Tell me a spooky scary story. Something that happened to you, or someone you know, or local folklore, or something your uncle told you by the campfire. Paranormal experiences welcome. I want to look like pic attached.
(just nothing involving SA pls and thanks)
This isn’t really spooky. More of one of those “glitch in the matrix” experiences that I still can’t explain.
When I was a teenager I was really into making music with my older brother. He was musically a lot more talented than I ever was in pretty much every way, except producing. I loved equalizing, mixing, mastering, all that forgettable minutia. I loved the criticism I got to throw at my sibling for bad harmonies. I loved the reprieve from being a little brother. Most of all I loved long summer days and homeworkless school nights ruining our eardrums together.
It started out with me recording his band with a cassette recorder, to running sound for their live gigs, to eventually joining the band and, over the course of a couple years, saving up enough to get a mixer with a built in CD burner. It was a Roland VS-2400CD Mixer, and it was honestly the most unnecessary expense of my entire life. But such a slick piece equipment needed to be used properly. So my brother and I set about turning the downstairs storage room that we had initially commandeered from our parents many, many summers ago to house our sprawling Lego-opolis into a professional recording studio.
We actually did a pretty good job. The finished product was probably not up to code, but it didn’t look like two teenagers slapped some boards together. Our dad and uncle helped a lot. Especially with framing the dividing wall between the mixing room and the recording room and putting in a window. When it was done we quickly realized an oversight. In order to plug in mic/sound cables into the mixer, we’d have to snake them under the door or drill a hole in the wall. I didn’t want either of those things. So bought some audio cable wall plates that we could plug into on the recording side and route into the mixer on the mixing side.
This is where the unexplainable shit happens. I’m going to try to simplify this in text format, but forgive me if it doesn’t make much sense now. I’ll explain later. I wired the wall plates like this:
Basically I wired the inputs and outputs straight through the wall. Input 1 in the recording room was on the rightmost side of that plate and was routed to output 1 in the mixing room which was on the leftmost side. I explicitly remember doing it this way because I didn’t want to bother crossing wires behind the drywall. I just wanted to do it straightforward. I did it myself and I was proud.
When it came time to record with the new set up I was dumbfounded. No sound. Troubleshooting time. I checked to make sure the inputs were routed to the correct tracks, that the tracks were on, that headphone volume was up, that the gains were all up. Nothing out of place. My brother was getting a little impatient. I get a lump in my throat because I know that it’s probably something to do with the wall plate. We unplugged the instruments and mics from the wall plate and ran the cables under the door again. Everything worked now. Uh oh. My brother could tell I was getting worked up. “I’ll go get Tack Bell,” he says.
While he’s gone I get frustrated. I reboot the mixer twice. Repeat all the same troubleshooting steps I did before, swap all the sound cables for other ones. I just can’t get sound to go through the wall plate. I could hear my brother open to the door upstairs. Suddenly I remember. It was so obvious. I didn’t wire the wall plate this way:
I wired it this way:
Just before my brother comes downstairs I switch the cables around to the correct orientation. Lo and behold everything’s working again. We have Taco Bell and spend the night recording covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.
…Did you catch it? Did you catch what’s been unsettling me all these years? It wasn’t me not remembering I actually did cross the wires behind the drywall. It was the fact input 2 always went to output 2. That track should have worked no matter what. What the fuck.
That IS unsettling. Did you ever try to put it back to see if it was still broken the old way?
Unsure what could be haunted in this scenario, but I imagine Taco Bell is enough to exorcize most spirits. Also, you’re a very compelling writer.
I eventually did take the wall plate off to see how I wired it. It was like the second diagram, where I had crossed the wires behind the drywall so that input 1 was on the left in the recording room and output 1 was on the left in the mixing room. I can chalk up remembering I did it the other way to faulty memory. But that doesn’t change that input 2 always went to output 2 no matter which way I wired it. I’m sure there some logical explanation. But I was pretty thorough in my troubleshooting before I “remembered” how I wired the wall plate.
And thanks for the compliment!