Why I Got Fired…

It was easily the best job I’d ever had. 

I was working as a tape operator in a big recording studio In London in the 1980s. ‘Tape operator’ meant plugging in mics and headphones, making coffee, carrying music stands and electric pianos, pressing ‘play’ and ‘record’, some occasional tape editing - but also providing any effects that were needed.

This was a time when, if you wanted some delay, you went to the outboard storeroom and took the delay rack unit off the shelf, and back in the control room you set it up on top of the patch bay facing the engineer. 

If you were mixing, you might amass a small tower of rack units there, patched in on the various effects busses.

Round the back were all the mains cables, plugged in.

It was a library music mixing session on a Monday morning, with me seated behind the patch-bay - a bit sleepy (surely not hungover?) - getting up every so often to press ‘rewind’, then ‘play’. A low-pressure session. 

At the end of one playback I got up and…. CAUGHT MY FOOT IN THE MAINS CABLES!!!!! 

The whole lot came crashing down!

That woke everyone up!

I broke stuff and got fired.

It was my fault.

You would expect that I’d be the Plug-In Effects King by now, living in a virtual studio world inside my laptop. But for some reason I’m struggling with steel enclosures, and soldering ‘DC in’ sockets.

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The Long View

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Asymmetric Enclosures; The Break Box