Mixing engineer Bainz looks back on one of the defining #HorrorStories from the early days of his career, sharing his approach for remedying an obscure glitch that was out of his control.
“This is probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me in a session environment”. It can be tough being the youngest or least experienced in the room on a session – if something goes wrong, the suspicion is that it’s your fault, whatever the truth of the matter. That said, if you navigate the situation correctly, you can turn into a major win.
Full transcript:
“It’s crazy because it happened very early into my career. The main engineer at that studio had gone on vacation. We were recording and we were working, doing a lot of stuff. Somehow at some point, they had installed a printer at the studio. The printer software was contacting HP that caused some glitch.
Anyway, none of the audio files that were being recorded were getting saved. Halfway through something happened and it eventually crashed. And when we opened it back, nothing was there. I’m like, ‘yo, what is going on?’
What saved me in that moment was while we recorded we were vocaligning as we went along, so I went into the committed files folder found those vocalign regions, flew them on the grid, pieced the song back together, in the early days as engineer, whilst everyone in the room blamed me for something because I was a new engineer.
It was so easy to blame me. Luckily, that tech came in and told us that’s what happened and then it went from ‘wow, you fucked up’ to ‘wow, I can’t believe you actually figured that situation and navigated through it.’”
