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I am thinking of starting a jam night/open mic again as I get better as a way to get out, meet some musicians in my area, and to have a little xtra cash. So my question is, I am not quite as able to move massive amounts of geara as I used to and will try to do this with a smaller set up than I used to while still beaing able to handle bands and jamming. So I am leaning towards using this type of setup:

PA about 1200 watt PA with 2 15" mains and 2 12" monitors
Acoustic guitar
Small electric amp (maybe my Jet City or I may even go smaller i.e marshall class 5 or so)
Drums.. Jazz style kit along the lines of a 18-20K kick, etc.
Bass...(GO DIRECT?)

The obvious idea is to keep volume, set up time, and lifting reasonable. ANy better suggestions?

Anyways, the real question is as far as running bass direct, what type of setup should I get. I have looked at the Line 6 xt pro things but they are 400. If I am gonna spend that much, I am going to get an amp. I like the idea of the pedal station like those so it has tuner, etc built in, but do not want a $400 bass pedal. I was then leaning towards a sans amp bass driver and a cheap tuner from GFS and just make a tiny little pedalboard out of it and run the sans amp direct into the board?

How about foldback/monitors?
[edit]My bad, 15" mains, 12" monitors. Read the thread carefully.

Bass can go directly into the pa, preferably through a hi-z input, or with a direct box. passive direct boxes are cheapest. Sansamp Bass DI is awesome as fuck.

Make sure you have at least twice the amount of power your speakers are rated at. Most speakers are blown by not having enough power, so you turn up the amp, it clips and bam! your speakers die from trying to reproduce a clipping signal. So having way more power than you need reduces the chance of clipping and therefore reduces the chance your speakers will die. I run about 2500w into two 500w enclosures for mains. This makes small adjustments on the mixer very pronounced, but I have a fuckton of headroom.


Also, i strongly suggest 15" monitors since they can reproduce bass frequencies a hell of a lot better than 12" - there really is a noticeable difference when playing a show. I love having bass and kick in my monitor mix, it feels so fucking good (unless the bass player fucking sucks - which is usually the case, dial him out a bit he's probably already too loud anyway.).

I am up in the air about the monitors. I would prefer to have better quality 12" monitors than cheaper 15". I totally agree on the power setup. My last PA was at almost 10K watts with a pair of double 15JBLs, 2 single 15JBLs 4 12 monitor JBLs and 2 yamaha 18" subs.

I am really up in the air about whether to just go ahead and buy a bass amp or go direct. I know that the sanamp bass DI is awesome becasue I used to use one as a DI for my acousitc guitar but I also want a tuner avaialable. I think I will go for the GF tuner and sans amp route and if the jam takes off I will buy a bass amp down the road.