn't know how to have us track to a metronome. After doing all the drums and half the guitars, he realized the drums weren't usable (quality wise) and had us redo them. Well, he took forever to return our calls, had an Elvis clock on the wall with swinging legs that swung for each second. He never returned emails and his email address kept changing. Including his cell phone number. His friend comes to visit him and says "so I heard you're not at Harman any more". Let's say he was pretty embarrassed in front of us, as he had JUST told us he'd been busy at work all day at Harman and had to work late, and didn't have time to mix our stuff yet.
He finally furnishes a copy of our initial mixdowns and instructed us to listen to it everywhere and make a general checklist of tweaks we'd like to hear. We sent him the checklist . After months of not hearing from him, I finally get a hold of him. I asked, so are we able to come and get the revisions? He says yes, then is not home upon my arrival.
Months fall off the calendar with no calls returned. Finally he picks up and says, "Oh man I've been done that for a while. It's been ready for you to pick up". So I pick it up from his mail box one day. Funny thing was, this was supposed to get our final approval THEN go out to Mastering at a certain place (great place) in Nashville which will remain unnamed. I read what it says on the disc and it says "Final complete masters". I smile thinking "oohhhhh it took so long because he re-mixed it and sent it out for us to mastering as a surprise". I pop the cd in my car stereo on the way home. What do I hear? NOT mastered and has not been remixed. Actually I don't think he did much else but panning and volume adjustments. Maybe some outboard compression at tracking. He ended up dumping all of the ghost tracks, the ORIGINAL drum takes that he was supposed to delete, AND my new drum tracks - all together jumbled into each song on the same disc...for each song. I think this was his was of saying "I give up".
After getting a hold of him a few months later, he says "Oh no I listened to it and those are your mastered tracks. I made sure before giving it to you. What you are hearing is just different effects I thought would be cool on the drums and such. Sort of like a Zep type thing". Well it was NOTHING like Zep. Ghost tracks in the background, us talking throughout the whole thing, cracks and creaks, guitars being tuned, 2-3 drums tracks all at different speeds being played at the same time (since he didn't know how to record us with a metronome), etc etc etc.
How can anyone out there actually say they'd WANT to run a business like that? More of a headache than anything. Woosh. Looks like some venting must've been in order! haha
Although I do retain some bitter memories and feelings as you can see above, now that it's all over...we do find it quite COMICAL. His name has now become a verb for making any stupidly extraordinarily absent-minded errors in the studio! And it really pushed me to start my own...not just for my own use or band's use, but for gradually letting in clients on a choice by choice basis.
M
moresound
Loud Sun Studios
Track Rat
Just Your Average Sized Member
Sorry. Since the headphones blew my eardrums out my ass I've had a bit of a problem with high frequencies.
Guitargodgt
New member
A band consisting of nobody older than 16 walks in and wants to do a song.
They show up with a drumset that isn't playable... literally the kick drum doesn't stand up. Also I have never witnessed a drumset with a kick that shallow, it seriously couldn't have been more than a 20X14 no exaggeration.
So first thing I do is borrow my brother's bands drumset (a mapex saturn).
We get all setup and this is what they record as a scratch track:
There was maybe another min of that before I sort of tell them we need to stop. A day later I call them (after I have time to process just what the fuck happened) and tell them they need to at least write a song before they record (they knew what they did was not a song). I wasn't trying to be offensive with saying that either. If they were in there 20s it would have been different. I'm quite a bit different in my demeanor with kids. I originally dealt with the parents, but the parents didn't seem to want to be involved more than signing my contract.
They are persistant though and ask another local kid to come help them write, honestly I wouldn't have entertained the idea if A) I wasn't already paid (I was going to pay them back the money) and B) I didn't know the kid already.
So kid comes in and we write the song bar by bar, we agree that fake drums are the way to go (the kid in the scratch track quit anyway I guess). I made them as simple as possible for them in hopes they could find a drummer who could play it. We spend roughly 5 hours writing ONE track. Once it's done I say "ok lets do the vocals now." The kid does the vocals totally on the fly and not in time at all. The song you will hear below was edited... and still bad. haha
When every one leaves, I redo the guitars (through the same tone, which I admit was pretty bad) and do a bass up for it, mix it and call it good enough.
This is what it ended up being:
Also: The band has since disbanded, I have talked with the guitarist. He knows how bad this was, but was thankful it came out as well as it did. haha
He is out of high school at this point and gets a pretty good laugh about it.
They show up with a drumset that isn't playable... literally the kick drum doesn't stand up. Also I have never witnessed a drumset with a kick that shallow, it seriously couldn't have been more than a 20X14 no exaggeration.
So first thing I do is borrow my brother's bands drumset (a mapex saturn).
We get all setup and this is what they record as a scratch track:
There was maybe another min of that before I sort of tell them we need to stop. A day later I call them (after I have time to process just what the fuck happened) and tell them they need to at least write a song before they record (they knew what they did was not a song). I wasn't trying to be offensive with saying that either. If they were in there 20s it would have been different. I'm quite a bit different in my demeanor with kids. I originally dealt with the parents, but the parents didn't seem to want to be involved more than signing my contract.
They are persistant though and ask another local kid to come help them write, honestly I wouldn't have entertained the idea if A) I wasn't already paid (I was going to pay them back the money) and B) I didn't know the kid already.
So kid comes in and we write the song bar by bar, we agree that fake drums are the way to go (the kid in the scratch track quit anyway I guess). I made them as simple as possible for them in hopes they could find a drummer who could play it. We spend roughly 5 hours writing ONE track. Once it's done I say "ok lets do the vocals now." The kid does the vocals totally on the fly and not in time at all. The song you will hear below was edited... and still bad. haha
When every one leaves, I redo the guitars (through the same tone, which I admit was pretty bad) and do a bass up for it, mix it and call it good enough.
This is what it ended up being:
Also: The band has since disbanded, I have talked with the guitarist. He knows how bad this was, but was thankful it came out as well as it did. haha
He is out of high school at this point and gets a pretty good laugh about it.
M
moresound
Loud Sun Studios
J
jaynm26
New member
LMAO!! Fuck it! LOL
propman
Active member
I have a story about a young man who kept his hard drive perched upon his laptop. The stupid dope got the cord caught and the drive fell, rendering it useless. Every one of the songs he'd been working on were lost. Several years later, not having learned a lesson from that, he ran from one room to the other with the laptop, DRIPPING in cords. Like Dick Van Dyke, he went bowling. The screen was smashed to pieces and he was forced to use an ANCIENT Compaq monitor for months until he could get it fixed. And that young man, is me. I'm the idiot. I ate sheep shit!
Armistice
Son of Yoda
After sort of training my GF how to press record and stop, and after a few mis-takes where I was having trouble communicating the "Stop / Rewind / Record" instructions to her, I decide that "Don't ever stop the machine until I finish playing" is the best instruction I can give.
Of we go again and I play a perfect perfect perfect rendition of this tune on acoustic guitar, and about two seconds after I play the last ringing chord, she hits the "Stop" button because I'd finished playing thus destroying a great take by cutting off the still ringing chord.
She has been banished from the studio, and I've given up trying with any other non-recording musicians either. Grief is always just around the corner....
Of we go again and I play a perfect perfect perfect rendition of this tune on acoustic guitar, and about two seconds after I play the last ringing chord, she hits the "Stop" button because I'd finished playing thus destroying a great take by cutting off the still ringing chord.
She has been banished from the studio, and I've given up trying with any other non-recording musicians either. Grief is always just around the corner....
J
jaynm26
New member
after sort of training my gf how to press record and stop, and after a few mis-takes where i was having trouble communicating the "stop / rewind / record" instructions to her, i decide that "don't ever stop the machine until i finish playing" is the best instruction i can give.
Of we go again and i play a perfect perfect perfect rendition of this tune on acoustic guitar, and about two seconds after i play the last ringing chord, she hits the "stop" button because i'd finished playing thus destroying a great take by cutting off the still ringing chord.
She has been banished from the studio, and i've given up trying with any other non-recording musicians either. Grief is always just around the corner....
lmao!!!!