Help with my live rig

["David H" <the.31st@gmail.com>]

Hey all, I have a conundrum I've been penciling around with for months trying to come up with a solution, but I can't quite find it on my own.

 

When I play at home, I run everything through one mixer: two mics, guitar, two Lexicon JamMen, and at least one FX loop. When my hands are not playing guitar, they are on the channel aux sends. Its important for me to be able to adjust them myself in real-time, so I can be re-routing what goes where (Jams to FX, Mic to Jams, Guitar to FX, Mic out of FX, etc).

But when I perform out live, I don't get to do this and many of my pieces are truncated. I send all signals directly to the house mixer and don't get any control myself. I could have my mixer on stage with me, and send stereo mains to the house, but I can't afford the hand-time to be EQing and riding fader levels to balance it out. I've prioritzed that to the foh engineer. I could tell him in the middle of a song, "Hey, turn aux 3 on channel four up to 12 o'clock!" but it is kindof a mood killer.

 

So how do I get to control aux sends from onstage, and an engineer to control EQ and fader levels from front of house? Is it possible? To make things even more difficult, I've built my rig and reputation on not using computers (as in laptops) onstage, so I'd probably not use any of the software options (if there are any).

Anybody else have this problem? Solutions?

 

David