The PRP6 and PRP7 are high-quality digital pianos from Generalmusic that offer great acoustic piano sounds and an impressive degree of playability. Great as a MIDI controller or a practice ‘board.
For the rest of today’s inSync we’ll focus on more interesting and funny studio and stage horror stories, picking up where we left off as of the 5/3 issue of inSync.
Richard Sales
The time: somewhere circa 1974. The place: a studio in Baltimore, Maryland.
NOTE – all names have been changed to protect the ignorant
It was a late night session. One of those graveyard recording deals – all night for peanuts. We were in a well outfitted studio with remnants of the old Blue Seas Studio made famous by Little Feat.
We were doing two of my songs. The owner of the studio had a crack jazz band that would help with these sessions. So we brought in their drummer and used a friend of mine as bassist and started at about midnight. The first song went well as it was a moody jazz influenced song. The second song, “Take It Slow, Michaelangelo” was a full tilt one two 170BPM blazer. All takes were live, no overdubbing. We started Michaelangelo at about three or four. Over and over the song we went. The drummer couldn’t hack it. After about thirty takes he THREW his snare drum at me across the room! Swearzies! he got quite violent and stormed out. We thought, okay, it must be good enough.
After all, the old saying DOES go, “albums aren’t finished, they’re abandoned!”
So we go into the CR. The engineer (a member of the studio jazz band) played the good takes of both songs. At the end of Michaelangelo we heard this strange Beatlesesque backward sounding music. THEY WERE USING THE TAIL OF THEIR TAPE TO RECORD OUR MUSIC! They’d recorded forward on a tails out 24 track tape. Eesh! It was a project they’d sweated over for months (for a major label) and they’d accidentally erased the last few songs on their album. It was an ill fated project and I never listened to the recordings again.
Tune in next week for stories of a man getting stabbed to death (on his 21st birthday) at a live gig as I tried to separate him and his killer – revolvers in the studio, (which all who’ve owned urban studios I’m sure have experienced), guitarists that had to stare at porn pictures to play, the many artists who would confidently whisper to me, “I think God wants me to make it…”
[Ed – Richard, we anxiously await these highlights.]
David Das
A producer friend of mine called me a while back in a panic. He had recorded an entire album’s worth of tracks in this manner: first he tracked to several banks of ADAT’s. Then he made a “working” 2-track mix of the ADAT tracks and dumped that 2-track mix into Logic, syncing up the ADAT’s to run with Logic. Then he proceeded to add tons of overdub tracks in Logic, the whole time using his 2-track mix as the guide.
What he discovered when the recording was all completed, to his horror, was that when he did that 2-track dump, the ADAT’s and Logic weren’t perfectly synced at all. He didn’t know the first thing about sync, and he had gotten the machines to transmit start/stop to each other, but they didn’t remain in constant locked sync at all. They drifted just a little bit. One minute into each song, you’d start to hear a little flamming in the percussives. By the end of the song, it would be up to a second or two off. All the overdubs were flawed in this tiny but hugely significant way.
We eventually solved it by flying all the Logic tracks into Digital Performer (his Mac and my Mac digitally connected via two 2408’s), properly synced up, and then proceeded to splice every measure of every overdub track, nudging them slightly around, comparing them to a click track we determined to be correct, and covering all the edits with careful crossfades. Slowly we ploughed through the album (it took several hours per song) but in the end we got it right, and dumped the whole thing to RADAR for mixing.
The album did great. I wish I could tell you who it was for. 🙂
Texas Jim
I play at Hotel Beach Bars in the Caribbean. We have lots of flora and fauna around: the occasional iguana, lots of lizards, etc. I was playing one day and I look up at the overhead beam right in front of me, and a seven-inch long Centipede is crawling along the beam, about three feet in front of me. The patrons are about three feet further back. I signal one of the West Indian bartenders to come over, and point out the critter, trying not to freak out the customers sitting almost under it. The bartender goes away and returns with the West Indian Centipede Eradication Kit: A 5-gallon bucket of steaming, hot water! He’s dragging a barstool over to stand on, so he can soak the Centipede, the patrons, and all my gear and P.A. stuff! I finally have to tell the customers to move, because they are right under a Centipede. Then, I get the bartender to get a pool cue and knock it down, which he does. Then, I use my cowboy boots to eradicate the menace, which STILL is freaking out the customers. Anyway, we all got a good laugh, but the West Indian bartender never figured out why I wouldn’t let him use the traditional method.
JG
It was early in my use of hard disc recording platforms, and I was tracking through an 8 channel interface and an ADAT, recording basics on 16 tracks simultaneously. The band did five or six songs that day, and afterward, they had all packed up and left except the bass player, (who was a math/physics major in college). I was preparing to shut off my system for the night, so I changed the digital clock source back to the hard disc interface and all of the sudden, the tempo of the playback changed.
Oh my God! NOOOOOOOoooo! Someone had bumped a button on the ADAT machine, and the sampling rate had been mismatched all night. The math major sprung into action and figured out a formula for time stretching the drum tracks to make it all the right tempo… and after working all night long, I was able to salvage half the songs and have them sound acceptable. I had to give them a free day of studio time to redo the other tunes.
That’s one little button I don’t fail to check constantly when I’m doing a basic track session now.
OK – we’ll have one more day of horror stories to post in the coming weeks so keep sending those tales of terror!