Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Error Messages

I saw this picture over on Matrixsynth and it reminded me of a funny story related to synth error messages (now there's a sentence you don't read every day!)

My band was playing a show somewhere in Germany. I forget precisely where it was, but it may have been Berlin. For this particular tour, my keyboard player, Paul, brought along a Waldorf Microwave XTk to play onstage. We were in the middle of a song when I suddenly noticed Paul's keys just dropped out of the mix entirely. I look over to see him bent over peering at the display... never a good sign. Out of nowhere Paul starts laughing and motions me over. I don't remember the precise wording of the error message, but it was something like 'CATASTROPHE! TOTAL FAILURE!' We both agreed that the Germans certainly had a way of capturing the feeling of having one of your instruments take a dump in the middle of a show.

Have you ever experienced one of these moments in the studio or on stage? Are there other synths with amusing/quirky error messages that you've seen?

3 comments:

Paul Seegers said...

If memory serves me well, it was "Catastrophic Failure", which I think would make a great title for an A23 Remix cd.

Steve said...

I can't remember what piece of gear it was that I used to have but it didn't have an LCD or alpha/numeric LEDs. When the unit crashed, the front panel LEDs would flash an SOS in morse code pattern.

Craig M. said...

they should just put "yer screwed" as the error message