Back when I was working as a tutor in the recording studio at my university, I volunteered to record a demo tape for a buddy of mine. He was applying to study at the jazz school in Freiburg, Germany, and needed a demo tape of a few songs to show his solo jazz guitar playing as well as playing in a group (which was a quartet: guitar, piano, upright bass, drums).
When doing a recording session, I always get there at least two hours early, and then have the drummer get there an hour early. That way I have time to get all the mics set up, headphone feeds, and all the inputs set in Pro Tools. The drummer gets there early so he can set up and tune his kit and we can get a good mic mix going before the rest of the group arrives. It really helps the recording session to go smoothly and efficiently.
So I'm in the process of testing the mics and headphones, and I notice that I'm not getting any signal out of several of the mics. I swap out cables, try different channels in the patch bay, and basically replace every element in the equation with no luck. And then I try plugging a mic directly into the board. Nothing. Apparently somebody must have come in the evening before and blown out a bunch of the preamps. And by a bunch, I mean most of the preamps on the entire board. I ended up having to record the whole group with only five working channels. One mic on the guitar amp, one on the piano, one on the upright bass, and two on the drums (I used the
recorderman technique).
It was rough, and took a ton of work getting the mix to sound decent, but the good news is that he got accepted--fortunately judged on the basis of performance skill rather than recording quality.