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.

Pedal put together

Now, what I really wanted to do was to have a pedal board which was small and that I didn't have to gunk up my pedals with Velcro. That didn't really happen. The first thing I did was find the Pedal-links System. Basically they're bicycle chains which have been broken apart. And I figured that I could just use machine screws and attach them to a Temple Audio Designs pedalboard. Their boards are light, made of metal, and have pre-existing holes in them (which are actually designed for attaching their proprietary mounting system, we'll get to that in a minute).
But the first thing I wanted to try was Pedal-links.

A single Pedal-link. Quarter for scale.

My problems with them is they're brittle and require very small machine screws (for most pedal boards you'd use wood screws which would be easier to "drill into" the pedal-links.) But they also have a tendency to "kick up" and I found it hard to get a pedal to sit flush with the board using the pedal-links.
So the next option for a velcro-free existence is the Pedalock.  They're reasonably priced, pedals just sit cleanly inside them without interference with their controls or jacks. Ah. A dream!
But... what's that you say? Oh, they're only available for MXR and BOSS pedals (and a wah pedal). So no unusual sizes, no Electro Harmonix, no nuthin' else. Boo.

The Pedalock with a couple machine screws goes right into the Temple pedalboard. Super sweet.

It locks in nicely, no interfering with the operation of the pedal, and you can remove the pedal any time you like. Note that the Temple's handles preclude using a straight cable to take the output (the Carbon Copy is at the end of my chain). That would be true with or without the Pedalock. Just note that the Pedalock does raise the pedal a bit.

 The last thing which is nice about the Pedalocks is that they even have cutouts for the pedal's feet. So you seriously don't have to make any modification of your pedals at all with the Pedalock.

"Look Ma! I still have my feet!" The underside of the Pedalock with the MXR Carbon Copy inside.

So. The Pedal-Links are being a tad wonkity, I can only put one pedal of mine in the Pedalock. Foof. What's next?
Aah, right. The actual mounting system from Temple.
They have big, medium, and small plates. They attach to the bottom of your effects with adhesive (which I was trying to avoid for a variety of reasons including not wanting to obscure important information printed on the bottom of the effect and also just not wanting to deal with sticky yukky glue.)
Using Temple Audio's pedal mounting system:

• Thing number one I advise is to really really make sure you attach the plate evenly. so that it isn't crooked at all. Because you will soooo notice it when you have the pedal mounted on the board.
• Thing number two I advise is to attach the plate to the pedalboard first and line up your pedal so that the plate ends up going in a reasonable place in regards to cable runs and other pedals (remember the plate has to fit in the already existing holes in the pedalboard).
• The third thing is to remove the feet from your pedals. The feet are going to be taller than the plates and will end up pulling the plate off the pedal. 

So yeah, you end up putting sticky stuff on the backs of your pedals and you end up with a pile of little feet (insert band name joke here.)

Here you can see the feet being taller than the plate.

 So I'm gonna end up sticking things to a bunch of pedals. And removing those pedals little feet.
I don't even know what I was trying to demonstrate with the next image. Who knows?

There are nicely machined holes in the Temple. With bigger holes for cables to find their way neatly and cleanly to where they need to go.

The Joyo power supply goes on the bottom, attached with two of the small Temple pads. That means the little thumb screws for the power are actually on top. I have moved the power supply around so that it would be in a reasonable place.

Top view of mess with missing pedals. And yes I tried to cram way too many on one little board I know this.

Pedal Party

See the thing is I rather like playing without pedals -- through a long guitar cable -- directly into an amplifier. Typically this feels to me like I have more of an intimate control of the way the amplifier speaks back to me as a guitarist. This may be completely psychosomatic and without regard to reality. But it does feel that way.
But even with the Kemper it's somewhat impractical to be completely pedal free. Huh. Now I say that but thinking about it all my recordings are guitar-cable-amplifier. Hmm...
But in any case for live work things are different. And the big difference is that the guitar hits a buffer. Now thesedays having a hard-wire-bypass in all pedals is very popular. But as soon as one pedal kicks in, the game is all over, you're buffered.
Which typically is a goode thinge. The buffering keeps the signal from being dragged down by each effect. And the fact is I'm not sure you can hear the thing I was complaining about there at the top of this post. It may just be that one can feel it. And maybe it's all psychological anyway.

And the fact is that sometimes one really wants some effects. Especially in a live situation. I find that with the City Samanas and Diatomaceous Earth I want to have my very sweet MXR Carbon Copy analog delay. I feel I might find that I want to use an Electro Harmonix C9† (and by extension a Strymon Lex Leslie emulator*). The other thing I find critical to playing live with a mostly clean sound (especially when I'm playing with Greg Bartus) is an attenuator so I can "turn down" while playing rhythm parts.**
But what else? I'll tell you what else. I don't want to deal with Velcro. It's icky and yukky. So what does one do? Most pedalboards are all about Velcro. But there are some non-Velcro options.
One can use Bicycle chain links in order to screw the pedals down into or onto your board. This dude has a post all about that.

• Now you can also buy special links specifically for this purpose.
• Pedalboots is an Austrian company that makes boots for a variety of pedals. I'm not 100% sure if one can actually buy them in the US.
• Pedalock makes special "boots" for MXR, Boss, and Wah-Wah pedals.

But as far as I can tell there's only one manufactured pedal board which is made for machine screws. Those are the Temple Audio boards. The irony is that they have their own mounting system -- which looks pretty cool (even if it does involve putting sticky stuff on the back of your pedals) but it would seem would also work with the above boots and links.

†A B9 is shown here because the site I put this together with did not have a C9 picture. Also note that a compressor before the C9/B9 is something you want -- even if you end up not wanting to have a compressor in the rest of your guitar sound.
*And optionally a mixer so that I can choose how much of the Lex I want in the signal because sometimes, you know, you just want a little bit of Leslie in your sound and not have the whole signal go through the Leslie. You know you want this.
**Fun fact, the Morley optical volume control has a "minimum volume" knob which does exactly that. And here I was thinking I was the only one who needed this control.

Kids These Days

Look at this. Just look at this thing. Sixteen analog inputs. Fourteen analog outputs. A gazillion more digital. And all for fifteen hundred bucks. Good grief.

I can't even begin to express how important input metering is on channels. Especially for live sound.

The Behringer X32 Producer solves many of life's problems.
When I look back on my time in audio I realize that I've spent a lot of effort trying to get cheap mixers (read: more expensive than $1500) to work for me. Sure, on high-end mixers there were always enough outputs (strangely, inputs is almost never the problem outputs is). And now you can just buy one of these Behringer things and have all the routing you've always needed.
Yup, all the time I'd spent on mixers back in the day where I was frustrated there was at the time a solution. It just wasn't cheap. The solution was several tens of thousands of dollars. And it wasn't 'till nigh on the end of my career that I was working on those mixing boards.

Anybody remember these things?

Looking at this makes me sick to my stomach.

Thinking about that Yamaha PM1000 the New York Shakespeare Festival used to have just makes me shudder. Three generations later with the PM3000 they still couldn't get it to sound good. But everybody specified them in the late 80's early 90's because when you flipped the power switch they turned on. And in the world of pro audio, just getting the thing to turn on was half the battle.
When I was using a PM1000 it was hopelessly out-of-date at the time (Macbeth with Raul Julia if you must know).
While I was there it got replaced with a DDA mixer which was vastly, oh so vastly, better. Sheesh.

A Journey of Discovery

Or: "Live Sound Mixing in the Box".

So. It turns out that when you use ASIO drivers (and hybrid monitoring "on" in Samplitude) you can actually use the thing as a live sound mixer.
Mixing "in the box" is not an entirely new idea. SAC is built for it.
Now, facing the cold hard reality that a Yamaha 01V is only $2400, it might be tempting to say that getting a computer, some interfaces, and hoping they all work isn't really worth the trouble. The 01V has 12 microphone inputs and a bunch of outputs. You don't need a computer, you don't need a monitor, and the preamps are usable. You don't need to worry so much about it crashing (although I've had one fail 100% on me once -- had to go back to the rental house).
To use a completely in-the-box system you'd have to get at least one audio interface. Probably two. The MOTU UltraLite is about $550. Of course that's really only 8 inputs and 8 outputs. And only two of those inputs are mic preamps (and they're kinda meh but maybe no better or worse than the Yamahas).

If you happen to have an UltraLite and a computer (which I do) then you're maybe thinking this whole task is a tad more feasible.
+++++
Plus, in many cases we just don't care about microphone preamps. The preamps are going to be on the stage, sending us line-level signal up to the FOH position.
What I've used with success is a signal chain like this: mic preamps on stage going to an Aviom system which went down a Cat 5 cable to the FOH position. That's. Hmm... Oh, here are my notes. I imagine I was coming into the Yamaha board with one Aviom card from a master station, and then feeding the headphone stations directly with some channels and via a mix for other channels.
Note that Behringer makes a vastly cheaper (and that's probably in every meaning of the word "cheaper") version of the Aviom system. I do, however, like the user-side of the interface better. Even the master station is more readable.
What Behringer doesn't make now is a D/A box for its Powerplay system. They just make the A/D box. Now, if you could run one Cat5 and have inputs and outputs appear on both sides, life would be good. Even if we had to run a pair of Cat5's (one for each direction) I'd be fine.
+++++
So the whole point of this is that we can use our favorite effects (including, er, Autotune) while mixing live just with a computer and an interface or two.