playing along to clicks / sequences live

[mbc113]

do any of you play along to a click in a live setting? or to any sequences or drum tracks in a live setting? if so, how do you do it? do you wear headphones/in-ear-monitors with just the click/sequence audio or with a whole live mix of the rest of the band? what have your experiences been? have you found it hard to play with the same amount of energy since your concentration was on hearing the click and staying with it?

[Bellringer]

The majority of shows I have done with sequences and clicks sounded great as long as the drummer could hear well. We would tour with a sidefill monitor that the drummer could control his own eq and volume on. This made things go real smooth. Most of the time, the sequences were in and out for me. I just learned to follow the songs based on the drums and a guitarist and that made things comfortable.
The only thing that made things shakey was samples that were recorded at a low volume. So basically, if you have a strong drummer with a good monitor and you make sure the sequences are consistent the show should be fine.

[GearJunkie]

The best thing to do if you're playing with sequences or a click or something is to put everything on a multitrack recorder. That way, you can assign things to go to the PA to get put in correctly.

My last band had:

Track 1: Click
Track 2: Synth Bass or low end sounds
Track 3: Drum tracks
Track 4: Aux high end synth sounds or pianos

From the output of the recorder, we'd go into a rackmounted 4 input DI that would go right to the FOH, where the engineer could mix it as he or she saw fit. The thru outputs of the DI would go to a rackmounted mixer where the drummer could monitor everything they wanted. It was:

Channel 1: Click
Channel 2: Synth bass
Channel 3: Drum Tracks
Channel 4: Synth sounds
Channel 5: Monitor mix from the house engineer.

This way, my drummer had full capability to hear exactly more or less of what he needed in his headphones without effecting the sound that went to FOH.

This was all in a 6 space rack.