Equipment destruction feel-better thread

[Utopia]

Hey everyone,

I just put a tiny scratch on my BRAND NEW T3i's outside shell of the articulating screen by slipping with the tissue and scratching it with my fingernail a little too hard and it wont buff out.

I feel like I've murdered my newborn.

Anyone else got some equipment destruction stories to tell? Might turn out to be a fun thread.

One I can think off the top of my head is that I blowtorched a countryman lapel mic while trying to record flames, and another time I crushed a lapel while getting high-impact metal SFX.

 

[Utopia]

This one happened in my presence, but I was not involved. ROC and other soundies will especially appreciate this one.

About 1980 or so I was doing a "temp" job moving a music store from one location to another. The owner thought that by using a powered hand truck he could move a full sized upright piano down a flight of stairs by himself. He lost control on the first step down and a $6,000 piano tumbled end-over end to the bottom of the stairs where it hit a building support and split into multiple pieces.

I just wish that I had been able to record the sound.

NICE ONE!

That's reminds me of the story I heard of a famous rock band who were doing lines on their mixboard in the studio and the producer walks in with a couple file folders while they were hanging out in the studio and he slams the file folders down on the mixboard and all that blow goes everywhere and into the faders and knobs of the mixboard.

It was a Neve 8078 I think. haha

 

[Cracker Funk]

Two years ago, I was doing some finishing touches on the edit for that year's 48HFP entry. The director stepped into the room, and told me he thought of a really quick scene he could shoot, and it'd be really easy for me to put it in the edit.

"Sure, that's a great idea. My camera is easy enough to use, I'm sure you can figure out how to use it."

He looked around and saw a mountain of miniDV tapes. "Which one of these tapes should I use?"

Not to be bothered, I shrugged it off, "ahh, I don't care, just grab any tape you want".

He grabbed the head cleaner. And proceeded to record about five minutes of "footage". With the head cleaner. That's very bad. My Sony VX2100 became immediately inoperable.

The equipment? I wasn't so worried about that. Material possessions can be replaced. I cared only about how we were going to turn in our movie in time for the quickly-approaching 7PM deadline. We needed a video camera to get the finished film back on tape.

We immediately started calling everyone we knew. We didn't need a fancy camera, just one with a firewire connection. Half a million phone-calls later, no luck. As the director, screenwriter and star kept making phone calls, I kept trying to export to tape.

Over and over again, my attempts were unsuccessful. I probably tried about thirty times, no exaggeration. At 6:50PM, I'm making one final attempt. "Please work, please work, please work, please work". I'll be damned -- it worked!

With director waiting in his car outside, screenwriter/star rushed the tape out to him, as soon as it was ready. With the drop-off point less than a mile from my house, they made good time, tearing through the streets of Richmond, to arrive on-time, with just a few seconds to spare!

Eventually, the VX2100 returned to perfect working order. My best guess is that it just needed to rid itself of the cleaning-juice that had gotten on the recording heads, and as I ran more and more tape over it, I essentially cleaned it of the cleaner.

And then I sold the camera, for a few hundred dollars more than I would need to purchase my T2i. And the person I sold it to absolutely loved it, as it was exactly the camera that fit his needs. Happy story, all-around!

 

[wheatgrinder]

nice one CF.. happy endings are sweet.

 

[JoshL]

Okay, this just happened to me last night, and I'm still a little sore and depressed, so hooray for venting!

I'm in the studio working on a score. Rough drafts are done and I'm starting to flesh out the arrangements a little more. It's primarily an acoustic guitar/orchestral score, so I want everything finished and perfect before recording final guitar tracks. Not very electronic in sound, but I want to use some subtle electronics to support and enhance, as I often do. My go-to synth for, well, pretty much everything is an Access Virus B. Absolutely love that synth to death. I'd love one of the newer ones, but I can't afford one now and the B is pretty great.

I'm working on a patch for a pad for one cue and all of a sudden, the virus stops making sound. Odd, I think to myself, but E-MU's MIDI drivers for my interface are sometimes a little wonky with Windows 7, so I reboot. Still no dice, so plug in a MIDI cord directly from my controller, rather than letting the host route signals. Nothing. Try a few different cords (you never know), and no sound, but I'm hearing that as I play a note, I hear a tiny little click and then nothing. Then the LCD display dims to nothing and all the flashing LEDs stay solid, rather than pulsing with the tempo.

I'm freaking out, of course. Send and e-mail to access, do research online. One person said they fixed the problem by replacing a few capacitors, so I crack open to look at the board to see if it's something I could do, but it's way beyond my soldering skills. They were quoted around $250-300 to repair theirs. They sell for around $500 on ebay (the new one goes for $2500...new price, not ebay used price). And of course, I don't have the money right now, having just spent $300 on a used guitar a couple weeks ago, which I didn't really need and was ALREADY feeling guilty about.

So, yeah. If anyone knows anyone who wants to loan me their Virus, let me know! Or if anyone wants to buy me one in exchange for a feature length score...