November at 40 Knots

So the City Samanas played at a little bar in Red Hook Brooklyn on Thursday.

The rain was biblical. Poor Dave forgot his cymbal case and stick bag and had to go back home to get it. Returning to the bar he face-planted from his scooter in the rain. He's okay now but it was a bit harrowing.

What's funny about this band is that we'll write back and forth very detailed emails about exactly what we're going to do. And then we do something completely different when we actually get there. Two examples of that are that I was roped into singing ("singing") a song I'd never even played before (Franklins Tower) and a thousand emails about how we would play Favorite Things was immediately abandoned and a psychedelic section was added to the song.

Roll away the dew.

The best-laid plans for recording all went out the window as soon as we showed up. My guitar was miked with an Oktava 012, Greg's was with an SM57 (draped sideways over his guitar cabinet). The bass amp was close miked with a Rode NT1. Uh, the bass mic twisted off-axis at some point and then got fixed again.

The drum kit is three mics. I did that thing where the overhead is an Ear Trumpet Edwina, the "side" mic is an Oktava 012, and the kick mic is a cheap kick-drum mic. Over the course of the evening the Edwina got very "grainy" sounding. I don't know if we were just hitting it with too much volume from the drums or if the phantom power wasn't up to snuff for it.

But the thing of that is that I didn't use any outboard mic preamps at all. I used the Focusrite 18i20 for every instrument. At one point the bass actually started to get too loud and I had to repatch it into an input that allowed me to put a pad on the input.

I am digging Lily's new 5-string bass. I'm mixing on Ultrasone headphones so I don't really have an idea of where the bass actually sits in the mix. In the future I'll have that more worked out.

The thing where I play with an Electro Harmonics C9 organ pedal seems to work really well actually. Since I can blend the guitar sound in with the very compressed organ sound it'll do a thing where I can get a guitar sound when I'm playing loud and it turns into an organ sound on quieter sections.

Greg and me singing is a very interesting sound. We're so very different sounding voices but it seems to work. I mean, at least on Franklins Tower. At least to me.

The vocals. The absurd thing is that we didn't have a cable which would go from Greg's mini mixer to feed the Focusrite. So I set up a small stereo bar on the mic stand and we had one dynamic go to the PA and another 58 go to the Focusrite. Sort of amusing. But I think even if we do that again we'll use the Edwina as the vocal mic. At least for recording.

These mixes are all over the place. In the Basement is marred by an off-axis mic or two. Some of the performances are lost in places. Sometimes we even get back on track!

My conclusion is that although there's a lot of scratches in this leather but the the loose, drunken (not literally), swing we approach is just right. It's sort of fascinating how this group of people go about playing as an ensemble, like four sculptors who are not entirely sure what the sculpture will be until they all start working on it.

I think if we do this a few more times we might just have something special in the way of a recording. Especially if I practice guitar more in the meantime. ;-)

Samana Recordation

A pair of Neves. A pair of ATI tube preamps. A Tascam US-2000 interface. The City Samanas. Recording live. I have to figure this out.
The drum kit is small and conservative. One tom. The band is situated fairly close to one another. It just occurred to me that I don't enjoy close-miking snare drums.

1. The bass guitar I've been traditionally putting a Rode NT1 (which is sorta Neumann U87 looking and maybe even U47 sounding) up against the grill of the bass amp. The snare and a variety of other instruments will get into that mic. There's nothing I can do about it. Probably use a channel of the ATI on bass.
2. I bet the other channel of ATI will be as the drum overhead. I don't know what mic to use. If I go large diaphragm I could use another Rode NT1. Or I could use a Ear Trumpet Edwina. 
3. I get a Neve 1272 on my guitar amp. With an SM47 (not my Unidyne, I don't want to deal with bringing that mic out with me -- which is a joke because every other mic I have is more expensive but that one mic is a pain in the tuchus because everyone thinks they're so special now.) 
4. Just for balance let's give Greg the other 1272. 
5. Greg's vocal mic. Now that's interesting. We could give him another Edana. The signal will be hopped up with a Mackie mixer so it'll be hitting us at something around line level
6. The tom will go direct into a channel on the Tascam
7. So will the kick
8. And the snare, what the heck... I mean I have a kit for miking things I may as well use it. 

Now I just have to figure out that I have the right interconnects to get from the two preamps into the Tascam. The thing I don't have to worry about is monitoring -- there just isn't any. Problem solved.
There will be a world of bleed from microphones. But I think I can live with that.

I feel we need some psychedelic lights though. We definitely need psychedelic lights.

Althea

Althea is a later Grateful Dead tune -- it came out in 1980. It's a very pretty number.
And I am in need to play it with City Samanas.

Verses

Bm  A \  E A 

Bm  A \ E 

Bm A  \ E A

Bm A\  E

A \ C#m\  D \ A\ 
C#m \ E \ Bm A \ E

Break

D \ G \ E \ E

D \ G \ E \ E

Bm A \ E

Jam

Bm  A \  E A 

Bm  A \ E

Samanas at 40 Knots

Tomorrow night, Thursday June 4th, I'll be sitting in with the City Samanas at the 40 Knots Bar in Brooklyn.

My intent is to play with the Peavey Vypyr amp and my Gibson SG. I'm doing that so I can dial in my sound ahead of time (which, as of this writing, is the "plexi" clean with the preamp and power amp gains dimed with a little bit of Leslie and a big 600 or so ms of delay) and not be stressed about powering up a cranky tube amp and getting the pedals to all work and such. I'm not sure if I'll bring the pedal with the amp yet. Maybe. I have one of those Sanpera pedals (the small one) and with it I can control volume and the like. Maybe. I'll have to experiment with it tonight.
We have no set list. We actually only have the vaguest idea of what we'll play. But that actually works out okay for us, so I'll go with it. I expect we'll end up doing a very long version of Dark Star.

An Album's Worth

Greg Bartus sent me some stuff to listen to before we play together next week. I'm kinda digging this stuff which was all recorded one or two years ago. Maybe three years ago. Anyway, I think we should totally release the unreleased stuff. Dark Star First Jam Loosely Regarded by the Cat Asleep by the Door is actually already on an album. So is, ironically, Diatomaceous Earth part II The Porcupines Dream is on that same album Measuring the Invisible is also on In the Vast Iteration But Sapphire Road Tractors? Totally an unreleased song And The Wooley Mammoth's Last Dance is actually a Diatomaceous Earth song

The Accidental Album

So. I think City Samanas accidentally made an album. I really like it. Maybe there should be some interstitial, maybe some things could be edited down, maybe a bit of tasteful mastering, but it's a cool album.

Eric Clapton's guitar in While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Isolated.
I am unnecessarily amused by a television commercial.

I know, right?

What Wickedness This Way Comes

So, quite by accident, I think we recorded an entire album.

Note that what you hear above isn't mastered and could likely use some gentle caressing as far as the mix goes.
This entire record is Greg Bartus, Lily Kinner, Dave Wolfe, and me. 

Sapphire Road Tractors

Last night Lou Clark played drums with City Samanas. Slowly but surely I'm getting all the members of Tyrannosaurus Mouse into the City Samanas. Ha!

Now. Here are some things. We played "Blue Shadow" for a good 35 minutes. Also, the experiment that is "Toxic Fruit" did, in my opinion, fail. I asked that we come up with a half-dozen motifs and then play them in a loop and then I edited them together. It seems more like a medly than as a prog-rock piece I thought it would be. Still, there are some nice motifs in there.

Lily rocks out on Ethan's fretless Jazz bass.

 We have like a gazillion (that's an accurate, scientific, number) of new themes we created in Blue Shadow.

Lou has the most conservative playing style where it looks like he's not moving even if he's rocking out.

 I tried to get a picture of Greg but he was looking down the whole time I had the camera out.

3 of the 4 of the gang.

Oh. In other big news we plugged the bass directly into an Aphex tube mic preamp. It's Greg's preamp. I don't really know what I think about it. Does the bass have more, er, "girth"? I just don't know.
There are so many questions I don't have the answer for.
Before we'd been using a Countryman 85 direct box feeding a Lindell preamp. I dunno. What do we think? I felt the bass guitar in last night's recordings was easier to mix. Maybe?
Still, I could totally imagine that much of what we recorded last night could end up on a record.

Measuring the Invisible

Last week's rehearsal's yield.

So. I did a thing. We're recording bass through a Countryman 85 DI and a Lindell preamp. In post I'm running the bass through an automatic level plugin but more importantly (and, er, starting on the second or third track here as of this writing) going through Samplitude's tube-warming plugin.
Yeah, I know. "Tube warming". It's the buzzword from about 5 years ago. But it does the extra thing I felt we want the bass to do. Makes me re-think the Aphex tube preamps that Greg has. Hmm... that might be worth trying actually...

The Porcupine's Dream

Wednesday with the City Samanas, we had Ethan Rosenblatt over. Yes, Ethan and Lily did play at the same time although I could not actually record both of them at the same time. I do not know which song(s) Ethan plays on in the following album.

There is much in the way of material which could be edited and then put together on an album. I would go so far as to say that the only things we wouldn't do anything with are the "Eyes of the World" and the "Imaginary Opera". Everything else has at least some portion which I'd be more than happy to put on an album.

I have questions. Like, for instance, should I add a pair of dynamic microphones for the toms? I could throw a pair of '57's on there and use the Apogee converters' preamps. Or something. I just don't know. Do I know? No. No I do not know. Tell me.

Tenth of April, 2013

Samanas recording April 10.
First big thing we did was record using the Tascam DR-680. As I pointed out the Tascam behaved exactly the way I'd expected. The direct outputs worked. The line level inputs had good and appropriate headroom. And the unit just recorded the way one would want it to.
We used our standard input list of three mics on drums. We had the pair of Edwina mics by Ear Trumpet Labs on overheads.

David Wolfe at the drums with a pair of Edwinas overhead. It's probably difficult to understand the mics overhead unless you already know what they look like.

The overheads are in an X/Y-ish pattern which is mostly because the microphone bar would slip and make the mics touch. So, okay, fine, more phase coherence. Those mics fed a pair of Neve 1272 preamps.
The Rode NT1 was on the kick backed off about a foot and went through one of the Lindell preamps with a bit of EQ. I don't remember what I did -- I just boosted, flipped through some frequencies, found a frequency I liked, and then reduced the boost until it sound better than no boost but not so much that it was stinkin' up the joint.

The rack of Avalons is not ours. Don't get any ideas.

The real trick is what we did with bass guitar. Lily played directly into the high impedance input of a Neve 1272. As I expected, I needed to roll off a bit of low end (I did a very low frequency high pass filter plus a bit of a scoop at about 500 Hz. There's also a tiny bit of compression followed by a larger bit of compression on many of the tracks.
Note that, for instance, "Eyes of the Vole" is by no means a finished performance. The point of these things is a proof of concept of recording. That being said, some of the finished jams are very album-able. Like for instance "In Apprehension How Like A God. This was just a jam Lily and I did before Dave got there. There may be a bit of Greg in that track. And eventually there may be some voices or some Hammond organ on that track. Otherwise I think it to be very groovy and usable as a final and actual song on a record. That's me. Thinking.
Now, the guitars. My guitar went through an SM58 and into a Neve. But Greg's guitar went through an SM58 and a Lindell. Again, at some point in the evening I fiddled with the EQ on the Lindell to make whatever I thought was "better" to be, you know, better.
The short answer here is that I feel confident we can record and get a groovy sound which I'd be proud to put on an album. Moving the kick drum mic back a bit gives us a nice "poof" on the kick. Plugging the bass into the world's most expensive direct box sounds great. As far as I'm concerned, recording guitars is easy and a no-brainer. If the guitar sounds good and you get a microphone near the speaker, you're in good shape. Your mileage on that advice, as always, may vary.

So click on through to the recording.

There are two recordings here which I think will eventually be for public consumption once edited and possibly massaged a bit in the mix and then mastered. "In Apprehension How Like A God" and "Thus Slept the Drunken Gods" (I'm on a "god" kick apparently, I blame Game of Thrones) are both improvised songs which I think are going to end up on some album somewhere. The rest of the tunes are strictly for band use -- listening to rehearsals that is.

Greg Bartus with the Rock and Roll.

Oh. And I did a real test of cymbals and bells with Dave playing and I recorded at 48kHz and at 96kHz. I seriously cannot tell the difference on playback. So I do not care about 96kHz any more.

DR-680 under stress conditions

So the Tascam DR-680 performed swimmingly with City Samanas.
Swimmingly, I say.

The Tascam DR-680 sits atop a pair of Neve 1272 preamps.

We fed it line level from the Neve and Lindell preamps. The direct outputs of each channel fed the JamHub. You know, I'd never even tested the Tascam's direct outs. I just presumed they'd work. And luckily they did.
Whew.
We did an experiment recording some cymbals at 96kHz and at 48kHz. Results of that test should be available tomorrow.

Anarchic Botany

Here then is the latest ambient jam recording. Things. Which include a certain guitar player's performance (mine), and the the sound recording methodology. But not necessarily in the same blog post. First let me talk about the recording process we used.

Dave Wolfe at the drums with 2/3rds of the microphones.

It was something like this. The bass was going direct via a Mesa Boogie Walkabout (feeding a Lindell preamp) and the two guitars were somewhat hidden from the drum kit using SM58's (feeding two Neve 1272 preamps). Two Ear Trumpet Labs Edwina microphones in an X/Y configuration over the drum kit (feeding Neve 1272 preamps) with a Rode NT1 just outside the kick drum (feeding a Lindell preamp).

A closer view of the drum "overheads".

So yeah. Thing one is that the "overheads" for the drums are down pretty low. This is perhaps a mistake, they should be about a foot higher than they are. The cymbals will be relatively less loud if the mics are moved further away.
But having the bass go direct really worked nicely: for drums. Lily and I struggled a bit with getting the bass to sound "right". Listening back to the recordings I'm not really hearing the stuff we were struggling with. What we're trying to get is a good midrange sound on the bass without it being to stringy/buzzy/slappy. But we were fighting with the low end on the bass and I think this indicates we should be using vastly better headphones when we're recording so we can hear those things. Ha! Yes. Capital idea, that.
The JamHub works remarkably well. I mean, it's by far the least-expensive of those kinds of things—headphone monitoring systems where each musician can control their own mix—and except for the somewhat irky fact that the 1/4" signals are all stereo (and that only the XLR inputs may have effects applied to them) it behaves as one thinks it should. Indeed, the XLR inputs even seem to be able to handle line levels, which is nice because we use one of the drum channels to come in line level so we can put some gated reverb on it (for monitoring).
The jam evolved into the Dead tune "Eyes of the World". Or, rather, it evolved into the rhythm section playing Eyes and Drew insisting on playing a melody to it which is quite simply wrong. So I have been told. In order to get that out of my system we might have to pretend that there's a new song here and have Pleasure for the Empire be responsible for it.
The thing we get into at about 9 minutes is interesting. It could possibly be an interstitial between City Samana songs or something for the Imaginary Opera. The Em to G#m is kind of cool. We could have the Chorus in the opera (a soprano) sing over it.

Obnoxous Guitar

Who is the obnoxious guitar player on this track?


Why it's me.
There's a lot of things I dig about this jam. Firstwise one should note that there is not a single part of this which was pre-planned. And that includes the key we're playing in. For some reason I went to full acid-rock mode on the Marshall.
Greg has a MoogerFooger which, let's face it, sounds awesome. Apparently I decided to turn the regeneration on my MXR analog delay all the way to the right which has predictably chaotic results. But once done with that I still had the preamp turned almost all the way up on the Marshall.
The Edwina microphones are about 18" closer to the drums than on the other tracks on this "album". I don't know if that's really the way to go. Do the toms sound more... something? I have no idea. There's certainly more specific spread on the drum sound -- ride is in one speaker and the hats are in another.
Also when I mixed this song I was focused on another part of it. So the apallingly loudiciousness that my guitar is relative to the rest of the mix can't be blamed entirely on me. As far as you know.

Penguins and You

Here are some things City Samanas did last night. This is just a rehearsal. I believe that there isn't a single piece we did here where we had any idea of what we were going to do before we did it. At least that might be true for me. In any case, the thing we're looking at here is the recording(s), not the performances. Click through to dig the grooviness:The songs have progressively more "stuff" on them. The Foot Hen song is all but dry. Those are just the raw tracks with panning and a limiter strapped over the stereo buss.
Then I added a drum submix buss with some additional compression on the next song.
Last mixes have a bit of reverb on the drums. With bigger compression. So this is a decent overview of what the raw tracks sound like, and then the various things I did in the way of mixing them.
There are a number of new or different ways we did of things:

• The drum overheads are, in fact, overhead, and are the Ear Trumpet Labs "Edwina" mics in an X/Y pair.
• I only recorded two tracks for drums. No kick drum microphone.

I didn't have my camera with me so you'll have to be satisfied with this X/Y pair.

• The bass was put through the PA cabinet because the Twin Reverb was being buzzy. That is not our preferred solution however it did sound surprisingly good.
• We used the new Jam Hub (bedroom) headphone amp. I fed one of the drum mics into it via an XLR adapter so that we could put a bit of gated reverb on the drums. That seemed to make people happy.

My feelings right now are that I (for the first time) wish I had used the kick drum mic. I feel derpy. Dave does not have a heavy foot to start with. But although I feel the rest of the kit has a good (albeit "old-fashioned" sound) the kick is a bit buried. So: next time we'll use a Rode NT1A on the kick and send it through the Lindell preamp.
I think I want to get the bass guitar mic a bit further from the bass speaker. We're not getting quite the midrange out of it that I think we're going after. I'm even punching a bunch of mids on the EQ on the Lindell.
Do I want even yet more separation of the drums from other instruments? Yep. I sure do.
Am I digging the sound of the Edwinas as overheads? I sure am.
The big takeaways: we still need more isolation for the drums. Also, we seem cool with the normal X/Y configuration (about a meter above the snare).  Everyone digs the headphone mix. We will add back a kick microphone.

The Vorga

Samanas!
Embedded below is a mix combining a thing we did with the Samanas and the recording I made of Maduka and Kate. The quote of last night's rehearsal was:
"Oh, somebody tuned these drums." -- David Wolfe

Andrew Bellware with Lily Kinner. The goofier version of this picture had my pick in my mouth.

 Lily played the Twin Reverb. The Twin makes a nice bass amp. I think maybe we need to experiment with the microphone placement to get a bit more of the mids and highs on it.
The isolation on the microphones was tremendous. I don't know why. I mean seriously, I have no idea why the isolation was so good.

David Wolfe on drums.

Again, we're doing the "guitar player's perspective" of drums. In this recording that means the two Oktavas are about 30" apart and aimed at the kit. Or, wait, no, Lily and I went over this a lot. She has a better sense of distance. I think she determined that the mics were 26" apart from one another. Then they're about 30" from the beater side of the kick drum.

This is an attempt to show the location of the three drum microphones. See them? I thought not.

I did in fact record with the AKG C12A as a center microphone for the drum kit, but this mix does not have any of that mic in it. I used the Lindell preamp and again the isolation was... fantastic. Weirdly good. But it just had the kick drum in it and wasn't a sound we weren't getting out of the stereo pair of mics, so I muted the channel.

Lily Kinner playing through a Twin Reverb. Did I ever tell you the story about when Debbie Harry told me on the phone that her bass player would use a Twin Reverb and then she got very annoyed with me when I showed up with a Twin Reverb for him to play through? 

This recording is one of those dream-scape sorts of things. Sort of a space-rock arabesque. Of course, the Doors song "The End" does that kind of sound and it's used at the top of Apocalypse Now, which is the feel of what we're doing maybe with The Imaginary Opera.

A bird's-eye view of the mic setup for the drums. The perspective is funky but the two Oktavas are actually on the same imaginary plane that the kick drum head is on. You can see the C12A is on a different plane would would likely make me want to time-shift it if I were inclined to use the sound of it.

The recordings this week have been quite inspiring. I've learned a lot about how to do an imaginary opera.

Greg Bartus, the master of space rock. 

Greg played through his Deluxe clone which sounds very, very sweet.
Did I mention that the bass (on a Twin) went through a Rode NT1A and then a Lindell preamp?
We're recording at 48kHz and hitting the M-Audio 2626 as A/D.
Coming up: on the Samanas Bandcamp page will be various other pieces we worked on. Man, I have to practice rhythm guitar.

Icing the Body Electric

Another Samanas session, another experiment in recording. "Icing the Body Electric" is just guitars and drums. Greg has a new Moogerfooger and it's simply fantastic for these kinds of space-rock jams. These drums are recorded with just two Oktava mics, about 1.5 feet off the ground, spaced about a meter apart. Those mics are actually outside of the frame in this picture — that's how low they are.
I actually did record with the AKG C12A but that's not being used in this mix. The drums are still a bit creaky. We haven't located exactly what's so creakish about them yet. And the drums aren't loud enough compared to the (even reasonably amplified) guitars. We play relatively quietly — I don't even use earplugs (often) with this band (although you can see that Dave in the picture below is wearing hearing protection).

Greg Bartus, David Wolfe, and Andrew Bellware.

So we're thinking about baffles on the amplifiers and using a monitor system. It is, you know, a thought. Two overhead or room mics on the drums with a world of compression on them. All the other instruments separate.
Actually, I'm ashamed to admit it, but the bulk of the drum processing on this track is from a cheapo plugin -- Waves' CLA Drums. The expanders and compressors work together in a really monster way. I threw some other compression on there and plenty o'EQ of course, but it makes me feel better about my 2-microphone ideology for drums.
Dig the JamHub BedRoom. My entire goal here is to get Dave to play as oppressively loud as possible. Did I say that out loud?
I'm not supposed to say those things out loud. I need to check with my Controller to have that part of my personality adjusted. I mean, it's not like they can find me as long as I keep my aluminum-foil cap on.

Dust Star

There's times when you just have to play for 23 minutes without really knowing what you're going to play next. This was one of those times.
One of the big differences in this recording is that Lily used her good bass head into a 4x10 cabinet at the studio. Although the band's sound is typically more of a "growly" bass (or at least one where you can hear the round-wound strings), but with this amp setup Lily went for a warmer and deeper sound. What this sound has in common with what we/she usually do/does is that it's a very lyrical bass sound. The sound and the playing style are melodic I mean. Something like that. Click through to listen.

Now up until now we'd set the bass speakers aimed right at the center of the kick drum. But in this recording the bass speakers are on the left side (drummer's right) of the kit. So the bass comes out more in the left (even with multitrack there's no way to separate the low frequency out of everyone's microphones, and even with the "omnidirectionality" of bass tones it does tend to sit in the left side.)
I had a devil of a time when I first put these tracks up on my editing workstation because the timing was off slightly so there was this strange delay happening. I went back to the original project and got everything into sync again.
The guitar preamps and the A/D converter are the Focusrite Scarlett. This is because we had that movie emergency wherein I had to use my old PC for other purposes this week.
Playing with the City Samanas has given me a lot of opportunity to play guitar in styles I don't usually play. Jazz, for instance. I know some major 7 chords in theory. And now I will actually have to play them. ;-) I'm good at those chords where you just barre over all six strings and pretend it's a suspended minor 7th or something.

On this particular song I don't have to do that. It's funny how simultaneously simple and difficult Dead songs can be. 

Love Me

Last night's Samana rehearsal:
I used Adobe's Audition to record, with the Mac Mini (having stolen it out of the office for the evening.) I used the M-Audio 2626 as the A/D converter. That's not how we're going to be doing things in the future. I'm bringing my old quad-core PC and recording with Samplitude and that's that. I'll be able to leave the computer at the studio.
Right now we're using a pair of Oktava mics as the right and left of the drums. And there's a "center" AKG C12A. There is a fantasy world I live in where we eliminate that center microphone. That same fantasy world has us using two of these beautiful Edwina microphones. But more on that at some other time.
Have you noticed that my notes on this blog are sometimes really detailed and are of no value to you, the gentle reader?
Here is a slow blues jam on the bass like of a Doors song. My feeling is that we may have abandoned the actual Doors song altogether.
  My personal notes about me go like this:

• I felt that my guitar playing was not always very controlled. Sometimes I would "bark", especially on the G string. I dig where we're going with the drums. Sometimes the other bands in the rehearsal studio nearby are freaking loud.
• We need the mic on Greg's amp to be a whole bunch closer. I was not as careful about that as I should have been.
• Man, even with the M-Audio the levels coming out of the Neve preamps is hot. 
• I messed up my input list. I noticed while we were recording. Basically I put the bass in the wrong preamp/channel. 
• You know what works well? Non-linear summing amp emulators. Right now I'm liking the channels for the mixer they used on Dark Side of the Moon.
• The preamps on the M-Audio are almost adequate for recording guitars. I really did not like the Focusrite Scarlett on guitars. 
• 
  

To Me, Not To You

Another rehearsal with the Samanas, another 10GB of recording.
If you're looking at an email or something in an RSS reader right now you probably won't see the following link to the "album". So go ahead, click on through to the other side. Here are my notes.
The Scarlett's very hot input level makes recording with outboard preamps very difficult. The Neves have to be turned way the heck down in order to not overload the Scarlett's inputs.
I did a three-microphone tree for the drums. Over the span of less than a foot I had a pair of Oktava mics in X/Y on the outside and the AKG C12A on the inside. This did not really work because of phasing issues. So I pulled the tracks with the Oktavas back in time just a tiny bit which eliminated the phasing issues. But I think that next time I will use them more as a spaced pair.

I'd put the M-Audio 2626 in my rack here in the studio and I've really liked having big and straightforward knobs to grab and change volume with. The MOTU Ultralite is not that easy to do that with as it's hard to see what knob you're touching without putting some light on it. That being said, the metering is a tad more apparent on the MOTU. But I think the 2626 has to go into the remote recording rack in order to be fed by the Neve preamps.
The trick is that the 2626 is only firewire. And if I want to use my laptop I have to go USB.
So what I can do is go from the 2626 into the Scarlett via Lightpipe. But at 96kHz I can only get 4 channels out of the 2626 via Lightpipe. The remainder would have to go via the two available channels or S/PDIF or analog inputs of the Scarlett (which are still a pain because of their high input levels.)
But what I've considered briefly is the notion that Tyrannosaurus Mouse simply does a weekly rental at the same studio that City Samanas uses and we keep a computer with a Firewire port at the studio. Along with the rack and such. The cost is $120 a month.
Interesting.
Not to you, of course, but to me.