I have a good
feedback story. I was running sound for the wedding of some very good friends (I'm actually how the two first met). This took place about 4 years ago, well into the digital music age. So the father of the groom had this really crappy
mono recording of his church's organ playing here comes the bride on an old WELL USED cassette. He handed it to me the morning of the wedding and was so excited about how amazing it was going to sound for the wedding. I popped it in the high quality Denon cassette
deck and the tape immediately disintegrated. I had three hours to wedding start time and we had no here comes the bride to
play. I grabbed the denon
deck, the dead cassette, and headed home. I used my best splicing skills to patch together the tape. Played it into my P.C. and then did my best to cut paste and edit together what sounded like a pretty good version of the song, removing the verse where the tape shredded, and burned it to CD. Back to the church just in time for the service to start and I had saved the day... or so I thought.
Since I was no longer using the cassette
deck for
play back, I grabbed a new blank tape and threw it in the
deck to make an audio copy of the service. All my processional music on CD ended, the pastor was about to talk and I hit record on the Cassette... The pastor said, "Ladies and..." and was blown away by the deepest bone rattling
feedback I've ever heard. I immediately pulled the pastor's mic down... the
feedback kept going... I pulled all the sliders down including the master... it began to rattle my teeth. I fortunately had the training and presence of mind to ask myself, "What was the last thing I did to screw this all up?" I pressed stop on the cassette
deck and the feed back ended. The church busts out in laughter as the pastor appeared rather flustered and confused and started over again. No one's ever heard a sound like that and had no idea that
feedback could possibly be that low. So they don't immediately think I screwed up (which is nice). Afterward, the father of the bride actually thanked me for screwing up. He said he was so nervous he felt like he was about to pass out, but the brief diversion and moment of laughter helped him through. "It's all part of the service sir".
So, how do you get
feedback out of a cassette
deck with all the sliders off? Well the
deck had an extra set of heads for live monitoring of the recording as it happens. The board was set up so that
aux send A/B was output
level to the cassette
deck for recording. Aux C/D was output
level to the
monitor system. The
aux send to the
monitor system had been accidentally left on as I had set
monitor levels earlier in the morning before the stupid tape broke. I created a
feedback loop that went from the cassette playback heads to the board, out through
aux send C/D on the channels used for cassette playback to the monitors, back in through the pastor's
microphone and that
channel's
aux send A/B on the board out to the cassette
deck to record.
Don't try this at school it's bad for your gear.