Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

When we learn from our own mistakes it is called experience. When we learn from other people's mistakes it is called knowledge or education. There is a place for both.

JR
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Mid-way through a speech by a visiting astronaut, the wireless mic he is on flakes out and stops working. We had a backup ready to go, so I wait for what seems like a good moment, and slip up on stage. As I clip the lav on and put the body pack on his belt in front of a full house, he makes a gracious comment about how comms is perhaps the most important part of of space travel, and something that they take extra care to get right at NASA.

I get the mic situated and flip the mute switch off. The FOH tech already has the channel up -- way up -- with predictable results. Without thinking, I flip the mute back on and skeedaddle, thinking in my head, "I'll help her fix it at the console." Now I've interrupted a high-profile event, generated an even more distracting wave of feedback, and not fixed a damn thing. Strangely enough, the video from that event was never published...and more strangely, I kept that job. 8)~8-)~:cool:

The astronaut in question was a class act through and through, and an excellent speaker. He was self-aware enough to know his mic was not functioning correctly, and was really belting it out to compensate. In hind-sight, the mic swap was probably not necessary.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

John Roberts said:
When we learn from our own mistakes it is called experience. When we learn from other people's mistakes it is called knowledge or education. There is a place for both.

JR
Click to expand...

This place (and the other forum) are both excellent sources of education. I am constantly astounded at the level of expertise that is available here.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Glen Kelley said:
Mid-way through a speech by a visiting astronaut, the wireless mic he is on flakes out and stops working. We had a backup ready to go, so I wait for what seems like a good moment, and slip up on stage. As I clip the lav on and put the body pack on his belt in front of a full house, he makes a gracious comment about how comms is perhaps the most important part of of space travel, and something that they take extra care to get right at NASA.

I get the mic situated and flip the mute switch off. The FOH tech already has the channel up -- way up -- with predictable results. Without thinking, I flip the mute back on and skeedaddle, thinking in my head, "I'll help her fix it at the console." Now I've interrupted a high-profile event, generated an even more distracting wave of feedback, and not fixed a damn thing. Strangely enough, the video from that event was never published...and more strangely, I kept that job. 8)~8-)~:cool:

The astronaut in question was a class act through and through, and an excellent speaker. He was self-aware enough to know his mic was not functioning correctly, and was really belting it out to compensate. In hind-sight, the mic swap was probably not necessary.
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Eugene Cernan, perhaps? We double-mic'd him for a presentation and he made a similar quip.

All the astronauts I've worked with have been great to work with. Smart, usually very nice and often funny.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

I've made the various routing errors people mention, including mis and/or unassigned channels. I've also screwed a routing or two on post fade configured monitor consoles.

One I'm embarrassed of is having the threshold set totally wrong on a gate for kick drum mic. The gain was cranked as a result, and when I opened up the gate, the kick mic took off on me. Also at monitors that time.

At FOH in a church setting there was a soloist added. I patched them on the last input, far side of the (analog) console. Set the level and forgot about that input. The guy that came into FOH to count attendees during the service accidentally engaged the channel pad. Of all the buttons to press... No level at all when it came time for the solo. Cranking the channel gain to max resulted in a quiet, but audible solo. I didn't dare unpad and guess at the gain mid solo.

Also, over time have had to run monitors from FOH more than I'd like. Definitely forgot to unmute an aux send feeding monitors before.
 
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Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Not so much a mistake but another horror show, huge televised event random patch chnges all day everyone is tired, the multipin connector for the downstage mics has either fell out or not been connected, much abuse from stressed TV producer down the coms, ok I'll plug it in then I suspect I caused every broadcast limiter in Christendom to peg right there and then and probably finished off the lastof the high end on the foh PA which had struggled all day. G
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Oh another one just came up, Billy Graham was over in Glasgow 20 odd years ago and at one of the pre campaign events with all the local dignitaries etc there I'm sitting at the back of the room with all going well when I notice my bright yellow tea mug and a half eaten roll sitting on top of th SR sub right in the field of the local TV company's camera. G
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Here is a couple of my more recent screwups:

Nationally televised major sporting event. Going to commercial on a replay package. I accidentally turn up the return from the replay machine instead of my instant replay for background music. Director mentions over comm: "I don't remember cueing pitched down announcer voices from hell."

Mixing a live show at a 1200 seat theatre. Get through soundcheck and everything is sounding great. We have a guest artist there who did a song solo before playing some guitar and singing backups on a few tunes. On the solo song I forgot to unmute his monitor mix. He played and sang great anyway. When I apologized after the show he was gracious enough to tell me he heard enough from the mains, but I still felt really bad for leaving him out on a limb alone.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Tim McCulloch said:
Eugene Cernan, perhaps? We double-mic'd him for a presentation and he made a similar quip.

All the astronauts I've worked with have been great to work with. Smart, usually very nice and often funny.
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Tim, it was Danny Olivas, not Eugene Cernan. Perhaps they all attend the same training. :lol: Very interesting presentation. I actually listened for once....
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

I have had plenty of "oops" moments, but have been lucky enough that most of them went by quickly without too much notice.

A couple of the ones that stand out are,

SecDef Robert Gates had retired from Washington and landed at Texas A&M as the president of the university for a few years. One thing led to another and he was called back to his old post in the White House.

At the end of his passionate and heartfelt farewell speech I was supposed to play the Aggie fight song for the assembled crowd of thousands. I had the CD in the player and que'd up way early on in the speech. Well at some point that home-stereo CD player went to sleep and lost it's que. I hit play without looking and played the wrong track. Then had to pause and frantically find the right track. A task not made easy, because the burned CD had no track list and I had no headphones so I had to step through a couple different songs before I found the right one.

Yeah that sucked.




Then there was the time I did a throw and go using a Soundcraft SI-compact for the first time ever. Has anyone ever noticed how close the "select" button is to the "On-Off" button over the main fader? Yeah. They are really close, and if you hit the wrong one you turn the mains off! Yay Soundcraft! Good job!
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

I once accidentally recalled the "zero the board" scene in the middle of a show. So the whole board went dead, all channels muted, and lost all my settings.

Oh, that was tonight.

I must have fat fingered the recall, whilst trying to set a HPF. The good thing about it was, we had a split going, and I did not have control of the inputs. So all I had to do was unmute the channels, and press up the faders.
The bad thing was, I didn't know how the board was patched, we had two snake heads going, and I couldn't find one of the vocal channels. Everything else came up close enough that I could find it.
It also, by coincidence, happened right at the end of a song. So after panicking for a moment, I had everything unmuted by a couple of beats into the next song. I'm not sure if this makes it worse or not, but it was probably the largest crowd I will mix for all year. On the other hand, no one from the event noticed, and at any of the smaller ones they would have been sure to.

I would say the lack of dynamics made more of a difference than the lack of EQ, although the band had settled in, and there was not as much compression happening as at the beginning of the set.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Did a wedding last night. Main system is tops over subs, with SRM-450's far left and right for outfills. Play a track and EQ the Mains by themselves, then EQ the Outfills by themselves; everything sounds great. Band plays Hora, outfills at -20db; room is a little washy. MC gets up to speak, Outfills are up to -2db and the echo/slap is horrendous. Audience can't understand a single word. I'm thinking "All my EFX are muted, and I'm not using delay on the MC mic anyway`. I check my speaker processer, and the outfills have 77ms of delay, left over from a previous gig. I hit Bypass on the delay and everything snaps into focus. Ouch!

-Mark
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Mark Oakley said:
Did a wedding last night. Main system is tops over subs, with SRM-450's far left and right for outfills. Play a track and EQ the Mains by themselves, then EQ the Outfills by themselves; everything sounds great. Band plays Hora, outfills at -20db; room is a little washy. MC gets up to speak, Outfills are up to -2db and the echo/slap is horrendous. Audience can't understand a single word. I'm thinking "All my EFX are muted, and I'm not using delay on the MC mic anyway`. I check my speaker processer, and the outfills have 77ms of delay, left over from a previous gig. I hit Bypass on the delay and everything snaps into focus. Ouch!

-Mark
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Lets hear it for leftover settings...

Had a talking head gig outdoors for Earthday. I requested 2 hours to setup. Apparently no one informed the stage crew. I had twenty minutes to set up the stage speakers and delays. Fortunately, I had a scene saved from the same show last year. Everything was fine for the presenters using their own wireless. But when the general thanks and awards speakers got up, their mics started going intermittent. I would go up to it and test and it would work fine, and then someone else would go and it was choppy, and I would test again and it was fine. And we went round and round. After the awards, a little digging revealed i had put a gate on the channel the previous year due to the wind.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

So, doing broadcast mix over the weekend. I've got video's multi-view in front of me, allowing me to see everything the cameras are sending. Which is great, allowing me to adjust the mix according to what's going out live. Until I don't have a shot of what I need to see, like when there's a speaker change...
Speaker finishes up, she says thanks, and walks off stage. Schedule says MC goes up, and I expect him to go on stage as the speaker walks off. No camera shot showing me the stairs to the stage. But he should be there. Has been every time so far. I, accordingly, turn down her mic, and turn up his. Apparently he wasn't quite ready to go. I've no idea what he was doing off-stage, but all broadcast heard out of his mic was, and I quote:

"Well, THAT was a fail."
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Had a well known dancer/actor doing a seminar at the University I TD at. He had requested a wireless lavelier microphone. I get him all wired up and ask if I should take care of the mute. To which he replies "the level is set do not touch anything, I will mute as needed." So you all know what happened. Yup, the university theater staff and my crew were having dinner when the sound of a waterfall came out of the sound system.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Back in the days of cassette tape tracks, I was running sound for a church service where I was handed a tape track for a guest soloist that showed up a few minutes before the service started, no opportunity for a sound check! I did not realize at the time that the pitch control on my Nakamichi MR-2 tape deck (which was a fader type control) had been accidentally bumped all the way down, so the music played several keys lower than it should! So here I had a soprano singing alto! At first I thought that the track was rather slow, then realized that the pitch control was all the way down! Slowly I increased the pitch control so that by the end of the song, it was playing in the correct pitch. The soloist was a real trooper, and I was pretty impressed that she could hit the low notes and hold them long without missing a beat!
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Hello

Couple years ago there was a group with sitar-flute-tabla-"drum" - all very quiet. Beautiful stage and we managed to hide most microphones almost unseen. Fine lights, too.

This was in ex-movie theater with high ceiling and concrete floor. Not much amplification - SPL around 80-90dB

I managed to tip the cover of my mixer , so it hit the floor with a VERY LOUD BANG in the middle of performance ....... must´ve been over 100dB - or so I felt.



Previous 30 years - a good variety of most imaginary mistakes - never managed to blow p.a. though - but feedback, odd squeeks etc - multitrack recording with blank file as result - power amps off - you name it.
 
Re: Spill the beans, what is the worst oops you have done during a show?

Evan Kirkendall said:
I can think of a few:

My most "famous" oops at a gig would be toasting 4 Carvin mid range drivers. :)

My most "face palm" oops at a gig would be a few years ago... PM5D at FOH. My iPod was sitting above the store/recall buttons. It had managed to walk down the console during the show from the low end, and hit the "recall" button twice during a guitar solo. It recalled my file with everything flat and muted... (No soundcheck that day- just throw and go at showtime). PA went silent. Woohoo. Lesson learned- recall confirmation!

Oh, and look I found a youtube video from it: Shameless- All Time Low - YouTube

My most "annoying" oops at a gig would be Warped Tour a few years ago... Day 1 for the band, everyone's looking at me like "Who is this kid?" Console was a H3k. I show up, line check in headphones, throw all the VCA's at 0(they were assigned to various things, but I didn't have time to change it to how I wanted) and get ready to go. First song starts off with an iPod intro- tracks are rolling along, vocals kick in and nothing is there. Vocals weren't assigned to the L/R, my bad, no worries. Band hits, nothing. I about lose my shit- the tech for the stage put all the vca's all the way down since I wasn't using them, but forgot to un-assign them! I quickly throw the VCA's back up and get to damage control. Band joked around with me about it on stage and it's always been a running joke.

Oh, and look, youtube has it again: All Time Low - Weightless (Live at Warped Tour '09) - YouTube


...And I think that's it!



Evan
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The comments under the videos makes the links a worthwhile visit alone!
 
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