Little dumb things you did, funny things that happened during the tinkering/performing/engineering process, stagecraft gone wrong, non-fatal electrocutions etc. Last night I did a mic shoot-out on one of my jam-mates' guitar cabs in preparation for today's session. Audix i5, Samson Q2, Sennheiser e604, EV RE15 and PL33, AKG D550, and Heil PR-31BW. I'd record a riff, swap mics, rinse-repeat. Every playback sounded kinda samey; hollow, mehy, and with way too much sympathetic snare wire vibration in the background. I kept trying more mics and getting the same results, to the point that I was questioning my senses. Could all these microphones deliver the same tone? Is tone REALLY all in the hands???I'm not sure what finally tipped me off, but eventually I realized what was up. I was recording and listening back to the room microphone, which is on the mixer channel next to the guitar mic. I repeated the comparison process and the Audix ended up getting the sound I wanted.So tell us, what dumb shit have you witnessed or done?

garthplinko wrote:In the early days of DAW, we found out on mix day that I apparently deleted the final day's work with an out-of-town client by saving the old session over the new one.That must have been a truly sickening feeling. What did you do? During my last paid audio gig, I tripped over the power cable for the digital recorder/mixer and lost a couple of takes, but they were shitty takes thankfully. The band never knew.

The Alloys EP had to be re-recorded due to momentary skips that showed up in the recording, which I wrote about on here once. My instinct was that they were due to the laptop's Sudden Motion Sensor being tripped by the sound pressure from the bass amp (proximity pictured), but I later figured they were due to an inadequate buffer size.I can't remember if I ever followed up, but it was discovered during the second tracking attempt that it absolutely was the Sudden Motion Sensor. Every single setting was where it needed to be, but we were still getting the skips. This second time, though, we had at least arranged for a backup recorder, i.e. FM pastlives' MacBook Air. With spinny drives out of the equation, everything went smoothly save for some clicks and pops that had to be RX'd out.

Preface this one with that Lou Barlow may have coined the term "Ear Knife"."Ear Knife" is accidentally cutting loose a squall of piercing feedback. In my little circle of "Recording" friends, we lump accidentally blasting someone with a damaging amount of signal into the "Ear Knife" category.So many times someone got ear knifed.

This happened 15 or 16 years ago but...Was practicing before a show and bass cab sounded HORRIBLE, lots of crazy high end fizz that I'd never heard before.My techie friend was over (their band was also playing and we shared a space). We checked cables, no change. Different distortion pedal, still got the same horrible sound. Took off the grill and ended up pulling out each speaker from the 4x10 and they all had proper impedance.Turned out, THE FUCKING TWEETER HAD GOTTEN SWITCHED ON SOMEHOW. At that point, I'd never heard it with the tweeter on and it was disgusting and horrible and we spent at least an hour figuring out we just had to put that switch back.Fucking tweeters.

I was recording a demo a few weeks ago and I couldn't figure out why, for the life of me, I couldn't get my rack tom to pan correctly. It kept wanting to live in the right of the mix, but I wanted it in the center, so I tried panning left a bit, but it just faded out of the mix entirely.It turns out that I had told Reaper to record that track in stereo, so the tom mic was in the right channel, and the snare mic was in the left. I used some black magic to separate the channels and get rid of the doubled snare track.

Was in a jamspace putting a master volume in my friend's YBA, - these fucking things run with like 600V on the plates, which is scarier than 400V for some reason. So just as I was putting the meter leads on the plate pins to make sure I didn't screw with the plate voltage, someone buzzes into the jamhall and it's one of those industrial buzzer type things so midsession musicians can hear it, I jumped out of my skin, but thankfully never touched anything and didn't get shocked like when I...Put a master volume in my YBA-1, I was 20 or something and didn't know much and ended up making the chassis live. Luckily my dad was working in the garage at the same time and just finished telling me to keep my hand in my pocket. That hurt a lot. Everytime I work on an amp now I check that chassis & power switch for voltage before turning it on with a stick.... except for...... I was modifying a champ knockoff for someone, to make it a little train-wreck style single ended thing, and I was having so much fun swapping components, playing and hearing the changes that one of the times I left it plugged in and got shocked through the soldering iron. Now I never plug the amp I'm working on near my bench I always walk across the room just to make sure, except for..... I had a usb powered signal generator and I was putting a sine wave through an amp to check voltages, went to page down on the schematic and got shocked through the aluminum laptop chassis.That one was surprising.

In the middle of a vocal take, I hit a wrong cue/headphone mix or something button somewhere and blew a couple of NS-10 tweeters, not before unleashing a hellish squawl of feedback to me and my boss, and Felix Cavaliere's headphones who happened to be the guy in the vocal booth.