Backline or frontline?

[slingo]

I need some advice please guys. I play in a church band, and I've always used my own backline (currently an Ashdown head and cab) which is DI'd to the church multicore, and then I get a mix of myself and everyone else fed back from the house PA to a wedge monitor on the floor in front of me. So technically, I've got two foldbacks, my amp behind me and the wedge in front of me. Recently in my absence, someone tried to use my amp as an extra foldback (not quite sure how) but they popped my amp and it cost £100 to repair. As a consequence, the church are now telling me to keep my amp at home and they want to buy their own. What I need advice on, is should I advise replicating what I currently use, or might it be better to kill two birds and use something like a Hartke Kickback combo instead? I definitely don't want to go direct to DI as it sounds horrid, and I want a degree of control over my tone at least, if not volume as well. Sorry for the long-winded post but any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[JapanAxe]

I belong to a couple of American-dominated guitar forums, and a fair percentage of members are PWGs - praise and worship guitarists. The trend is for them to use good quality amp sims (and big pedalboards!) into the church PA. I think you could easily become inaudible to yourself doing this, unless you had an individual monitor mix.

As far as Hartke Kickback combos go, I used to have the 35W model as a practice amp, and it was severely lacking in bass-end warmth. Granted, the form factor is right, but I would try some other tilt-back options! In my long-ago church music group days, I made a sturdy tilt stand for my hideous Carslbro combo so that I could use it like a wedge monitor in front of me. This also allowed me to run it at a much lower volume than when I had it on the floor behind me. It was also mic'd into the PA.

Hope some of that helps.

[jrixn1]

3 hours ago, slingo said:

I definitely don't want to go direct to DI as it sounds horrid, and I want a degree of control over my tone at least, if not volume as well.

Does the direct signal sound horrid because it is "unprocessed" -- was the Ashdown DI set to "pre-eq"?  If so, then the bass might sound horrid to the audience as well!  What about a pre-amp pedal like a Tech 21 SansAmp?

As for controlling your volume, you get that set during soundcheck; or during the gig by catching the sound engineer's attention.

The above would present (IMHO) the most "correct" solution i.e. avoiding having two separate monitoring systems running side-by-side.  However, I appreciate perhaps it wouldn't work in your real world scenario for one reason or another.
 

 

Edited November 9, 2018 by jrixn1