help w/ performing electronica music live

[Bullet Days]

we're currently rehearsing for live shows, hopefully by summer. our music is electronica, kinda like sneaker pimps or garbage maybe. our music has loops that are combined together with drum tracks to make cool and weird sounding beats. our problem is playing the songs live and staying in time with the loops. to start with, i made a mix of the songs without the vox, guitars, and drums (and later w/o the bass and some keyboards once we get those players in the band). we play the mix thru the PA and we play along with it a la karaoke. it works out ok, but there are some parts, especially when there are no beats going on, that we lose track of the timing and we all mess up coming back together. i know this can be remedied by providing a click track at those silent parts, but then the click track will be heard by the audience, right? i don't know how to make a mix so that there's a mix that just goes to the drummer w/ click tracks, and a mix that the audience hears w/o the click tracks. our last resort is to just take out those loops, but some of them we feel are very essential to the song that to take them out is to lose the soul of the song.

also, i'm sure for our music we'll need a sequencer of some sorts to play those loops when we start doing this for real (or am i wrong?). i'd like some recommendations as to what gear we might need to get. we do have a triton le, and i think that has some sequencer capabilities. thanks guys.

[Cloneboy Studio]

The click track is usually sent to the drummer only via an aux buss or whatever the FOH is using for a cue mix. The audience won't hear a thing.

[Bullet Days]

sorry, but what's FOH? i'm not familiar with gear other than guitar gear so i don't even know how to do it via the aux bus.

[Cloneboy Studio]

Originally Posted by Bullet Days

sorry, but what's FOH? i'm not familiar with gear other than guitar gear so i don't even know how to do it via the aux bus.

FOH = front of house.

My suggestion is figure out how live sound is done (ask someone that does it for a living) and go from there.

What you are suggesting is simple enough, but inherently fraught with disaster if YOU don't understand how it is set up, works and the limitations of such a system.

[Picker]

FOH -- Front of house.... The sound that comes out of your main speakers.

What you need to do is have the click only in the monitor mix.... Especially if you use an in-ear monitor nothing would be heard by the audience. Regular monitors would only be heard by those close up. In a small club this could be a problem... Large venue, not a problem.

Another optoin would be to have some other cue such as a lighting display that is in time with the music.

[Bullet Days]

i doubt the lighting option will work for us right now. we don't have the equipment and it seems more difficult to follow lights than sounds.

i'm using sonar 3 to record, and i'm no pro at it but i can do basic recording. i noticed that each track can have several outputs, and two of them are "aux" outputs. i have my tracks going out to either "main" or "A." i guess what you guys are saying is to output my click track into the aux outputs, and then have the drummer's headphones plug in to the aux jack of the PA system and not the normal headphone jack?

i know the solution is probably something very simple but i'm just not that familiar with the hardware aspect of the process.