Arghhhh

[pstamler]

Hi folks:

Well. The big rock'n'roll/Girl-Group/Wall-of-Sound backing-track session for the Analog Recording Technology class on Saturday came off superbly. We had two electric guitarists, two acoustic guitarists, piano, hammered dulcimer, bass & drums (the latter one of the students from class -- boy, is he a good drummer). The students did a great job choosing and setting up mics while the musicians -- most of whom had never met -- worked out the arrangement. (I'd given them lead sheets and an idea for an opening, but that was it.) When we rolled tape they nailed it ON THE FIRST TAKE. Yeah, you heard me right. These folks had turned into a tight, clean band while we were doing tech stuff. If I ever need a studio band, I know where to look. Having aced the song we were supposed to do, we went on to do a nice version of "Stormy Monday" and a blues jam for the B side. We all went home with a feeling of a job well done.

So you can imagine my reaction when I got to Analog tonight to do the vocal and saxophone tracks, and discovered that somebody had recorded over several of the tracks on the 2" reel.

After some questioning, I discovered that the person who'd done that was one of the students in the class. It seems he was doing his class project, but he hadn't been able to reach his tape partner to get the 2" reel he'd been issued, so he asked the student engineer on duty what to do. The engineer told him, "Go ahead and use the reel labeled 'Analog Class'." Which he did. And in so doing, they wiped out six weeks of planning and setting up, and the work of a dozen people for five hours on Saturday.

I didn't kill the student, although I was tempted. I did shout at him for about 45 seconds, which I'm not proud of, but I think I can claim extreme provocation. Then I pulled myself together and told him to leave the room for a while (sent him on an errand) in case the urge to throttle him returned.

Meanwhile, thank the paranoia gods, we had done a backup recording onto Radar when we cut the track last Saturday. So the students set up the patching and we dubbed that onto the 3M (on a part of the tape which was blank -- I checked carefully), and resumed recording. I think we got a good record out of it; the singers (one of them also a student in the class) laid down two pairs of excellent unison vocals and a pair of backing vocals, the sax player did a very good break, and we added a tambourine as the last touch. (I put it onto two tracks, 5 and 23. 5 is the one with the cue problem, where the output contains signals from both the record and playback heads; I thought it might be interesting to see what the doubling did to the tambourine part. The tambourine player/lead singer liked it, and we'll probably use it in the final mix.) I still wish we could have done the whole thing on analog.

So I've learned a lot of lessons. Always back up onto Radar. And never, ever assume anything you leave in the studio is safe. From now on, I will take home any reel of tape that matters. (Yeah, I know, I shoulda known that beforehand.)

I do wish I hadn't shouted at the guy. But then again, I didn't call him any of the names that were in my mind; I confined myself to telling him that he'd just screwed up the work of a whole lot of people. And I didn't actually strangle him with a patch cord, although there were several of them handy.

Peace,
Paul

 

[okgb]

Fact is , once it's done , it's done
Of course good self restrain on your part
How best to handle it next ?

I recall a quote from a high level boss being asked if he was going to fire the employee who caused a serious loss , to which he responded,
Fire ? I just spent hundreds of thousands training him , i'm not going
to fire the guy [ referring to the loss ]

Just with kids & the youth of today it's often hard to know if they
are taking some responsabilty and get the big picture [ lesson ]
everyone learns differently ?  custom lesson ?

And you did have the presence of mind [ with experience ] to backup
to radar , which is not the worst thing .

So to pick any positive maxim or adage , Alls well that ends well
or if it's good it's great and if not it's a lesson

 

[amorris@home]

"Go ahead and use the reel labeled 'Analog Class'."

unfortunately it's right there. should have been relabeled. Or a unique reel used.

that does suck though.

 

[pstamler]

Well, the guy had his own reel, or should have had. Oh well...what we really need in that place is lockers. The photo students down the hall have them.

Peace,
Paul

 

[sodderboy]

I am not a teacher, but I tech at a college, and I do my best to have the maintenance protocol exactly the same, if not tighter, than in a commercial studio.  The trick commercially is that the staff has to be a tight communicative unit following a book of standards, and make it look "loose" outwardly so that there is not this over-bearing attitude that stifles creativity.  The students will have to learn that eventually, and it should start as part of their learning in school.
Did you yell at the guy who hit RECORD, or the guy who gave-out the tape.  I hope it was the latter!  And I am sure that you yelled at yourself even more.  I say to those who work for me that I am always hardest on myself, no matter what I might say to them.
Bless the backup!
Mike

 

[Mbira]

Hey Paul,
Bummer!!!  The irony though, is you got to show them the best workaround to gt the job done-probably one of the most valuable (and common) needs in a 'real' recording studio!

 

[jensenmann]

Something very similar happened last week to me. My students formated two harddisk in our recorders without asking me. Result was that all 24 track and a bunch of 2track liverecordings of 7 bands were lost. These recordings were supposed to be the basis for our next months work. Man, I was so angry.
Now I have decided that they have to work on some really shitty, ugly, tasteless, awful, vibless and annoying recordings which I chose. They have to suffer.

Really sad is that one of the erased 24 tracks was very good and I´d have loved to mix a few of these tracks for myself.....

 

[CJ]

All kinds of stories like that.

Famous record masters getting tweaked, some weird process to get it back.

My favorite is the janitor that  knocked Gary Rossington's 58 Les Paul to the floor, snapping the headstock off.
The janitor told Gary he could fix  it like new, Gary said OK, youv'e heard the records, you know it came out pretty good, eh?

 

[okgb]

I like the one about the Engineer who is starting overdubs and
realizes that he wiped over the first 30s of the orchestra ,
excuses himself to go to the washroom , gets in his car
and keeps on driving [ away from that career ]

 

[wtmnmf]

Never wiped anything, but I did thread up the 2" that we had been working on all week and set it to rewinding, turned to the console and began to reset it.  I don't know, 30sec or a min later, I smelled what I realized represented a big pile of oxide, spun  around and stopped the tape.  :'(  There it was, piled up neat, like a little volcano.    I blew the cone of oxide away and threaded the tape properly so that it was not scraping across the sharp edge of the head shield, crossed my fingers and hit play.  All was good except maybe a little HF rolloff (maybe). I lined up the machine and proceeded as normal and felt quite lucky.  ;D

A little later, I think my head bounced off of the faders a dozen times and my face had that 'I'm totally on top of it', eyes wide open expression, which was fooling no one....

 

[ENS Audio]

Forgive me for my ignorance but shouldnt recording studios apply the same type of data backup protocols as a Network Admin would use for let's say a very large server farm?? It takes twice as long but in comparison to how I backup data, I'll not only take the most important info put that on a separate HDD but I will archive everything via 7z Plus a checksum file to go along with it then all folders+compressed files go to image in which from there I'll backup onto DVD.

Now for Reel to Reel its a bit different I know and starting off decades after some of you guys when it comes to recording/mixing; is there a way to sync up  a reel to reel with either another reet to reel or some other kind of tape medium (HDD/ADAT) as a way to further safeguard your precious recordings??? 


Just curious because very soon I'll be putting some of my gear to work (before the next century I hope) and just wanted to get some feedback on this important issue.

Thanks,

 

[sodderboy]

They did backup to RADAR, which saved the project from FUBAR.  Your data backup routine is ironclad.  Analog is much more robust when just sitting there, so "backup" was not done until there were finished multitrack and 2 trk masters of songs during a project that could afford to do that.  Most often the masters got locked away for a decade or two, and then got transferred to a different medium for preservation.  We know that it is not good to shelve a HD for a decade without spinning it, and how are the oldest DVDR's and CDR's holding up?  I still retrieve data from +10 years old CDR's.
Synchronizers are used to lock analog to whatever- TimeLine and Adams Smith were the two biggies.  The MicroLynx is my personal fave.  It really is preferred to lock analog to digital instead of lock digital to analog.  It does not make good sense to force a Lucent or Apogee clocked system to dance to an Ampex or Otari beat!
Mike