Please, help me with my live setup!

[el cochino]

Hi guys, I'm working on the 3rd album of a project of mine called 'Hollenthon'. It's basically a metal act mixed with ethnic and classic music. Somebody's set up a myspace site, in case you want to have a listen: http://www.myspace.com/hollenthonmusic

Anyway, here's my problem: So far, we did several live shows, which worked out pretty good, but I want to improve and at the same time simplify our live setup.
This is basically my solo project, where I do all the music, instruments and recordings, except for the drums, which are done by our drummer Mike. For live shows, we have an extra guitarist and bass player and everything else comes from a harddisc recorder.

So here's the present setup: Fostex 8 track digital recorder, headphone amp for the drummer to hear the click track, Ddrum4 drumtrigger module, several racked di boxes (I don't trust the venue's di's). Everything is packed into a rack the size of a small refridgerator, which is fine for nightliner tours, but sucks on single shows, such as festivals. It's simply too big to fit into a regular car, it's too expensive to take on a plane and renting a van is usually out of our budget, as well.

The other things that bug me about this solution are 1) our drummer is the only one who hears the click, which caused problems when the monitor mix wasn't right. This is often the case at big festivals were you don't get to do a sound check. 2) The Fostex, although relieable, is quirky to operate and rather big and heavy. 3) Setting all the shit up, takes us about 30 minutes, which is a bitch at festivals with short change overs. We also can't afford a crew to help us, except for a soundguy, but he's busy to get everything working on the sound board.

Ok, I hope you guys are still with me!

I was thinking about getting a notebook with a decent 8 channel audio interface, that I can bring on a plane as hand luggage. What's a good one and how reliable are they and what would be a simple software that plays back up to 8 (usually just 5-6) audio tracks? Some kind of playlist editor would be sweet to change the song order without having to wait for the songs to load.

Then I thought about ditching the headphone amp and replace it with a 8 channel rackmixer. That way, our drummer can setup his own headphone mix, with the whole playback and preferably live guitars, bass and vocals, too.

Next thing I was considering is in ear monitoring for myself, so I could hear the click track as well. What's a good system that doesn't cost a fortune?


So, how would you do it? Any thoughts and suggestions on how to improve this setup are highly appreciated! thumbsup