The one that got away!

  • Thread starter Thread starter moresound
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moresound

Loud Sun Studios
Post here your biggest mistake while recording ..... it doesn't matter what hat you were wearing at the time. Be it from playing, over dubbing, tracking, mixing, mastering.
That had you do it all over again from scratch or maybe it was fixable at that point.
 
The usual ... forgetting to hit the 'record' button, forgetting the pop filter ...
 
I forgot to take the felt bag thing off a room mic once. I was only wearing socks. It's cold in the basement. :)
 
I want masses of money before I make such embarrassments public ! I need compensation for hurt feelings as cyber~laughter resounds throughout the known universe.
 
After I finish recording a track, sometimes I leave it armed for record. Then record on another track to find that I dubbed over the first one :-)

I've done that a few times this week.

The first time I ever recorded was with my cousin. Back then I didn't understand compression and the finished product turned out like a rectangle.
 
My TASCAM 2488 freezes up in RECORD mode once every few months...so maybe once out of every 500 times I hit the RECORD button. When it does that, I have to shut off the machine cold, which means I lose what I didn't save. I often tell myself to save before doing something else, but since saving re-sets the machine so that I have to re-arm the track(s) I'm recording on, I often just say I'll save after the next take....just to save myself 3.87 seconds. I've payed for that laziness many times. As recently as last week, I lost a complete vocal track because of it.

Funny thing is, whenever that happens, I'm pissed off at first, but almost always end up with a better take, or an great idea I wouldn't have thought of if the machine didn't freeze.
 
Had harmony singers in, did the background vocals, then recorded instrumentals over their tracks after they left. Had to recall and redo.

Bill Duncan
 
One of my fave's wasn't me, but just for fun. At Pacific Recorders in San Mateo, the assistant used our first 1/4 inch master reel for tape echo.

:eek:
 
i walked into a session casually late, (it was a 9am college thing)

tossed my jacket in the corner, hit the talkback button and told the guitarist we were gona start.

a few hours and several tracks of recording later, i realised the tossed jacket had landed perfectly over the 57 that used to be pointing at the guitar amp.


eugh..we live and learn huh?


use your ears, not your eyes folks......and just cos everything worked yesterday doesn't mean you can take it for granted today.
 
Two big gaffes I did recently--1) Recorded a live bluegrass set for some friends, including guest musicians from out of town. Due to a mis-communication, I only armed 7 tracks to record instead of 8, which was needed. I discovered my mistake about half way through the set. The missing track was, of course, from the out of town guest--I am still trying to get him back for an overdub session…2) another time at a long live acoustic session I did not notice that two of the side-address mikes got turned 180 degrees, because the foam pop filters that were in place obscured my view of the mikes' orientation. So I recorded some banjo and dobro tracks off of the back side of the mikes--very tinny and phasey stuff. Because the session was live, with a fair amount of bleed between channels, it was not possible to fix those parts only, so another session was required. :(
 
I've accidentlly burnt over countless takes doing punch ins in my life. On more than one occasion I've had various band members (mostly drummers) reach over and grab the handle of the drive bay caddies on the HD24 and say "what does this do?" and pull it out. After the second time that happened I moved the HD24 so the knuckle draggers can't reach it.
 
Track Rat said:
On more than one occasion I've had various band members (mostly drummers) reach over and grab the handle of the drive bay caddies on the HD24 and say "what does this do?" and pull it out.
Click to expand...

You are not alone with that one! Been there.:eek:
 
Yeah, it was 3:30 this morning.:mad:

I have a project I recorded last fall, and finally decided to mix down and try to make it into something a little more refined. Spent about 2 hours putting in some light compression and reverb and some level automation and due to some issues I had earlier the autosave was set for every 5 minutes. So every time I played the track through I was having to wait for the autosave. Anyways, I got to a point I wanted to save the entire mess and I got a "disc may be full" error. It was late and I didn't think about doing a "save as" which probably would have worked, and wound up losing all the mods to the file.

Fucking Sonar!

:mad:
 
Lent out my recorder to a friend who had been around for sessions enough I thought he knew what he was doing - until it came to the difference between starting a new track and ERASING THE WHOLE FRIGGIN DRIVE which he somehow got confused about so just pressed 'enter' when it asks 'are you sure?'
 
Tried to use both sides of a cassette and got some bleed through from the other side.
 
Well, once my band went in to record a 5 song EP at a friend's home studio. He found out that I had tons of experience in mixing and producing, but wasn't familiar at all with computer-based recording, so he agreed to let us record there for free. The deal was, he'd learn some production tips from me, and he'd teach me about using a DAW, and we'd consider it a fair trade.

He had the place set up pretty nice. Had made some efforts about killing reflections, and even had cobbled together an isolation booth. He had some decent mics, and I also brought along several of mine. The problem was the interface. He was using a Behringer mixer that sent the signals into the computer via firewire. So, we had Behringer mic pres AND Behringer AD converters. When it came time for mixdown, he also had monitors made by - guess who? I drew the line here and brought in my own quality monitors. This is where I began to hear that the raw tracks didn't sound all that good. But, I thought it would be "good enough for rock and roll."

In the end, when I got the final mixes home, I realized that, while the mixes themselves were perfect, the sound quality overall was just not very good at all. We had hoped to use this EP to promote the band to clubs, but decided that we couldn't use those mixes for ANYTHING at all, since the poor sound quality didn't make a favorable impression of the band. All that time invested in the project (two or three days of recording for four guys and two more days of mixdown for me) was totally wasted.

The lesson learned is that crappy sound quality isn't a good deal - even if it's FREE!
 
Captain Ego said:
Lent out my recorder to a friend who had been around for sessions enough I thought he knew what he was doing - until it came to the difference between starting a new track and ERASING THE WHOLE FRIGGIN DRIVE which he somehow got confused about so just pressed 'enter' when it asks 'are you sure?'
Click to expand...
So... was that one or two boo-boos?

Shirley it was backed up right? ;):D
 
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