My first real flub as an apprentice

[DaveBlack]

I've gone a long time without screwing up (but then again, I'm not normally put in situations where i can screw up) but last night, the owner asked me to meet with the band because he was going to be late. He told me to fire everything up and basically, if they wanted to start recording, open up their template and hit record.

We get through 3 songs and when he walks in, he kinda whispers to me "notice anything wrong with those drum tracks?" Thats when I realized I didn't turn on the Mindprint or The Langevin gear and recorded all three songs with no overheads. The damn track lanes are so small and he records at such low levels that you cant tell if somethings recording or not lol.

I felt like an idiot but luckily he's a good guy and kinda covered for me and i assumed some responsibility too. The drummer was tight too so he nailed it again in a few takes. Then he told me a story about how he recorded almost a full album with the vocal mic backwards. It couldve been worse but I still felt like a stupid ass and costing him extra time.

Anyone have any stories to share?

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

Don't worry, you're an apprentice so you're there to learn and it seems the guy knows it. Just show you're genuinely sorry and learn from your mistakes and it's all good. Mistakes like that can be fucking awkward, but they teach you to pay attention really quickly.

By the way, if you can't see the waveforms while tracking, just zoom the waveforms vertically. While it's all about the ears, a little visual aid still goes a long way!

 

[Paulie!]

Oh man, this one time I was doing a bands "demo/ep" and I somehow accidently moved the master fader's pan about 60% left before I saved the session.

So when I reopened it the next day and made a sample cd for them to see if everything was cool in the mix, the left side was blaring compared the right.. They were like "wtf mate".

Fun stuff, that was an easy fix, but I felt like a retard for not checkinig before I rendered it to disc.

-Paul

 

[mva801]

Good thing your owner is a cool dude. Mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow. Biggest one I've had is recording a DI along with a miced cab for Bass. We liked the bass cab tone, so I got the DI dialed in and then just lowered the fader in PT, intending to keep it if needed for re-amping purposes. Well, these guys went to another studio to overdub some vocals, and sent our studio an email freaking out cuz the Bass was all distorted. Sure enough, about 30 seconds into the first song, the DI track developed some weird noise, sounded like a bad/ dirty patch cable, but since it wasn't clipping, I never double checked it. Their management was bent out of shape. We offered to just re-track the bass for free, but they haven't been back since. It was a pretty big band too.

Oh well. You just have to look out for it in the future and keep on truckin!

 

[Pedro Teixeira]

It was cool the owner was a good guy dude. That kind of stuff happens to me sometimes and when it happens I pretend its not my fault just for teh giggles ^^, like sometimes Im tracking drums, start countdown and forget to punch in, stop, press talkback, "that was cool one more take", when the take was actually a good one!

 

[dasbrootal]

sometimes Im tracking drums, start countdown and forget to punch in, stop, press talkback, "that was cool one more take", when the take was actually a good one!

i'm guilty of this more times than i care to admit. haha.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

I wouldn't even sweat that man. Shit happens.

 

[abigor731]

when i recently recorded the my first album for another band i forgot to record the high tom track,
luckily i was triggering it anyway so it was easy to fix
i just copied the mid tom track to trigger the high tom, and moved it like one quarter note backwards and it worked, because that drummmer did the same tom fill over and over again anyway

 

[vaiman]

Sounds a cool guy as you mentioned.
Theres nothing like that sinking feeling in your stomach when you realise something has gone wrong lol

Like when I put unleaded in my boss's diesel car
He was not so cool.

 

[soundsunderground]

I'd say your bigger flub was not recording a small pass, then soloing each track to check for technical issues.

 

[DaveBlack]

I'd say your bigger flub was not recording a small pass, then soloing each track to check for technical issues.

Jay? Is that you? jk. I'd say that goes hand in hand with the whole thing.

Being in a real deal studio with real deal equipment, crazy fucked up patchbays and a different DAW, mac instead of windows, etc. was so intimidating at first (I tried to play it off like it wasn't though) but now I've started to get used to it for the most part - I will always hate digital performer though.

Better to take that extra two minutes to check everything than to assume its all good and end up with something you cant fix when you start mixing.

 

[JayB]

Wow that sucks dude, at least he was cool about it. Obviously hindsight is 20/20 , but I would've also done a small section and checked everything out before recording the whole cd.

 

[jval]

i was assisting at a studio and Usher & Timbaland were there for the week. They had their own engineers with them (including Jimmy Douglass!) so I was really just there for whatever random help they needed. Anyways one night I walk by the control room and the engineer yells to me "Quick, can you go put up a vocal mic? Any Neumann I don't care, just do it fast!!" So I put up a U89 and go back to whatever I was doing... 20 minutes later he comes out and tells me the mic was sounding really weird and he couldn't figure it out... until he went out and saw that it was backwards. ugh.
lots of funny stories from that job..

 

[madbutcher]

Years ago when I worked at a studio, some teenage girl came in with her mom so she could basically sing over a song on a karake cd. Recorded the whole thing, bounced, burned a disk, sent them out smiling. They called saying the cd sounds weird and low pitched. Looked at the apogee converter, it was on 48. DOH! But, when she came back, the girl said she thought it sounded funny and a little fast singing to, but didn't want to say anything. The 1 time a client speaking could have helped.......

Worst part, the song was "I will always love you"