Things that crappy bands do/say that make you go "WTF?!?"

B

buhzie2

Guest
I feel like I need to vent and share some experiences I've had while recording some local bands. I get a lot of young kids - high schoolers, inexperienced musicians, and I do a lot of turd polishing. :lol: Here are some of the more memorable things that make you literally face palm...

-Guitarists claiming they can hear the tubes working in their amp - it's a solid state marshall - sorry bud.
-Pointing to the foam on the walls of my studio and saying, "Yeah man, this stuff is pure sound proofing right here!"
-After telling them a million times to get new drumheads and strings prior to coming in, they come in with stock drumheads that look like the hood of a volkswagen after a hail storm and guitar strings that could give you tetanus just from touching them. :bah:
-Vocalists yells for a few seconds - "Yeah, I'm pretty warmed up."
-Going over the structure of a song for click tracks; ask them what tempo the song is at - "What's tempo? You mean 4/4?" :bah:
-Immediately replace shitty recorded kick drum sound with kick samples - "Yeah man, my kick sounds amazing! I love this kit!"
-Tell guitarists to tune up after hearing wildly out of tune solo - "Nah, I'm still good from before." o_O
-Make click track for whole song - drummer can't stay in time. Abandon click track. "Fuck it, we're doing it live!"

I bet everyone's got some great WTF - facepalm moments... Share!
 
:lol:haha, here's a personal one. "All your fancy plugins, amp modelers and cab impulses sound too digital for me... Lets mic up my Behringer practice amp with the radio shack mic I used for the shitty reference track I came in with..."
 
ZanetheVocalist said:
:lol:haha, here's a personal one. "All your fancy plugins, amp modelers and cab impulses sound too digital for me... Lets mic up my Behringer practice amp with the radio shack mic I used for the shitty reference track I came in with..."
Click to expand...

Yes! The band I'm working with now would rather me mic up their solid state marshall half stack than use amplitube metal with impulses... I'm gonna mic it anyway, then just ditch the tracks and blame it on the "EQ." :fu:
 
Guitarists telling me their thirty watt practice amp has more gain than any tube amp they've tried.

Bassists who need the lead guitar to show them their parts.

Vocalists who don't know theory giving the rest of the band musical advice.

drummers who can't play their parts on their own.

And every last one of those fuckers asking me to turn them up, and I twiddle some knob that's not even on, to them instantly going, " oh that sounds way better!"
 
buhzie2 said:
-After telling them a million times to get new drumheads and strings prior to coming in, they come in with stock drumheads that look like the hood of a volkswagen after a hail storm and guitar strings that could give you tetanus just from touching them. :bah:
Click to expand...

This pretty much sum it up! If a band comes in with old strings, i tell them they can either run to GC and buy a new set or gtfo
 
Yeah, I always am on the verge of being like, "Okay, listen. Get your shit together and come back to me when you're mature enough to play your own material and know your own instruments."


It always ends up with me editing sloppy drum and guitar parts 3 hours after the band leaves for the day....
 
guitarist comes in with a small line 6 practice amp. Hears tracking guitar tone (podfarm) and says "No, i want my guitar tone to sound just like this" (tone is soaked in reverb, gain is at 10 and mids at 0)

Deathcore singer comes in, listens to mix and says "yeah, but can you make it meaner sounding? I hear machine uses guitar distortion on his vocals" Put on shitty distortion "wow that sounds amazing"

Then i kill myself
 
robfromthedeep said:
"Yeah you can just edit that bit"
Click to expand...

Oh sure, I'll just edit that kick drum part to make it in time, since it was only an entire bar behind the click.

Hence, why I only do minor quantizing. I never fully adjust to the grid for these young bands. The world needs to know that you can't play in time. I'm not gonna fix you.
 
I was talking with some AE about these same things, he was telling me about how he goes around it:

Whenever I have a new client, I sort of 'audition' them beforehand. I sit them down, explain to them how I want to listen to their material first and give them advice, to see if they're ready to record YET, or not. I do this for free; this gives them confidence in my work ethics, they become much more receptive to what I have to say, and also shows them I'm not just about charging them $$$ and be done with it, but how I'm truly interested in creating a quality product along with them. Very often I'll send them to rehearse for at least a couple of weeks.. saves a ton hours of editing, re-tracking etc, and mainly, a lot of headaches. Of course sometimes they will suck so bad, it is better to just let them go.
 
Just YESTERDAY i was traking a "pop punk" band (Greenday meets Blink) and the call me an hour before their scheduled time and say .....

Them: Hey do you mind if we just bring a scratch vocal and guitar track recorded to a click? Our guitarist got called into work.
Me: Sure but be sure its tight to the click cause of its not its a waste of time
Them: Oh sure no problem

(Hour and a half later)

Them: Here is a USB stick with the tracks
Me: ok Cool

(Import in and take a listen)

Me: Ummm guys nothing is in time
Them: Well we didnt use a click we just winged it

Me: What time does your guitarist get off work?
Them: 2:30pm

Me: GTFO - See you at 2:30
 
I know everyone likes to rage on drummers the most in this forum, but hands down for me it's been the singer and the bass player in 90% of ill preparedness.

Drummers are usually stupid, but it's not that they don't care about sounding good on the recording they just don't seem to know any better a lot of the time and I can usually talk some sense into them....

Bass players on the other hand, HOLLY SHIT some of the laziest fuckers I have dealt with have been that instrument. Constant derping on how the tracks go etc... This is metal dickface your rocking 8th notes on a single note because that is all your band trusts you with and you can't even be bothered to get that right.

Then there is the band leader singer that hasn't a fucking clue how to play an instrument that has to interject every little stupid idea into everything anyone else is doing, except they lack the brain cells to know what the fuck they are talking about....

AND THEN THEY SING AND IT'S NOTHING SHORT OF A NIGHTMARE. Sometimes it's so bad I don't think they even hit 30% of the notes on key, so in comes auto tune to save the day... except it sounds like shit because I have to move a note 4 fucking whole steps to get it where it should have been.

Guitarists, welp they usually just don't know how to dial in an amp and I can deal with that since most guitarists can't anyway, (er have been able to thus far) but I have only had 1 band where the guitarist wasn't up to the task of getting it done.

Drummers: Usually just cheap stupid bastards, but haven't had to many that were so bad we couldn't make it work.
 
^ guess the reason for the bass player issue is, that most bass player didnt exactly chose to do that job, moreover they wore just the worst guitarist in the band and had to do it. passionated bass players are quite rare.
 
I'm trudging through a project now that I thought was going to be just an acoustic songwriter thing. NO. I felt good when the drummer supplied was killing it and I hardly had to worry about him being off the click. I was ready for an exciting project, now we are doing guitars 2 4hr days a week and we have only four usable guitar tracks. Last time dude was here he explained how some songs were too long and had me cut like 1 minute out of two of them and noted that he didn't think it would be that difficult to do since it's on a COMPUTER. holy shit. i cut this dude an amazing deal, we've been doing 2 days a week since June and i'm totally pissed.
 
I would like my tone to be old school like this band, have the filthy low end of this guitar tone, the high-mid of Gorguts, the Low-Mid of Demilich and the punch of this tone.

So you basicly want me to mic 4 different sort of amps and chop off all the sections you want from what you just described so you can have your tone, right.
 
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