^exactly.
 
let the GAS rip! 

Well, Mike, looks like that was a poor Mic choice. I had started with a mxl v63 but it was too loud and clipped with the gain down to the floor. Now I remember that the Mic was in the tascam. The rme has a low gain setting on pre. The tascam has a single button for phantom on four inputs.


And, well it had the word guitar right in the Mic name!

And a shure sm57 was unused in my bag.

There is no way I could have identified this during recording without interrogating the wave forms. That is a huge bummer.

I had that problem, but it was clipping the bottom of the waveform and not the top.  Turned out to be a bad preamp.  I was using a Presonus Dual BlueTube.  Replaced the tube and it was OK (a major task, the way it required disassembly/reassembly).

This is the best argument for monitoring wave forms during sessions I've seen yet

Have you determined that's not what the waveform looks like coming out of his amp? I've seen this kind of thing before, and it was tracked back to a leaky coupling capacitor that was allowing a DC voltage on the grid of the next tube, causing the tube to be biased incorrectly. 
 
This would seem to be a more likely scenario than a problem with the microphone itself, which would only behave this way if it was broken, or perhaps a ridiculously high volume level. Same for a mic preamp: it would have to be really loud, and even then the clipping would be more or less symmetrical. Unless the preamp was busted, but that's unlikely if it's solid-state. I'd look at the guitar amp first.

Yeah, I totally thought it was guitar amp before this thread started. I'm totally planning to run it down. Especially since the problem was song consistent. He would pick a sound and maybe yes maybe no for weird clipping thing.

∞

I was using the TASCAM 2488 for this on input 3 of 8.
[Edit: The problem happened on the MXL mic I used before the Guitar Cube as well, but it wasn't as extreme.]
It looks like the issue was related to power and the MXL Guitar Cube Microphone.
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/condenser-microphones/mxl-guitar-cube-pro
 
The problem started before I changed Microphones (1 song before) and was limiting the + values to -6dB. Then after changing Mics it limited to -12dB.
 
I haven't been able to replicate the issue.
 
Further, it occurs to me that when I used the Tascam a lot for recording, I would use 2 Art Tube Pres with it. Maybe this reduced the likelihood of me bumping into this particular problem. I also have a tube mic with it's own power supply. Still, there were only 3 Mics plugged in that needed phantom power. 2 were my KM184s which recorded fine and one was the guitar cube.
 
I wonder if I had toggled the Phantom power after plugging in the Guitar Mic if that would have fixed it, or if the unit were simply underpowered to handle this particular mic plus the 3 others with phantom and the 4 drum mics without phantom.
 
If I had brought along my Art Tube Pre, this could have been avoided, probably.

Right about now, I'm pretty glad I grabbed a direct too. I think I'll be able to salvage the recording using that.
 
The direct signal sounds weird, but the wave form is NORML. I can work with it.