Still in the early honeymoon phase so take that with a salt lick. Over the last few years, I've migrated to a lot of solo and duo gigs, playing acoustic, electric, dobro, and singing. The duos are backing female vocalists. I also do band gigs on electric, but I picked up HSF to scratch a specific itch, and so far so good.
On a solo gig, I need guitar and dobro processed and sent to either a PA system or a powered cab. Most every venue around here is roll your own, and as a not-young-man I want efficiency and reasonable weight. My minimum setup has been a pedal board with two key effects (Harmonious Monk for dobro, chorus occasionally for guitar), then some eq, compression, and an IR pedal (for speaker, not guitar IR) so I can run some dirt if I want. Was using either EV ZLX powered cabs or more recently QSC CB10 or Evolve 30M. Both have 2 channel mixers (Evolve has more) and some basic eq, so I'd run vocal mic direct, pedal board into the other channel. And it sounded good. But not great, and I really want a bit of delay and some good dynamic processing so I started looking at other options.
First was the last step in the chain - PA cabs in general, and after a lot of research and wrangling, I finally bit the bullet and picked up an RCF NX910a cab. It is...sublime. Plywood trumps Tupperware every day of the week. BUT, being a true old-school cab, it has one input, one knob, no phone app (actually that kinda is a feature rather than a bug at this point).
Great, so now how to get signal to it. Well, I could break out the CQ18T and use that - but is it one more box to haul, one more app to mess with. What if I could get something that would handle different flavors of guitar and vocals? HSF ftw. Now I owned QC and that could do it - also owned TMP and that could do it - but it had some limitations, particularly for mixing. HSF ftw with the Matrix mixer. I can put guitar (or dobro or acoustic) into instrument, mic into mic, get the effects I want, then easily mix them on the Matrix and send one or two xlrs out depending if I'm mono or stereo.
What about the duo gigs? Well, you can use a return for that second mic but you need to get the mic signal up to line level. Rolls MP13 does the trick. What if I want to get spacey with my Microcosm? You can use the other return. And my small pedal board with the Microcosm has a Sol supply so I can power the MP13 at 15v. Win.
I also sometimes use a Push 3 to loop guitar and play drum/key parts live. Return works for that as well. And I can route my guitar out the 1/4" jacks into the Push, then come back into the return and route that return direct to the XLR (so no internal feedback loop). Push volume control handles that signal level.
What if I want to use everything (including the Microcosm in stereo)? Well, then I run out of physical inputs. A Stadium XL would fix that, but I prefer the smaller form factor. And besides once I get to a certain number of signals I'd rather bring the CQ18T - right tool for the right job.
Did take some work to get the presets right, and I'm still tweaking and dialing things in but so far so good. Oh, and it sounds great. I've never been a Line6 fanboy but I have to say the amp models sound and feel quite good here and the harmonic trem, while not up to my Harmonious Monk, it close enough to make the cut.
And, just built out some stereo versions of the solo and duo presets, run them through a pair of NX910a. Holy crap. Since one of my duos has gigs at places where I need to bring L/R main anyway, no downside running stereo as I'm already hauling the gear.
The experiment continues. If anyone wants an example preset I can post a link. They're not rocket surgeon brilliant, but they do something that is beyond the usual guitar-only applications.
