Last night's gig may have finally convinced me to go digital...

robinbowes

sjo89 said:

Your point of 'youll sound shit no matter what' kinda feeds into my statement about wondering whether all the gear is worth it to begin with - at least at this stage and at our levels in the venues we're playing...

You've got to fix the thing that makes the most difference first.

Something like:

Repeat until happy:
 - Find the issue that will improve things the most
 - Fix it

There's no way round it - being too loud in small rooms never works.

Jalapeno

Danny1969 said:

A lot .....

done something similar to monitor my own vocals ... mic to splitter then PA, and splitter to IEM or one of those small personal monitors

Radial Engineering, Millenium, Lehle all do various signal splitters - look at the choice in Thomann under PA -> PA Accesories -> Signal Splitters

Reverend

My experience is bands i've been have always sounded better with a loud drummer

robinbowes

Reverend said:

My experience is bands i've been have always sounded better with a loud drummer

They'll certainly have sounded louder  

uberscott

I do exactly this @sjo89 - I've been using a QC live for about 6 months now and it's working out great. It's handling both bass and guitar in our band, the other guitarist uses a Helix. All direct into the PA - I also split the bass signal off just before the cab sim and go from one of the QC's sends to the bassists amp which gives his sound a little extra thud. 

As far as monitoring goes, I gathered loads of great info here about monitor mixes, particularly what @Danny1969 has written about stereo mixes and wired setups. 

We use an RCF M18 mixer - this has a stereo headphones out which has its own mix. I set pan & level for each channel & feed this back into Returns 1&2 on my QC. This is then fed directly to Outs 3&4 (you can see this as the empty lane on the bottom of my QC's screen). I mix in my guitar's signal (Out 1) in the QC's own headphones out mixing screen. The headphones mix goes via a Bright Onion I/O box into a combo guitar/IEM cable and from there into my IEMs. So far it's been a really consistent sound regardless of venue and I'm really happy with it - and my ears are very thankful next morning! 

Please enjoy resplendent pub carpet below - on which is my entire guitar rig. The fact that it's a single point of failure is never far from my mind, but we have a backup guitar amp set up in the RCF mixer should the worst happen. 

Stratavarious

We flip to digital and eDrum kit for smaller venues.  Ideal.  Acoustic drums set a high threshold.

I can DI my amp and use it as stage monitor or use it muted/silent and I have a boss GT unit I use for direct to desk if really pushed.  IEMs but I do like a small monitor to let me hear the room sound.