Biggest pet peeves as a sound engineer/ producer

[KingAenarion]

Thought i would share this here cuz this is ridiculous, got this message the other day froma band trying to book.

• • Dude.
    
  
  
  
  
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  • yes sir?
    
  
  
  
  
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  • So, we probably have about 9 minutes total of material. Like some songs are like 20 seconds. It would be super silly for us to pay 100 dollars for a 20 second song, ya know? Like a band could go to you, record 2 songs for 200 and get the same length of stuff. Like realistically, how much would you charge us for an ep that's no more than 9 minutes. You probably won't even have to mix it, cause we'd want like a raw punk sound. So like, 11 minutes, like 250?
    
  
  
  
  
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  • How many songs total man? And you have to understand how recording works man. No matter how long the song I still have to mix and master which still takes and equal amount of work on my end lol. Tell me how many songs and about the length of them and I'll give u a quote
    
  
  
  
  
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  • We don't want em mixed. We want a raw sound. And it'd be like 7 tracks. Maybe 8. Longest one is 1:57
    
  
  
  
  

......I have a problem with this....

Charge them by the hour. Say if you honestly feel that it won't take long, I will charge you by the hour.

Make them sign a contract... That way when you do "no mixing" on it and give them a sample of the work (so about 30 seconds of 1 song) they'll be like "Dafuq man" and you'll be able to say "That's what you asked for"...

Then they'll ask for a mix and you'll charge them by the hour!

 

[Edika]

I think I remember you telling this story before...

"It's tuned to F"... Dafuq?

Yes you are right, in the guitar pet peeves! It was so note worthy that and had to do with sound engineers so I had to mention it again hahahaha!

 

[Oxidation_Shed]

We had to do a stupidly hurried recording session because my drummer was retarded enough to forget that the uni he applied to required some tracks of things he had contributed to musically, until just under a week before the deadline -.-

Anyway, because of the last minute nature, I didn't have time to engineer the whole session. I left the bassist in charge because his primary instrument is drums and he does A2 level music tech so I figured he must have some knowledge of how to do a recording - seeing as he gets graded on one at the end of this year. Boy, was that a mistake.

Firstly, I was around for the setting up of the drum mics and we got the best possible sound that we could (because of time restraints, there was no money or time for reskinning drums so we used some week old skins, they didn't sound too bad because the school's kit is barely used - it's a Yamaha Stage Custom I think, so it could be a lot worse sounding). I came back halfway through the drum tracking to find that one of the overhead tracks wasn't making any sound: he hadn't turned on the channel strip on the mixing desk -.-

I then sat through just about everything else, until we got to vocals. We did four preliminary takes, I took the best and then did some quick comping. So far so good but, inevitably, some notes were out of tune enough to be problematic. I didn't have much time before having to leave the studio so I just cut and deleted all the notes that were off and told my bassist to track them again until we got good takes.
Disaster.

Instead of re-tracking the whole line or phrase, he just got the singer to record the words that were out. i.e. If he had to record "Summer felt so long", it was "Summer" "Felt so long".
The vocals came out sounding like a fucking automated answering service. No amount of editing could make it sound remotely realistic. In the end I had to copy and paste stuff around the place because of time restraints.

So yeah, engineers who don't know what they're doing. The phrase "Adam can just fix it in editing" was banded around rather a lot between those two morons. -.-

 

[KingAenarion]

Got a new one...

Going somewhere, using their cables and realising the fact that the people before were fucking TERRIBLE at rolling cables!



I don't want to be spending 10 minutes at the start of every fucking session fixing poorly rolled cables just so I can use them

 

[JohnIce]

Got a new one...

Going somewhere, using their cables and realising the fact that the people before were fucking TERRIBLE at rolling cables!



I don't want to be spending 10 minutes at the start of every fucking session fixing poorly rolled cables just so I can use them

My band did a tour project with another pretty good but inexperienced band, and one of the first things I did after the first gig was to gather everyone around me and teach everyone how to properly roll a cable It paid off though, the cables are still good as new.

 

[jsaudio]

Charge them by the hour. Say if you honestly feel that it won't take long, I will charge you by the hour.

Make them sign a contract... That way when you do "no mixing" on it and give them a sample of the work (so about 30 seconds of 1 song) they'll be like "Dafuq man" and you'll be able to say "That's what you asked for"...

Then they'll ask for a mix and you'll charge them by the hour!

Yea that is what i should do, actually already thought about it, the thing is its gonna come out semi-mixed anyways, cuz i would just track them into a previous mix i have done lol

So yea it would be a really easy recording session, but at the same time they are gonna make MY work sound like shit by telling me to make it sound like shit...haha im not down with it lol

 

[JohnIce]

Yea that is what i should do, actually already thought about it, the thing is its gonna come out semi-mixed anyways, cuz i would just track them into a previous mix i have done lol

So yea it would be a really easy recording session, but at the same time they are gonna make MY work sound like shit by telling me to make it sound like shit...haha im not down with it lol

Have them sign a contract saying they can't name you as being involved with the record. You don't have to put your name on it if you feel it could damage your name or career.

Come to think of it, I think Max Martin took his name off from producing Bon Jovi's "It's my life" because he was so dissatisfied with the end mix.

- edit - That said, you should never expect ALL your preferences to end up on the final mix. The artist or record company will almost always tell you to go with some choices that you voted against. Which is fair, because they hired you, not the other way around. It stings but it's how it works. I'm currently mixing a singer/songwriter duo that asked for far more reverb than I think sounds good, and it takes away so much beautiful intimacy from their voices, but in the end they decide.