Drove 2 hours to a gig at private fund-raising (cancer) party for some of the richest people in the state. Duo: singer/acoustic guitarist and me on ac & el guitars and some vocals (planning to run both acoustics & 2 vocal mics thru PA, electric thru HD500 into Crate 100w Power Block & 1x12" cab). We were also asked to provide recorded music during our breaks, for which we planned to use mp3s on a laptop run thru the PA.

At 15 minutes to start time mixing board is totally dead! PANIC!

POD HD500 to the rescue:

1. Pulled up a new User Tone with 2 Blackface Dbl Nrm amps, one for vocal mic & one for the 2 acoustic gits, Set up Hall Reverb after mixer block for both amps

2. Plugged vocal mic into Mic In, ac git 1 into Guitar In,  and ac git 2 into Aux In inputs on HD500

3. Assigned Input 1 Source to Mic, Input 2 Source to Guitar+Aux

4. Connected HD500 to power amp input on back of Crate Power Block (bypassing its preamp)

5. Plugged the PA speaker cables into the back of Crate

6. Plugged PC into CD/MP3 In jack on HD500 for break music (luckily I had a mimiplug-to-miniplug cable!)

7. Set volume & tone controls & reverb settings for mic & gits. (Both our acoustics have their own onboard v&t so we were able to balance them ourselves using only one "PA" channel)

Everything worked like a charm & sounded great Our host was happy & never knew how close we came to crashing & burning!

I had never done any of this with my HD500 before, and had always done my programming of tones at home with HD500 Edit. But it was quite easy to do using the onboard controls.

I didn't use my electric because my style would have required a different amp model than a clean Twin, which is what I used for the acoustics. But it would have been possible to set up another tone with mic + git amp (I usually use the AC30 model), and used that for the songs where I accompany the singer on my own. I didn't bother. The gig went fine with only acoustic gits.

Other drawback is that we had to share one vocal mic, but hey - victory was snatched from the Jaws of Defeat!

Thank you Line 6!