Okay I need some help...I'm going to be performing a song at my brothers wedding for an audience of about 400-500. Here's the deal... I produced the track which is a electronic, pop love thing. For the performance its going to be my cousin rapping, me on vocals and playing a little bit of lead electric guitar (through an eleven rack) and the backing track.
Now here's where things get dicey, I'm almost 100% sure..the DJ's PA system is going to be BEHIND us during the performance. Which raises all kinds of questions...
MIX: Assuming we don't bring our own mixer (2 mics, 1 guitar via the eleven rack and 1 backing track probably coming from an ipod), would it be crazy to rely on the DJ for the audience mix....he'll probably have to do the entire mix through headphones because of his position..which I know is not ideal. I'm contemplating bringing my own mixer and positioning closer to the audience (and have a friend standing in as a "sound guy"). I'd then send the DJ the master out from my mixer. It seems better but it makes the setup much more complicated (see the time constraints issue below).
MONITORING: Will we (most importantly me because I'll be singing) be able to hear ourselves. I'm wondering if I can get by with out any monitoring other than mains behind us? Ideally I know we should have it, but I'm wondering if we can skate by because of the speaker placement. If we go the route of bringing our own mixer, than I will try and send a wired IEM to my ear from that.
FEEDBACK: I'm assuming we'll be at a minimum of 15-20 feet in front of the mains using dynamic mics (probably sm58s). How worried should I be about this??
TIME CONSTRAINTS: What makes this difficult is that the wedding is actually in the same hall as the reception (it's an indian wedding) and there will be only a 2 hour window that the DJ will be setting up before the reception starts. In that two hour window I'll be luckily to get 10 minutes at best to do a proper "soundcheck" after we setup our gear. And once we actually get to performance time..there will be a series of speeches/talks and then we're on. We'll only have a couple of minutes to get things in place and then start. Thats why I have a strong preference not to bring my own mixer, it will be much simpler easier if we go through the DJs.
So what do you guys think? How would you approach this performance. Obviously the best thing to do is get into the space and test all this stuff out..but like I said i'll only have that short 10 minute window right before the performance to do that. I'm trying to be as prepared as possible before then. Advice is greatly appreciated!!!