Recording horseplay

In one of my old bands the drummer had an enourmous double kick set (not a pedal, actually two seperate kick drums). I routed the mics from each one to seperate tracks and panned them full L and full right before sending them to the (stereo) headphone bus. That got some weird faces out of everyone.

 

When we're recording I usually end up in the producer's chair, and one time-honored ploy that always works is when somebody's just done a great take, a definite keeper, and he/she knows it. That's the time to hit the talkback button and say: "Hey - that was just about perfect, you're sounding terrific! How about if we try a real take now, while you're hot?" The effect only lasts for a few seconds, but it's a proven way to release tension and make everybody smile together.

 

In one of my first bands, we had just finished recording all the instrument tracks and the only thing left was the vocals. He was having a tough time with his vibrato and frankly he was laying it on a little thick as far as the soul department is concerned.

So we came up with the Kirk-O-Fudd meter. That would be captain Kirk (feel) and Elmer Fudd (vibrato). We would stand behind the engineer with our arms spread out and whenever his vibrato would go south one arm would fluctuate like the needle on a VU meter, the other arm would do the same when his feel was a bit over the top. Of course there was the occasional spike in the meter, sometimes both at the same time. Needless to say, there was more than one or two takes for the vocal tracks. This was before digital so we could not paste tracks together. It was a great way of making a stressful situation comical.

 

In a former band we played a bunch of really obnoxious VERY "BLUE" if you know what I mean ? Jokes on our engineer so when it came time to track bass I got a very loud Fake Orgasm played back through my headset instead of the drumtracks I was Recording to . I wouldn't have been so bad but they had my EX Wife do the sound effect.

 

That's very childish when you're trying to do a recording. It works very well live, though. Quite a crowd pleaser!

Randy