Damn, we had a gig yesterday (with 5 other amateur bands) and it was a NIGHTMARE
Jesus...
The tech guys just couldn't handle our awesomeness

The other bands were mostly your typical high-school thing, playing Nirvana covers with a guitar, bass, drums and vocal. Then we came in with a laptop which run some backgrounds, midi keyboard, microphone that went through software effects on the laptop, the DS-10, bass, and electric guitar with a multi-effect

You should have seen the panic in their eyes
Half of the sounds didn't come through at all (and it switched to the other half every few minutes).
What happened with the DS I completely don't understand, I had all the levels set nicely beforehand, but once i turned it on it was chaos - one of the synths could be earsplittingly loud while you could barely hear the other one. One song got completely destroyed, after about a minute of drums and base I unmute the rather loud piano lead and the notes sounded completely random, scrambled in a weird way, it sounded like a five year old playing with a Casio keyboard o_O I can't understand how could this happen? I checked the DS before and after the "gig" and everything was perfectly in place...
We only managed to get two songs going - one DS-driven with half the sounds turned of (and not played very convincingly, I was affraid to touch things, they all head the potential to unleash a horrible noise at any moment). The other song had a background made in Ableton, that worked ok, as did the bass, the guitar was awfully quiet, my vocals were non-existent (I kept screaming at the microphone though, show must go on

). At the second part of the song I have no vocals and I just make some nice noises on the DS, and with the midi keyboard - of course there was no sound coming out of either of them
Lessons learned: BUY A MIXER! And just send them the ready signal (I'm not entirely convinced this will help, but it should in theory...). Don't use processed vocals live. Expect things to go wrong (I could have at least kept only the DS-10 drums when other stuff was not working and lean on the guitars more, I was too surprised and confused to think about that though...).
At least we had a smoke machine and we look like rock stars on the photos
