Recording Disasters

PaulBrewer

What's the worst recording disaster that's befallen you ...?

As a young (thin) boy I managed to erase a whole albums worth of backing tracks because another party put his tapes on the 'To Be Erased' shelf.
Those were the days when lads erased tapes for reuse.

I also was present when backing vocals were being recorded on an otherwise completed track and the multitrack machine went into record in all 24 tracks destroying the middle 8.

The one that hurt me the most was an album I was recording on an Akai DR16 which calved 2 mixes into 16 songs ....

You'll find I back up quite a bit these days .

krd

My zoom died - won't power up. And there's maybe a hundred sketches on it .. that I didn't back up. And some are actually really good. And at some point I may have to pay specialists a lot money to recover what's on the disk.

Something I've realized - the gremlins always decide to attack just when you've got something good down. My Roland SP-808 let me do something cool - that I had it for a few hours - which I played back for hours... basking in it - best thing I'd done on it, and then the SP decide to eat the zip disk, before I had a chance to back it up.

Ableton - when it crashes it normally can recover everything you've been working on - there is one instance where it won't - which I've learned too. And it can scramble the primary file too. Anyone remember the guy who came on last year after scrambling a few days worth of a session?

GTE

krd wrote: »

My zoom died - won't power up. And there's maybe a hundred sketches on it .. that I didn't back up. And some are actually really good. And at some point I may have to pay specialists a lot money to recover what's on the disk.

Is there any sort of memory card you can take out of the Zoom? Internal I mean more so.


Personally I have been lucky in the recording disaster department. The worst thing that happened to me was a rapid deterioration of the drum signal path during session. Things went from clear to static in one song length.

Worst general audio problem I have suffered was my internal audio drive quietly killing itself. After a routine backup I found that every file that was backed up was being corrupted by a cyclic redundancy fault. My backup software saves your last previous backup but what I didnt know was that files larger then a few MB were ignored. .cpr files were saved but no wav So the projects that I was constantly looking at to have a mess with were all lost.



I was able to recover an album but the wavs are corrupt and I cant get any combination of Goldwaves RAW file input to recover them fully so I have a feeling its more then just the file headers that are dead.

Ahh well! Tis life! Multitracks can be replaced for the most part. All the real disasters are ahead of me!

krd

bbk wrote: »

Is there any sort of memory card you can take out of the Zoom? Internal I mean more so.

It's an internal hard drive with a proprietary file system. Zoom do not even want to talk about it. I've been in touch with other people who've had the same problem and their recorders have just pop'd magically back to life. If that doesn't happen for me - I'll have to track down a Zoom technician who'll recover the disk for me.


Lots of it's just sketches - because I didn't really know what I was doing. But there's one or two pieces that are well worth recovering.

Neurojazz

krd wrote: »

It's an internal hard drive with a proprietary file system. Zoom do not even want to talk about it. I've been in touch with other people who've had the same problem and their recorders have just pop'd magically back to life. If that doesn't happen for me - I'll have to track down a Zoom technician who'll recover the disk for me.


Lots of it's just sketches - because I didn't really know what I was doing. But there's one or two pieces that are well worth recovering.

Get another exact model and swap the drives.

drumdrum

Heres a story for you Paul.

A few years ago, I was asked to do a session on the drums for an engineer friend of mine as the bands drummer just couldn't cut it. He had tried editing, beat detective, sample replacing etc, but the feel was lost and it just wasn't working.

Fine I said. I was told that that the band were cool with it and so I went in, set up the drums and we started tracking.

An hour or so later, we are on the second song and then the band walk in....WITH their drummer!
Well, the drummer went BALLISTIC as apparently he knew nothing about me replacing his drum parts! Apparently the band "forgot" to tell him about me, or there was a mix up in communication, and he insisted on coming along that day with the band.
In fairness to the rest of the band, they had texted my engineer friend in advance to warn him, but as he was recording he had had his phone off.

Suffice to say "awkward"!

He left in a huff, I finished up the song and the next one "while we had the kit setup" and left sharpish!


In the end the band kept my drum parts, the drummer left the band, and the 3 track EP was finished. I think that band broke up after that as I never heard about them or anything from them again.

Kinda funny in retrospect....:)


Maybe its not the type of "disaster" story you're looking for, but I thought it'd be worth sharing!

danjokill

drumdrum wrote: »

Heres a story for you Paul.

A few years ago, I was asked to do a session on the drums for an engineer friend of mine as the bands drummer just couldn't cut it. He had tried editing, beat detective, sample replacing etc, but the feel was lost and it just wasn't working.

Fine I said. I was told that that the band were cool with it and so I went in, set up the drums and we started tracking.

An hour or so later, we are on the second song and then the band walk in....WITH their drummer!
Well, the drummer went BALLISTIC as apparently he knew nothing about me replacing his drum parts! Apparently the band "forgot" to tell him about me, or there was a mix up in communication, and he insisted on coming along that day with the band.
In fairness to the rest of the band, they had texted my engineer friend in advance to warn him, but as he was recording he had had his phone off.

Suffice to say "awkward"!

He left in a huff, I finished up the song and the next one "while we had the kit setup" and left sharpish!


In the end the band kept my drum parts, the drummer left the band, and the 3 track EP was finished. I think that band broke up after that as I never heard about them or anything from them again.

Kinda funny in retrospect....:)


Maybe its not the type of "disaster" story you're looking for, but I thought it'd be worth sharing!

classic !!

studiorat

Millions, made all the mistakes at some stage or other. One I remember now is, recording a take with 80 something in an orchestra, 100 odd choir, tenors and sopranos. Got to the end of the take, everyone thought it was great only to realize I hadn't pressed record!!!. Had to tell everyone I didn't press the right button

GTE

Neurojazz wrote: »

krd wrote: »

It's an internal hard drive with a proprietary file system. Zoom do not even want to talk about it. I've been in touch with other people who've had the same problem and their recorders have just pop'd magically back to life. If that doesn't happen for me - I'll have to track down a Zoom technician who'll recover the disk for me.


Lots of it's just sketches - because I didn't really know what I was doing. But there's one or two pieces that are well worth recovering.

Get another exact model and swap the drives.

Or if you can't do that see if the drive is a regular style one. Ones that come in external usb drives. I say that without really knowing your model of Zoom.

dav nagle

Last sat i go into work, my external hard drive didn't power on. I dropped it around to computer shop and they said by monday they will know if they can fix it. I was expecting a massive bill to transfer the data across to a new drive.. they called me up and said €30, all the data had been transferred correctly. I could have easily lost three songs that were in production.

i lost one or two singer songwriter tracks a few years back..

problemchimp

recorded in Bow lane many years ago when the engineer (well known so no names) opened a can of coke, cut his finger and then fainted. He had to go home and we lost a half days recording because of it.

studiorat

problemchimp wrote: »

recorded in Bow lane many years ago when the engineer (well known so no names) opened a can of coke, cut his finger and then fainted. He had to go home and we lost a half days recording because of it.

haaaaaa hahahaha. I must be sick, I think thats hilarious.

Chap I know was recording in London a few years back. Around five or six o'clock engineer and band decide to take a break and go for a pint.
An hour later they arrive back and the studio's locked up and everyone gone. The assistant thought they were done for the day and buggered off home. Lost half a day recording...

if6was9

Was doing both live sound and recording of a gig one night with the recording being a favour for a friend's project in college. The band were having alot of problems getting set up and we were running short on time for the gig. In all my running around and rushing I forgot to hit record.
Luckily when they reviewed the video footage they realised the band were all out of tune and played not so well so it would have had to have been scrapped anyways!

Had a few other small ones like arming the wrong track when multi micing cabs so missed a mic for some takes, or having phantom power disengaged.

Dord

Got a blue screen of death one day when I was finishing up a track on my laptop. Gone completely.

studiorat

Niall - Dahlia wrote: »

Around about the time we got PT9 and the Alphalink here I had a band in for a very quick demo, was still getting my head around the new system.

The next day I realised the tracks I had bounced down for them were routed from the headphone mix...some of the tracks were pre-fade, no master comp, may even have been a few blasts of click and talk-back in there...

I did a rough mix at the end of the day in the same place with the old desk, left some of the microphones going to the mix buss so you can hear the lads packing away the gear all through the mix! Saying how great it sounds and what a deadly engineer I am

TelePaul

Some funny stuff here so far!

Not so much a disaster as a vulgar display of stupidity, but 7 or 8 years ago I got my first interface with my first band. We were working through the whole gamut of music production urban legends, and at this point were convinced that recording vocals in the shower offered 'improved acoustics' :rolleyes:

Now, my tracking room is about 20' -30' from my bathroom and of course we didn't have a headphone cable long enough. Not to be deterred, we just cranked up my stereo amplifier that I was using as a monitoring chain. The woofers were quiet big and we had to really crank things so that the vocalist could hear the backing track. Myself and the bass player stood by the amp with our hands in our ears until the speakers started to vibrate free of the wall, bringing with them whatever accessories had been placed precariously on top.

Five minutes later, the singer finishes and we gather around my PC to hear this nasally, re-echoy vocal that's always a split second behind the beat. Not long after, I bought 'Home recording for Dummies'.

Android 666

Dord wrote: »

Got a blue screen of death one day when I was finishing up a track on my laptop. Gone completely.

That story needs a bit of pizzazz. Was there no hookers or dwarves involved?

artvandulet

dav nagle wrote: »

Last sat i go into work, my external hard drive didn't power on. I dropped it around to computer shop and they said by monday they will know if they can fix it. I was expecting a massive bill to transfer the data across to a new drive.. they called me up and said €30, all the data had been transferred correctly. I could have easily lost three songs that were in production.

i lost one or two singer songwriter tracks a few years back..

Where was that computer shop you dropped it into Dav? Have an issue with one of my drives.

PaulBrewer

studiorat wrote: »

Millions, made all the mistakes at some stage or other. One I remember now is, recording a take with 80 something in an orchestra, 100 odd choir, tenors and sopranos. Got to the end of the take, everyone thought it was great only to realize I hadn't pressed record!!!. Had to tell everyone I didn't press the right button

Sweet Divine Jesu !