I did some spot-courses at Metalworks a few years back. On the first day they gave us a tour of the facility. Two things you should know about me: I love sound, and I have a freakishly loud snap - as in finger snap.

As we're walking through Studio 1 and Studio 2, I couldn't help but feel... relaxed. As if something in my ears just went "ahh"- and I realized pretty quickly what it was. The rooms sound fantastic, even quiet. The ambient reverb of the room was very pleasing. I snapped my fingers, and enjoyed the reverb.

Snap snap snap snap. Snap snap snap snapsnap snap. Ahh. Sounds soooooo good in here!

It was wonderful.

A few days later, I was sitting at the pub with a friend who asked me how it all went. I regaled him with this story, and as I'm doing so I'm snapping my fingers to drive the point.

Snap snap snap snapsnap snap.

I look up, and there's a not-very-pleased waitress, arms folded, scowling at me as if I was the rudest customer of the year...

I read the sticky saying you need some stories so here's mine as short as possible. So I'm interning at a studio and the session ended like 20 minutes ago and we're (two engineers and myself) waiting for the singer and producer to come out so we can start cleaning the studio. We have cameras in the halls so we can see the outside of the studio, which we are watching from the office waiting for them to come out. 30 minutes go by and the engineer is getting pissed that they are still in there and tells me to go in there and start cleaning up to give them the passive aggressive message that we're wrapping it up and they have to go. You already know what's cumming. I open the door and sure enough they are going at it missionary style with their clothes on on the couch. I say "oops" and clothes the door shaking my head in shame knowing that I'll be cleaning up the mess when they're done. We ended up charging them an extra hour in the end lol

We had a singer once that got piss drunk during tracking...

We were giving him some serious shit... I mean he couldn't even remember the lyrics (seriously, we were punching in one word at a time!)

He got pissed at us and tried to storm out of the vocal booth. He threw his headphones down and was ready to storm out... Except he couldn;t find the door!

It was a little bitty isolation room that had treatment on all of the walls and the door, and he couldn't find his way out. He had some sort of pseudo drunken panic attack and got all tangled in the mic cord and fell down, pulled the mic down with him; it was a total disaster.

They did not let him use that mic for the rest of the recording, we had to use some much cheaper one just in case.

This is not my story, I'm just posting it to help out the sub. The original story can be found here.

I originally plunged /r/TalesFromTheStudio into darkness in line with many other subs to support what is currently going on. However, after listening to other sub mods discuss things, I've realized our small amount of ~70 subscribers won't really benefit from that decision. So I've brought the sub back.

I fully support what the default subs are doing, by privatizing their subs for a short amount of time. I will withhold judgement on the issues, though, until more information is brought to light.

Read up on the issue here and here is a live feed.

So I go to a smallish trade school which has a program which is related to audio engineering (but not actually audio engineering). The whole school is a little shady; for one thing, the teachers get paid based on how many students they have, so they all recruit like crazy until they have too many students for them to reasonably teach. But that's a whole nother story.

The studio story: It's the beginning of last year. The program I'm involved in just built a smallish recording studio, so the school is eager to get some bands in it for publicity, so they book a whole pantheon of local bands to record some live sessions. They book the studio solid 8am to 4:30pm on a particular Friday.

The day before the big event, the instructor asks me to help set up the studio. He knows I play piano, so he gives me a keyboard and tells me to "get it ready." So I take it in the studio, prop it up on two stools (of course the school didn't bother to buy a stand) and hunt down a di box and the necessary cables. I go to plug in the 1/4"...

and I realize there's no line out. My instructor had given me a MIDI keyboard. Okay, no biggie. I guess he wants to use a virtual instrument in Pro Tools, or maybe he worked it out so the bands are using their own laptops. I'll ask him to see if I need to find a long enough usb cable to make it to the control room.

So I ask him. We have some trouble communicating because, as I slowly realize, he doesn't know what MIDI is(!!!). He told me that he hadn't made any arrangements with any of the bands about this keyboard.

Luckily around this time, another staff guy (a CRAS graduate) comes around to see what's going on. I tell him the situation and ask him if I should try to work out a usb cable to the control room so we can load up a some piano samples or something. "Oh no no no, fuck everything about that," he says.

So he drives home to get his keyboard (which DOES have a line out), which sat propped up in the corner the whole day because none of the bands needed a keyboard. -_-

tl;dr: The person in charge of my school's studio didn't know that the keyboard, which he placed the order for, doesn't actually produce audio. A different staff member drove home to get his personal keyboard, which we didn't even end up needing.

Edit: keyboard≠leopard

Does anybody have a good repository for stories like these? I've found a few, but I've exhausted most of the better ones, already..

I'll be looking for more soon enough, but I'd really like this sub to stay afloat, and I worry that lack of stories will have it dying off soon. If anybody has anything, even a short story that's a few sentences, or something mundane, I ask that you feel free to share it.

It takes a whilefor subs like these to get off the ground, but once they get going, they can self-sustain! We just need to keep fueling it a little longer :]

P.S. Anyone who comes through with a decent supply of stories to help us get going, I may have something in store for you! Gold and/or modship, depending on how things go.

Lots of wicked stuff happen on the road, but one "accident" was pretty fun.

So we are at this small hotel after a gig, the band is happily setting down their stuff and getting ready to get their well deserved amount of booze when our driver decides to go take a dump. He returns after a while with eyes huge as a bug. Walks straight in the room without saying a word and starts gulping down vodka straight from the bottle.

So i ask him if his crap took the wrong turn or what? Turns out the bathrooms in that hotel were pretty funny - you get a smaller section behind the first door with a sink and a mirror (the door to that does not lock) and only after that there is the loo itself with the usual lock on the door.

So as the driver walked out of the loo, he saw a biiiiig woman - aged above 50 - with one leg on the sink, washing her cooch....

To quote him - "That thing just stared at me from the mirror like a giant abyss, she didn't even make a move to hide it or anything...."

Poor guy spent the rest of the night watching basketball game and drinking silently..

This is not my story, I'm just posting it to help out the sub. The original story can be found here.

My worst one is still inexplicable. I got a 2" 16 track tape from a NYC studio whom I've mixed a lot from cause of their bad customer service, ears and mostly overcharging and refusing to work more then an 8 hour day so they can go out and drink. Nonetheless, we get the reel and put it up and I don't usually look at the track sheets at first cause sometimes I will come up with cool blends without them to use later for FX.

So the point is I find this GREAT sounding ride mic. Then I start to hear a weird sound everytime the floor tom is hit. I look at the track sheets and realize this is the floor tom mic. Every time the floor is hit the first 5ms or so is really strong and then the tom just sinks violently and then the ride- or whatever-bleed rises back up.

So I am really freaked out by this, on the track sheets, it says none of the tracks have compressors. So I call the guy he says 'no, just mic pre and EQ' on his board. So just in case I take a ride over to the studio and go in to listen. I go up to the engineers' position and I really don't notice it with his N ASS-10s up against the wall. Then I walk back and just as I am gonna say something I hear the sound the same as it was where I was mixing the record and I realize it ain't me. He assures me he didn't compress or do anything and my machine must've ruined the track.

WHATEVER.

He assures me he has worked with Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade constantly and they are close friends and that's how a tom should sound. He then asks who I have worked with as if this is justification for this sound and is being very standoffish. I end up having to take a cell phone call and the guy proceeds to hit on my girlfriend, who I brought with me.

ASSHOLE.

While taking the call a mutual engineer friend walks in and the he hears it (the weird bleed) and asks what the fuck is going on.

AHHH REDEMPTION!!!!

I end up taking the tapes and dumping 'em into PT and replaying every tom fill on the record and triggering them as well. Unfortunately, this guy hit the toms more than anyone on Earth, so life really sucked for the 30-some odd hours that took. Fact is, though, the guy who produced that record hasn't ever done a single record with another engineer since 'cause of that.

This is not my story, I'm just posting it to help out the sub. The original story can be found here.

It was a late summer night at a music recording studio in NYC. I was setting up a mixing session for a reggae dub-style track. It was after hours so the receptionist was gone and I was responsible for tending to the door in between setting up for the session. I was in the midst of trouble shooting with an analogue tape delay when I heard the doorbell ring.

I looked at the security camera screen before opening the door and saw a Rasta-looking fellow with dreadlocks and a guitar on his back. I did not recognize the man, but he seemed to fit the part for the dub mixing session that was going on. When I opened the door I was met by an overwhelming smell of alcohol and a man who was clearly intoxicated. Although unpleasant, this was not that out of the ordinary for an after hours session, so I didn’t think too much of it and let him in.

The man stumbled into the lobby and started mumbling nonsense to himself as he looked around in awe at the inside of the facility. He didn’t seem to know where he was. I started to get a terrible feeling that this person did not belong. But why did he have a guitar? And how would he have known to come to this location at this particular time?

The outside of the studio is completely bare and sort of run down. There is absolutely nothing on the front that would indicate that a studio is inside. I tried talking to the man to get some information out of him. Maybe he was a part of the session, but he was just too drunk or high to recognize the inside of the studio? Stranger things have happened during the after hours sessions.

The man would not answer me and walked off–right toward the mixing session. I wanted to kick him out, but some very small part of me believed that he might have belonged there. The odds seemed too extreme that some random person who just happened to have a guitar and dreadlocks decides to ring the bell of a random unmarked building that just so happens to be a recording studio with a reggae dub mixing session going on inside. I most certainly did not want to get in trouble for kicking out a client. My stomach sunk as we walked into the control room.

The moment of truth….I prayed to God that someone would know this man, but no one did. I had unknowingly delivered them a bum.

Every one looked very confused as the man started ranting about the “ultra mega hits” that he wrote.

After a few moments it became apparent to the room what had happened. At first they found it amusing and humored the man for a bit. But the humor soon subsided and the situation became tense. The man would not leave or listen to reason. After about 10 minutes of deliberating with the bum, the assistant engineer and I had to physically lift the bum down the hall and out the door. Luckily he was very skinny and relatively docile. The assistant engineer was furious with me. I thought for sure that would be the end of my internship, but my supervisor was forgiving and nothing came of the situation.

This is not my story, I'm just posting it to help out the sub. The original story can be found here.

As a preface, I believe this sub has potential, and I'm hoping it takes off. This story is from an engineer and friend I often work with, rather than a session I was personally involved with.

Anyway, it's 9am, and my friengineer (we'll call him Garry) has got the studio all lined up and ready for a day's tracking with a certain rock group. 10am rolls around, and Garry is happy to find out the band turned up on time - by 11, everything is set up, and ready to go. A long and successful day of tracking ensues, getting a couple of tracks completed - the band were of the old school variety, who'd do everything live together, and then overdub any mistakes.

By the time 5pm rolls around pretty much everything is sorted, and ready to mix, and the band all stick around while Garry works. Well, most of them. The drummer's missus happened to work just around the corner from the studio, and he pops out for a little while to meet her, for them to return a short while later. As is typically the case, to save time he decides he's going to pack down the drums as he's finished for the day, so off he trots, and nobody bats an eyelid.

Well, until somebody checks the time, and realises he's taken half an hour to pack away a four piece kit. The band jokes amongst themselves about it, until struck with the realisation the drummer's partner isn't in the control room, Garry looks over to the CCTV display to see the drum room camera has been moved. With the rapid unmuting that's the mark of an experienced engineer, the whole band are treated with an 11 mic ensemble of the drummer and his partner over the drum stool. Most people would laugh, and leave them to it, but not our heros! Said drummer had left his cans on his snare close enough to the 57 to be heard, and for the next 10 minutes or so the group narrated the unfolding drama to tape via the talkback and snare mic.

Apparently it's still unclear if the drummer, upon his return, was more surprised about being caught, or about the guitarist's ability to do a Bill Oddie impression without cracking up, given the circumstances. Nothing has ever been more in the red than his girlfriend's face.

Hopefully we'll fill this sub up soon. This is a subreddit for those who have both amazingly wonderful, and amazingly horrible stories of their times in the recording studio.

Whether an engineer behind the console/computer, or an artist in the studio proper, post your stories here to share with others! If you work in some other type of studio, please, post as well! Expansion is possible and all horizons are open.

Enjoy your time here, everyone :]