Dumbest studio mistake(s) you've ever made?

[Blacklight_Studio]

I have once almost completely deleted my "Productions" folder from the hard drive. All the sessions (hundreds of them including the ones that were in the mixing progress etc) were in that folder. I have just reinstalled Windows without a format and the old "windows" folder remained, I was trying to delete it from the boot cd and occasionly highlighted it along with "productions" folder and hit remove without any recycling. I noticed the audio files being removed at the progress bar, but it was too late. Almost half of the projects were gone. I can't forgive myself for that, it took me SO much time to do lots of work again. Happyly I track to another computer and all my recordings sessions are kept there, so I just had to do all mixing and editing work again on about 4 entire albums that were almost done before I "deleted" them )) This was not the first time though )) I have once occasionly removed the .NPR file (nuendo project) along with some unneeded audio files in the folder of the project. )) Very cool to have all the audio data but without an actual project file you can do nothing with it since thay are all not consolidated and there were just hundreds of cuts everywhere. I told the client that it was a moster super virus deleted his project file )) and I had to give him free time to rerecord everything from the scratch. So please BE CAREFUL WITH COMPUTERS! Aspecialy deleting stuff))

 

[Uladyne]

Letting bands dial in their own tones.

:facepalm:

 

[Paulie!]

anyone else know there own song so fucking well and are so prepared with it that as soon as the count off is done and you go to hit the very 1st chord of the song you actually hit the wrong one? How about multiple times?

guilty

me toooooo! I hate that..

I was recording my old band and the guitarist was laying down a perfect take and fucked that last chord up... just a quick punch to fix though!

 

[ahjteam]

I have made the "wrong input" mistake a few times... Once I was wondering why the fuck is the bass mic signal so quiet and sounds like shit, turned up the gain like hell and after like 3 takes I realized it was not the MD421 in front of the bass amp, but the C414 in front of the guitar amp we used to track cleans, 5 meters away in an angle facing away from the bass amp. Then on the same sessions we miced up the guitar cab with SM57 and on bands request I added MD421 there too. I think on the first song I accidentally recorded the SM57 on both channels of on the lead guitar players takes, and that song had the best guitar tone on the album. Never told the band.

 

[The Unavoidable]

I have made the "wrong input" mistake a few times...

Yeah me too, most ladies gets pretty pissed about that.

 

[Skinny Viking]

Yeah me too, most ladies gets pretty pissed about that.

just gotta know how to talk to them

 

[Joshua Wickman]

I lost the overhead tracks to a song i was working on for a band once. I don't know how the fuck it happened but good old protools opened up with the missing audio files window. Thank god i took cymbal samples and just rebuilt the drummers cymbal performance off the tom and snare mics.

I have also done the bad routing thing and got tracks mixed up.

My most recent fail was in the last project I was tracking, my left overhead mic lost all its high end. I think having 3 room mics recording (L,R,C) kept me from hearing it. We had got some really great takes and the drummer was tired as shit after a 8 hour day. I solo the overheads when I was about to edit and realize, the left overhead mic has no high end. We did 3 tracks and you can hear the high end slowly going away over the first two tracks. I think it was a pad issue on the mk012's, so i hope anyways. I just had them modded by Mr. Jolly (Oktavamod) and it was my first time using them so i was supper pissed. So needless to say we had to retrack drums after a 8 hour day of tracking, the drummer was not that thrilled about that. I don't think this was so much my fault, as it was the equipment but still a EPIC FAIL none the less.

 

[::XeS::]

PT deleted some of my tracks too...don't know why. Fortunately they were the kick mic and the kick trigger tracks..and I had already printed the edited kick to another track...
Not engaged tom another time...but I recognized it after a take.
Sometimes when I finish to record, after some days, I think I should have done some things a little different...or try other things....or change the mic positions and find a better spot, etc...

 

[jeid]

Wasn't me (although I have done some stupid shit) but we were tracking an EP in a studio nearby and our drummer was having a bastard time getting the track nailed. On about the 7th take he finally got it. He was outside smoking. Myself and the producer were listening back to the track "Is there no floor tom hits on this track?" he asked. "Yeah, it starts with loads of floor tom"

I went to the drum kit, tom mic had been unplugged. He overdubbed all the floor tom hits. D'oh!

 

[pipaguapique]

i had this country/pop/rock band recording their demos with a Fender Deville that i mic'd with a SM57 but i was recording acoustic guitar in the same room with my Rode NT1...the whole way through the recording i was like "Dang! that DeVille sounds like Poop!!"

it was becuase i was picking it up with the Rode from far away...*FACEPALM*

 

[C_F_H_13]

I've made some EPIC mistakes in my time for sure. Everyone does sooner or later it's how you learn... Here's a few gems....

1. Was tracking a live off the floor band. Was using so many inputs/busses on the SSL that I didn't realize I had overlapped on one. Snare bottom in the guitar amp 1 track......luckily I had DI's and reamped while the band went to lunch.

2. Was backing up to a second drive using a sync program and backed up the wrong way and deleted all the new stuff I had just tracked. Luckily the studio still had it on their drive.

3. Tracked the first drumtrack of a new record without realizing the external clock was set to 48k and the session was set to 44.1k....disaster. Had to start over.

I've also witnessed some amazingly stupid ones...

1. Runner moving a mic stand, fully extended straight up (about 30 feet) with a U87 in a shock mount, instead of moving the stand then putting the mic in. Mic fell and split in 2. He almost cried.

2. Asked a runner once to document everything and then recall a song. He skipped the document part and just started recalling stuff. When it came to recall then first song, he tried to talk his way out of it but finally accepted that he didn't write anything down...bad bad bad bad.

3. Just last week a guitar player came into my studio. He was constantly forgetting to turn off his tuner, and then would get mad he didn't have any sound in his headphones. As he got progressively more upset about this he'd start really hammering on his guitar. Decides to switch to a mesa head, forgets to plug in cabinet. Turns it on, and starts strumming as hard as he can wondering why he's still getting no sound. The mesa is now dead (ish).

 

[brianhood]

I still think the data transfer fuckup on Underoath's Lost in the Sound of Separation is hilariously awesome - no OH tracks ever made their way over to Bendeth; the cymbal sound is entirely from the room mics.

Most of the "mistakes" you guys have posted have been pretty minimal, but this one actually makes me feel a little better hahaha

 

[colonel kurtz]

damn dude OH mics aren't your friend

i had to erase about 6 months of my own material along with a couple other people's mixes because it was all stored on my internal HD, and my system got nailed with some wicked trojans

needless to say, that was not a cool day

 

[dale_a_smith]

Not so much recording as mixing..

Did a mixing session with the band present, just to get the tracks 90% done as quickly as possible. They where really happy with it, so I took it away to finish..

Got home, and spent the next 2 weeks tweeking every element of the mix, until it was miles away from the mix that the band liked, and, didn't at any point along the way back up the project.

Back at their place, it sounded awful. Gutted..

I had to borrow a Cd of the rough mix I'd done for them, and spent the following days mixing it back to how it was originally..

Always, always save/rename the project if your gunna f*ck about along the way..

 

[OctoberRust]

This isn't necessarily a studio mistake but I'm always actually shaking my head when I realize that I've been doing fine-tuning around for minutes and then realized something wasn't set right so the turning did not create any difference, but I thought I heard it anyway. Scary!

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

Always, always save/rename the project if your gunna f*ck about along the way..

I always save the project with a new running number every now and then, and describe the work phase in the file name. "Song name REC 1", "Song name REC 2", "Song name EDIT 1", "Song name MIX 1" etc. I usually end up with dozens of project files for a song, but because I keep a TXT log of all the major changes per file name, I can easily recall the situation I need.

 

[Dalinkwent48@aim.com]

I JUST made a mistake, Im about to start recording drums, I have everything wired up and ready to go. I go to set the levels for the OH's and all I hear is static/hissing. Checked the cables and routing. all of that was fine. So for shits and giggles I throw a 57 on the same input, same static shit. I go outside and have a smoke to calm down thinking something on my 002 just fucked up on me and where I was gonna get money to replace it. I walk inside, only to realize that I had somehow put fucking amplitube on the OH tracks. I dont even know when i opened amplitube, coulda been the drummer messing around on my mac when I went to my car before this all started, could have been me just not paying attention and opening it for some reason. Anyways, yeah, FML

 

[shredder10]

I have DELETED tracks while trying to DUPLICATE them! damn them PT Gui designers!! haha

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

Oh, this is a recent one. I was baffled because the talkback connection didn't work at a studio. I literally crawled behind the racks to fuck with the patchbays, did alternative connections to fix it, switched mics a dozen times, cursed everyone related to the studio in my mind for fucking up a simple connection like that, and after an hour of troubleshooting I happened to open up the gain of the preamp used for talkback just a bit more. Worked fine. Thank god no-one was there to see.

 

[ahjteam]

Most of the "mistakes" you guys have posted have been pretty minimal, but this one actually makes me feel a little better hahaha

One thing I remembered was that when I was working with an old Tascam ADAT record, I forgot to press record in the beginning of the live show, and it was like 2 hour show. I did record the soundcheck tho. But the band sucked, so no big loss there.