| I recently helped out a friend's band at a Battle Of The Bands. We were the last band to compete (5th competing, 6th playing) and I had some of the worst sound I can remember. My bass, on its own, sounded fine, and the drums sounded fine, but the two acoustics (one with a pickup, one without), the percussionist and the keyboard were all undermixed. The drummer and I couldn't hear the main guitarist, and the crowd couldn't hear the main guitarist, so essentially the first song was a whole lot of drum and bass with some vocals. It makes it kind of hard to win in a situation like that. Granted, it would have been better if the guitarist had an acoustic pickup, but there was also no communication between the sound people and my band. After the first song I asked if I could please have some (any) guitar in the monitors so that we could at least play the songs.
I'm not normally one to complain, I usually just roll with the punches. The sound for the evening overall, though, was very poor. And the ironic part was that the bands were competing for recording time with the people who were doing sound. | 
