Facepalm Moments in the Studio

[RedDog]

What's the worst facepalm you've had while recording?

I was talking to a buddy, his was pulling up an amp sim and tweaking the settings, not realizing it was on a muted track, and imagining he was hearing a difference.

Mine most recently was muting the drum group and hitting record. Twice. And both times, the guitarist just kept fuckin' playing, which made me feel like even more of a dumbass when I stopped him.

Then there's those times you're not paying attention and just hit play, and go through a whole freaking take, just to realize, "Shit, I didn't record ANY of that " then you gotta play it off and act like you meant not to do it.

Man, I fuck up a lot!

What's you's guys stories?

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

Spending quite a while crawling behind the racks troubleshooting the studio's patch bays to figure out why the fuck the TB connection wouldn't work.

After several mics and cables, when the band was 15 minutes away from the studio, I cranked up the gain on the TB chain.

 

[Morgan C]

"Ok yeah that was a good take, let's move on to the next section."

*come mixtime*

"Oh God, that wasn't a good take AT ALL."

I dunno why, but I'm a terrible judge of performance DURING the performance. Afterwards I'm really good, but then its too late and all I can do is tune and quantize the fuck out of it.

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

"Ok yeah that was a good take, let's move on to the next section."

*come mixtime*

"Oh God, that wasn't a good take AT ALL."

I dunno why, but I'm a terrible judge of performance DURING the performance. Afterwards I'm really good, but then its too late and all I can do is tune and quantize the fuck out of it.

It's the heat of the moment. The clock is ticking, everyone is anxious to get their parts down and you're worrying about a hundred things at once, so your judgment can easily get clouded. It's the same with spotting tuning problems. It develops really quick, though

 

[Morgan C]

It's the heat of the moment. The clock is ticking, everyone is anxious to get their parts down and you're worrying about a hundred things at once, so your judgment can easily get clouded. It's the same with spotting tuning problems. It develops really quick, though

It's a little bit that, but it's more that I get caught up in the music (this isn't a full-time thing for me so I've only tracked/mixed bands whose music I really like, and the musicians are decent).. most things sound more passionate (especially vocals + drums) and generally just tighter and better when you're hearing them in person as opposed to playing back. I guess I take more of a producer's role when I'm tracking and unfortunately the engineering side of it sometimes suffers a little.

 

[Williamn]

Solo a track.. tweaking the comp or EQ/whatever thinking "Ah much better !".
Find out I was tweaking a plugin window relating to another track then the one I had solo.. or finding out that I had the plugin bypassed

oh and +1 on Morgan C post.

 

[ahjteam]

I posted this same on the gearslutz thread a few years ago, but I think it was one of the most facepalmish moments I've experienced during a session.

We were tracking vocals and the take sounded awesome like, really great. Then the singer comes to the control room to listen to it and I hear this really metallic sound, it sounded awful. I went thru all the tracks soloed but I didn't hear it anywhere, so we just decided to retrack it as we thought that there was something wrong with the take. Again, brilliant execution from the singer, he comes to listen to it, same thing again. A metallic sound that was not supposed to be there and it sounded like the mix had no low end at all. Then I went to the play room and noticed what the cause was. We were tracking thru an analog console and the singers mic was still open. He had placed the headphones on top of the microphone, like the microphone was a head, even tho there was a chair to put the headphones on to So when I listened to the track again, the track sounded normal. But what was amazing that the singer did it AGAIN on the next take, so when we listened to the take, I just muted his mic track.

 

[Randyisgod15]

My friend wanted to submit a vocal cover to Dark Funeral because they were (are?) looking for a new vocalist. So I'm checking levels and I can't get more than a faint whisper when he's practically chewing on the mic. For a minute or two I'm like "what the fuck, did my pre take a dump?". In a moment of recollection, I reluctantly (and very slowly) turn around to see I never switched the mic cable from the e906 on my cab. Had a good laugh about it but I felt like an idiot.

 

[drew_drummer]

Recording 8 channels of kick drum microphone, instead of the whole kit.

What a twat!!

 

[professorlamp]

forgetting to arm the snare track on one of the songs, I then have to do a bugger load of things to salvage it from the room microphone and trigger it off of that instead, took the best part of 2 hours

 

[botus99]

Client: "Can you fast forward to the breakdown"

Me: "......."

Client: "The one that goes 'juh juh jugga-jugga-juh'"

Me: "You've gotta be WAY more specific there buddy"

 

[HandsOfDespair]

Here's something that happened to me recently:

I just recorded the drums for the single of a band, and the kit was a really good DW kit, so I took samples of everything. When I got home I did a quick rough mix with the ghost tracks, just to be sure everything was tight. The day after, I sliced all my samples, and made 2 TCI's for kick and snare. Then I tried the TCI on the tracks and I was like OH SHIT THIS SOUNDS GOOD, I'M REALLY GETTING BETTER AT MICING DRUMS, I AM THE NEXT JENS BOGREN. Then I tried to blend with other samples instead of using 100% my samples, and there was a lot of phasing due to the fact that I cut my samples not precisely enough. So I re-opened my drum project where I sliced and exported the sample, but re-did all the slicing more precisely. Then I noticed something in my console view...

I had Trigger on both my kick and snare tracks...So when I was thinking HOLY SHIT MY DRUMS RECORDING SKILLS ARE BECOMING GREAT, ILL POST THE TCI ON SNEAP FORUM TONIGHT, I was actually listening to...slate samples.

 

[dale_a_smith]

"Ok yeah that was a good take, let's move on to the next section."

*come mixtime*

"Oh God, that wasn't a good take AT ALL."

haha.. awsome

 

[dale_a_smith]

during a live recoding at the studio..

Band " so we got 4 tracks done "

me " 3 tracks "

after investigation

band " where's the first track "

me " I thought that was soundcheck "

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

lol. "I thought that was soundcheck."

 

[P-E]

So when I was thinking HOLY SHIT MY DRUMS RECORDING SKILLS ARE BECOMING GREAT, ILL POST THE TCI ON SNEAP FORUM TONIGHT, I was actually listening to...slate samples.

Hahahahaha, wow.

Client: "Can you fast forward to the breakdown"

Me: "......."

Client: "The one that goes 'juh juh jugga-jugga-juh'"

Me: "You've gotta be WAY more specific there buddy"

THIS. hahahahahahaha, especially when recording some kind of "breakdowncore" bands like the one I did last time.

 

[jangoux]

record two times the same side of the overheads. Or no kick drum track and perceive it afterwards. Hat to paste each one of the kicks on a 6 min song :/

 

[Scott Horner]

What's the worst facepalm you've had while recording?

I was talking to a buddy, his was pulling up an amp sim and tweaking the settings, not realizing it was on a muted track, and imagining he was hearing a difference.

Mine most recently was muting the drum group and hitting record. Twice. And both times, the guitarist just kept fuckin' playing, which made me feel like even more of a dumbass when I stopped him.

Then there's those times you're not paying attention and just hit play, and go through a whole freaking take, just to realize, "Shit, I didn't record ANY of that " then you gotta play it off and act like you meant not to do it.

Man, I fuck up a lot!

What's you's guys stories?

This, this and this. Haha I've experienced of all those things. The not hitting record one really sucks though, haha. I usually play it off by saying lets go ahead and double that part.

Another thing that really fucking irked me is when my old guitarist would come record demos and he would finger-tap the drums on his palm. I would start programming and after placing just one or two kick hits on the grid he would immediately stop me and say, "No, it's supposed to go like this...(tap-tap..)" It's like he thought there was a button I could push to generate the entire song immediately from just his brain waves. I finally made him go into my living room and play PS3 while I worked. Fucking ignorant.

 

[bedubaya]

One of my first proper recordings,

Was using an analogue console and never panned the tracks on the desk hard left and right going to the correct groups. so at the end of the recording i realized that track 1 had snare and bass drum, same on track 2, then track 3 had Hihats and tom1 and so on.
Made mixing an absolute nightmare!

 

[Mago]

Wondering why the overhead tracks are so low on the drums, making sure every cable is tight, phantom power is on wtf is up?
15mins later, me to our drummer:
"dude...did we set the mics to "ON"?"