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Boneheads Musicians Recording

Falling asleep in the mix

I recorded this really shitty metal band one time. Their singer was so bad, he would blow his voice out after singing 1 or 2 takes of a song. It wasn’t singing either, it was more like screaming remotely close to the key of the (bad) song.

So we finally get to the mix. We’re tweaking everything when I hear this strange noise. I stop the tape (yes, in the tape years) and I find that the sound is the bass player snoring on the couch. He was really sawing logs. I ran into the sound room and grabbed a great big large diaphragm microphone, placed it 1/4″ from his nose and hit record. Then we pumped his snoring through the main speakers and put a giant reverb on it. He sounded like a giant snoring in the Grand Canyon. He soon woke up.

Days later this bass player was bitching and moaning about how bad his bass sounded in the mix. I could only tell the dude that he might have gotten what he wanted if he was actually conscious during the mix. Typical bullshit we engineers go through. They sleep though the mix and blame you for their sound not being what they wanted.