Categories
Boneheads Musicians Recording

The drifter

I’m painting one of my soundrooms. I’m on top of a ladder covered with paint. A “walk in” client suddenly appears. (I don’t have walk ins…) He’s interested in recording. I say when do you want to record and he says “now.”

Well ok then. Let me clean the paint off my face…. So I ask him what kind of project we are about to start on. He’s going to sing. Great, so I ask him what music he’s going to sing to… “I don’t need music.” He says.

I ask “so you’re going to sing with no music, just acappella?” ….Yes.

DUDE IS TONE DEAF. After “singing” for an hour in the most sour, out of tune fashion he asks if I have a guitar.

“I’ve got a strat here, but no amp” I say

He’s cool with that, doesn’t need an amp so we plug the fucker right in! I hand him a tuner.. He hands it back to me “I don’t need that, I have perfect pitch. I’ll tune it myself.”

He definitely doesn’t have perfect pitch. In fact he has NO pitch. So he takes the guitar and doesn’t even tune it. He then has me roll tape and he starts to pluck the strings and put his fingers in random positions on the frets of the guitar! HE DOESN’T PLAY THE GUITAR! We lay down a tune of guitar and vocals.

I mix the tunes and make a master. At that point I inform him of his bill. He asks me if he could bring the bucks by later and I say “sure.” (I figure as long as this guy owes me money, he’ll never come back). So I let the guy go with his master in hand, without paying a dime. I watched him leave and he had no car. He just walked down the street… I picked up the paint brush and start painting again.

Categories
Boneheads Recording

The strangest engineer I ever knew

I was at another studio doing drums for a rock album. When all the tracking was done we asked the flaky engineer/owner to mix it. This guy was a piece of work. He’d go to the bathroom and disappear for hours. He spouted wierd gibberish for hours. Anyway, he says “we can’t mix until we have a spiritual moment.” HUH?

He proceeds to tell us how he was driving down the road and smelled smoke. He thought something was wrong with his car, but when he looked down he noticed his arms were on fire. Upon looking out the window of his car, he saw Jesus Christ floating above his car. The light from Jesus Christ was so bright, it was burning his skin!

So we say “cool, uh, can we mix now?”

Then he tells us he’s tired because he had sex with his wife for 8 straight hours. We’re saying “woa dude” but he says “it’s not physical sex, it’s spiritual sex.” Oh shit, here we go again…

He proceeds to tell us that when he has sex with his wife, they sit in a plain room with no pictures or items in the room…only one light hanging from the ceiling. They then have “spiritual sex” by starring into each other’s eyes without even blinking for hours and hours…

“Uh, can we mix now?”…..sure

A while into the mix he says he’s gotta take off for a while and lets us run the board while he’s gone.

We’re working the mix and tweaking when some guy we’ve never met walks into the control room. “Is Sam here?” the guy asks? We tell him we don’t know where he is… He say’s ok, then proceeds to unplug the Yamaha NS10 studio speakers and haul them off….