@shredd, I'm looking forward to hearing your stuff man.
I appreciate that you are being humble and self-deprecating for humorous purposes, but dude, you are not stupid by any means! Here, I'll instantly prove that I've done something far more stupid than you ever have:
I did a 55 piece orchestra that hired a bus and catering. I had over 70 people in the studio and we worked all day on several of their tunes that were going to be pressed into an actual vinyl album (this was the 80s).
We had a great take of one tune but there was a small section with some terrible noise that was very transient and the timing was so close to the audio that it could not be manually muted with the console (no automation in that studio).
Instead of doing the safe thing (something reversible), which would have been to use a white grease pencil and mark the section start/end and then use the 2" tape editing block and simply put a short piece of leader tape, I decided to do what I had successfully done hundreds of times before - actually do a very short punch-in/out erase on the master tape. I had a great deal of experience with this machine (a 3M M79, probably the fastest punching 2" machine in history). Punching in with this machine had become intuitive.
In my haste/confidence/arrogance I neglected to check the mode I was in. Normally when I do that I'm in overdub mode meaning that you are using the Record head for both playing back and recording. I was in
playback mode and therefore the timing was off due to the gap between the playback head and the record head.
The punch-in/out went perfectly and I erased a section of the audio I wanted to keep rather than the noise. I played back the tape at the section before the punch in and heard the offending noise immediately precede a beautiful silent spot on the tape, right where the audio started after the noise. I looked at the machine and yup, it was in playback mode. I wanted to resign.
For the record, the 3M M79 does not have a Control-Z key.
So,
@shredd, have you ever destroyed someone's record?
They had another, lower res recording of the tune and I flew that section in, live. To me it sounded terrible but the client was gracious. I offered to personally pay for the re-record session but he blew it all off as nothing.
I hope this has made you feel better about yourself
@shredd. Now I'm going to my studio and purposefully erase something in Reaper as penance.