stupidest/worst mistake you've made in a session

[Kilroy]

Hey, what was your guys' worst mistake made in the studio. I think this is a good learning experience.

Mine was when i was assisting a session with this jazz group and it seemed that everything was going wrong. We couldn't figure out why we werent getting anything coming out of the bass. We checked that patches and everything was fine. After a while I figured out what was wrong.

One of the labels on the patch bay is in two pieces. So one end slipped under the other so the numbering of the mic/line in the live room was off by one and we didn't even notice. We wasted an hour of this groups time and it was mostly my fault . Most embarissing

[penrithmatt]

i was assisting on a stiff little fingers record.after the mixes were printed to half inch we would wind the tape back and run them off onto a dat for safety.i would always leave the half inch parked at the end leader,ready to go for the next mix,with the counter set to zero.anyway,time for the next mix to go down,i roll the tape.out of the corner of my eye i see a splice go through,the edit i had done on the last song.i have a small heart attack.i have just printed a new master over a previous one!!!!
taking a deep breath i confess my mistake............the producer was totally cool.we wound to the leader,where it should have started from,and printed the mix.then we patched the dat up two channels of the board and printed that back to tape where the song had been prior to my erasure....aparantly they had listened to the tape whilst i was out getting sandwiches and forgot to tell me.

i have a friend who had a big shock when he dropped in to record a guest rapper.his assistant had aligned the tape machine and left every track in record on the remote.as you could arm tracks from the board the remte was in the machine room next to the tape machine.rapper goes into live room,my friend arma a track from the console winds o the place in the song,gives it some preroll,rolls tape.as he drops into record all he can hear is the rapper saying "where's the track gone?".he looks at the machine.24 red lights.
oh dear.
they take a break.they wheel in another machine.as the song is all loops they manage to copy a section of the song to another piece of tape and cut that into the original song.everybodie is happy.assistant gets a bollocking and a lesson in tape editing.

cheers
matthew
www.allairestudios.com

[Electricide]

the studio keeps a sheet in the control room of all the projects currently on the hard drive (RADAR II). Once a backup is made, you indicate the date and initial it. Well, the back up tape fritzed in the middle of backing up five songs, and I went back to determine if the tape had any good backups on it. The next day the engineer asked if I had straightened out that problem, and I said yes, and he erased the HD. Well, since it fritzed in the middle of backing up, it never actually backed up the last song. I had noted this on the sheet, but when he asked, I assumed he meant "is the machine working right today?" the wording of his question threw me off, and neither of us checked the sheet.

The client had gone home with board mixes of all the takes that day, and of course, OF COURSE, when he comes in he wants to use that take, out of the four he did; and the other three were backed up. So, we had to give free studio time to retrack. Ick.

[Lazy_Q]

I've pulled the classic trick of piping board feedback into a singer's headphones. Drops 'em straight to the ground. They get all paranoid after that.

[Rodgre]

My biggest mistake was saying "Why yes, of course I'll record your son's hardcore band."

I've done all the others too.... accidental punch-ins. Erasing drum tracks. Talkback mic feedback in the headphones. Accidentally having the hi-hat mic subbed with the bass track, Running 44.1Khz mixes while the computer is sync'd to a 48Khz clock...

Roger

[Nozzler]

not hitting the record button to catch the spontanious magic. back ups are always my worst nightmare and also leaving reels of tape on their sides and rewound so it's at the head for the infamous print bleed. unless you're going for that tape affect.

[graveleye]

i got into it with my clients during the mixdown once...
The artist was happy with the mixes, but the money man was an anti-bass Nazi and he was just flat making the mix sound like ass - less bass less bass... until during a song I muted the bass track all the way. No bass. I turned around and said "so how does that sound?" I am proving my point real good I think to myself...
ooooh it sounds GOOD now he says.
So I left it that way and totally forgot about it, thinking I would turn it back on. Well I didnt, and a few weeks later they came back cryyyying that there was NO BASS in the song and I had to scramble to remix the whole damn thing and it turned into a major headache.
I did learn to not always give them what they want. If their idea sounds like shit, then fight it as long as you can. Its tough, because you end up in a catch-22, damned if you do or damned if you dont. Then if it they win, and it still sounds bad and you let it out of the studio, do you allow your name to be attached to it??? tough decisions... verry fine lines to cross with picky customers...

Here is the WORST mistake I ever did, and I got no one to blame but my temper.
I was setting up a session for my own band. The guitarist was a well known irritant to me in that he liked to play with my gear. Well I had a reel of tape with a recent song in my hand when I looked over and that sonuvabitch was unplugging my rig and moving shit around and taking stuff out of my rack etc etc... I completely lost my temper and hurled that reel of 1/2" against the door - it was a spectacular spaghetti snake explosion, and the tape was so damage that it couldnt even be rewound. In a further rage I threw the pile of tape in the garbage and THREW IT AWAY.I lost the song completely, and to this day I cannot remember how any of it went as I had written it at the console, no notes, no lyrics, no charts. I remmeber liking the song, but thats it.. it is now just gone gone gone. I will never lose my temper again like that....

[Seventh Wave Studio]

oh yea. hitting "record" without arming the track. At the end, the singer said, "Can I hear it back?" Nothing there. it's hard enough to get a good vocal from someone in the small window of the good voice without me doing that!

As I tell many people...

The first 100 bands are just practice.

In any other scale in the world, if you get 98% right , you get an A+. In recording, if you get even 1% wrong, you get an F. Whole thing is blown because of one button pushed wrong. It doesn't matter that you pushed the last 8,000 right.

www.seventhwavestudio.com <----looky

[GT40sc]

Back in the ADAT daze, 16-track setup...

Basic tracks on the first machine, overdubs on the second one...

While working on the vocal overdubs, for some reason I had to take the tapes out of the machines, and...

I PUT THEM BACK IN THE WRONG ORDER.

Went to work on the next vocal part, and accidentally erased some of the drum tracks...OOPS.

We ended up not using that song anyway...

Oh well,

[joel hamilton]

I am with rodgre. I have done all the regular stupid moves. I have hit record across all 24 when I was supposed to be doing just a bass fix, MORE THAN ONCE.

That rules.

.....heapdphone feedback, cosole feedback (particulairly nasty on a neve 80 series)...

burned takes that were the "keepers".

recorded conversations that almost got me in fights (the vocal mic was up, and I thought I was wiping a reel, and two of the guyus were talking bad talk about two others in the band... ouch. the control room volume was down, thank god).

overdubbed an amazing vocal to the wrong take. All kinds of stupid shit, especially early on when I let myself work for like 90 hours in a row or something ridiculous.

This is a funny thread. Anyone who calls themselves an engineer has made these mistakes, or will eventually!

[tiger vomitt]

my worst mistake? hard to say as mistakes are the only way to learn...

but yoda aside, one of the worst i had was-

i was just starting to get work in a studio that was all analog. the studio owner had no idea how to use a computer, the guy didnt even have email. he wants to go digital. i set up a system for him and then proceed (like an idiot) to teach him how to use it so well, that in a week i was out of work. i had no idea he'd pick it up so fast.. really busy studio too with good clients.

the guy was kind of a jerk tho, so i still dont know if this was good or bad. and ultimately it doesnt matter because it was how it went down. if things went differently the universe would collapse.

[black mariah]

it was a song for my band. We'd laid down the basic stuff and I was about to add a second guitar track. I hit record and about halfway through the song I realise that I didn't turn the other channels off. I ended up wiping half the damn song.

More than once I've made the mistake of saying "Sure, I'll record your band." It's always a crapshoot.

[@?,*???&?]

Doing the work, i.e. overdubbing nearly all of the guitars on a major label album project for the engineering credit I was promised by the producer- only to have the album come out without my credit and have the producer (who I'd worked on over 2o projects with) blame the band manager for the error. Later he'd say as well, "that I can't afford to give up the credit". That's when you know you've been a house engineer too long and that it's time for management to negotiate your deals.

[gravy boat]

Doing the work, i.e. overdubbing nearly all of the guitars on a major label album project for the engineering credit I was promised by the producer- only to have the album come out without my credit and have the producer (who I'd worked on over 2o projects with) blame the band manager for the error. Later he'd say as well, "that I can't afford to give up the credit". That's when you know you've been a house engineer too long and that it's time for management to negotiate your deals.

I think they mean what mistakes YOU have made, not the producer, lol.
I've erased tracks, made bad punches, all the usual stuff. Mostly on my own bands though.

[@?,*???&?]

Once while assembling spare bits of tape from outtake reels I walked away from the 2" machine as it was winding through the remainder of the reel. I sort of gave it a visual inspection and thought, "yeah, that should fit on this reel" and then I went about my business. As the tape winds close to the end, I got back over to the machine just in time to grab the freeform extra almost 2 inches of pancake loosely flopping around the take-up reel. Being an independent record, every spare bit of tape was precious. I remember casually winding the tape back onto the other reel by hand- for about 15 minutes! One would think I would have learned because the same thing had happened several years earlier when I was working on the Dramarama mix session for 'Hi fi Sci fi" with the 1/2" 2-track master. I remember Chris Carter looking up from the couch about the same time Chris Fuhrman and myself looked up and then he remarked, "Is that our master?!?" Difficult part about that was that it was an ATR machine and with the angle those things lay at, it's difficult when you get near the end of a reel. Library wind or not, if it's not on the reel, it's a pain in the ass!