Why would I go into a focusrite (whatever that may be) and then to a mixer? I wouldn't. My mics are plugged into a Mackie mixer mounted into a 44 space rolling rack with the 4 digital reverbs, the 31 band stereo EQ, the compressor, the vocoder, etc..... and that mixer's outputs go to a patch bay (1L and 1R if you are keeping score), which gets patched to my M-Audio (24L and 24R) when it's time to sing. Most of the time, I let RB compose EVERYTHING and just sweeten some with manual parts. RB plays better than I ever did, so why mess it up with MY playing?

The whole idea of my post is that I don't want to ever touch cables if it isn't absolutely necessary. Other than jumpers to route stuff through the patch bay, I never have to cable anything. When I want the sampler for a track, I run 2 short red jumper cables from 22 to 24, which sends 22 (the sampler) to 24 (the M-Audio interface). All the synths, the drum machine, the vocoder.... everything... all routed through the patch bay. Other than those 2 12 inch red patch cords, I never plug anything in. The M-Audio is wired permanently to the powered Wharfedale near field monitors so I never touch those. There's also a bunch of MIDI routing in there but that's boring.

And honestly, all the "adds noise" talk falls on deaf ears to me. One more step in my signal chain doesn't take my signal from "cemetery at night dead quiet" to "bulldozer pushing gravel across a corrugated metal runway". I take that kind of thread with the same shaker of salt as the "I only use Monster Cable because...." bandwagon nonsense. Those people couldn't tell Monster Cable from the Monster Mash if they didn't know in advance it was or wasn't Monster Cable. I DO find a great deal of comic relief from those people though.

Like the guy years ago who I let use my Les Paul one night while his was in the shop. He went on and on about how he LOOOOOVED the sound of Dimarzio pickups. Wouldn't play a guitar with ANYTHING ELSE. Told him the were Dimario. He was happy as a clam. Right up until the end of the night when I broke his heart and told him they were Seymour Duncan pickups on my Les Paul. While he THOUGHT they were Dimarzio, he loved them. I LOVE doing stuff like that to people!

And if they get mad at me, I blame rharv.