The band was a dead cover band slash hippie rock...
Drummer singer
Guitarist singer times three
Bassist
Keyboardist sax player

The bar was long and narrow.

I recorded everything, but only ran the vocals and keys and acoustic guitar through the pa.

The pa was 1 bose tower, 1 powered wedge for monitoring, and 1 powered speaker on a speaker stand.

It sounded awful. Despite trying to notch the EQ to help with feedback there was tons of it.

I used EQ on every channel and did my best.

I used expander on the vocal Mics so when the band stopped the Mics wouldn't feedback. I used a little compression too.

Only one of the vocal Mics was a condenser. We tried switching it for another but still had trouble.

Members of the band tried to help but that created a bit of mayhem. The would just change the level of the wedge not conscious of the fact that this meant I either had to bring down the levels in the other speakers our reduce the send to the wedge.

One member unplugged a Mic despite the fact that it wasn't being sent to anything, only recorded, in an attempt to fix the feedback.

It was such a bummer. I keep hoping that with more practice I will one day get good at this, but it is really hard when the pa and Mics aren't yours to get it all under control.

It sucked for the band too.They have to be able to hear themselves.

I guess I'm just looking for sympathy. I keep trying despite a really awful record.

http://stabilitynetwork.b...1_PreacherManLANDR.mp3

http://stabilitynetwork.b...N02_LoveLightLANDR.mp3

You did your best. 
 
Sometimes acoustics are just difficult and hard to control. The best thing though in that situation is for the band to turn way down but I bet they were too loud and could not do that.  That is the real source of the problem in a difficult acoustic.  So many bands think it has to be loud to have power and energy but this is simply wrong.  But if they did play much softer than everything was done that could be done and there is not a lot more you can do.
 
I would never bother recording any live band though in a not so great sounding room.  If a band wants to do a live recording in a venue I go there before hand and check it out to see if it is at all possible or worth even trying.

I record live bands quite a lot. It's fun for the band to have a nice recording of the gig.
 
It is also fun to see how good it COULD have sounded.

And yes, you are right Jeff, the band was loud and there was nothing I could do about it. They weren't unenjoyably loud. Just loud. If the vocals could have been in there nicely, it would have been great! The lead singer sent me to turn down the guitar amps which I did once, but I couldn't get to the bass amp and they just turned them back anyway so it didn't help much.
 
Yes, absolutely, if the band could have turned way down then it would have sounded fine. I'm not sure the band could have gotten the same energetic feeling with a quieter jam, but the sound could have been excellent.
 
I know the monitors/speakers get much louder, I just couldn't get them louder without feedback. So, really, in the end, once I'd EQ'd as best I could, I could only take volume from one speaker and give it to another. So, more monitors translates to less mains.
 
BTW, I was using Windows (I sometimes use Linux). :-) Windows was not a problem this time.

There have been times where I got a good sound on the venue, this just wasn't one of them. My kid listened in the car on the way to school and made the comment she thought only parents of the performers and others obligated to go would enjoy it. Ha ha.

I thought it was enjoyable. :-)

Using expanders on the Mics so they effectively turn off when the band stopped was really helpful. I'm going too make that standard practice from now on.

Some venues are just acoustically terrible and that's an end to it.

Getting anything other than feedback out of the PA can be a victory in itself, and that's with a good PA not a mix of whatever can be strung together.

One thought though. It sounds like one of those situations where splitting the mic signals pre mixer and sending one split to the PA mixer and the other to the recorder can help. Like when stage foldback is mixed from the side of the stage and the FOH PA mixed from out front so the two mixes are completely seperate. Only in this case the recording wouldn't be affected by whatever drastic measures might have been needed at the mixer.

Mind you, in some not too large acoustic nightmare rooms sometimes only putting the vocals through the PA and foldback is the best answer. So long as backline and drummer can cope with the room size of course. Generally they can.

In my case, the Mics all went straight to my gear. RME UCX. RME quad pre. Audient ASP 880. From there the signal went into RME TotalMix. This too made it easy to create the separate mixes. One mix for the powered main. One for the Bose behind the band and one for the wedge.

While incoming tracks all had the same EQ and compression across the three sub mixes, each submix could have its own EQ and compression in addition that was not shared.

TotalMix then has trim that enables me to move faders and adjust the same fader across all the tracks for its relative position for that submix. Or turn off the trim setting to move them independently for each mix.

I also grouped the faders for the submixes so I could bring these up and down in unison.

RME DigiCheck did the recording. That went fine. Also DigiCheck has a spectral analyzer.

Ah, didn't realise you are using a UCX. I've done similar things with my UFX a couple of times, recording to a USB stick. Once even running the iOS version of Totalmix.

A fully-featured multi-setup mixer in a rack space or two comes in very useful sometimes.

Just occured to me. If you haven't got one a 33 band graphic between mixer and power amps can be very useful in nightmare rooms. Doesn't have to be a particularly expensive one either, even Behringer will do. An alternative is an automated feedback destroyer/digital eq. They can be good for really tight notching and the fedback detection and cancellation can be very useful, though sustained or swelling notes can sometimes fool the device and get mistaken for incipient feedback.

Interesting points. Thanks, TLW. I have taken the time to get the iPad recording working, but really I almost never do it. The UCX doesn't have the USB recording feature, so I have to record on the iPad and this limits me to 8 channels when using the iPad.
 
The UCX has eq on every channel and if you use loopback, you can stack EQs. For example, if you are recording 16 tracks, set the 2 SPIDF tracks to loopback, then route 2 mixes to them. This gives you the outbound compressor/expander+eq on the SPIDF, the inbound compressor/expander+eq on the SPIDF then route SPIDF input to Analog Out for another compressor/expander+eq before sending to a monitor or a main. Just using the SPIDF channels this gives you 3 stacked EQs and Compressors. It also gives you the opportunity for parallel compression if you send the original mix to the same analog output in addition to what comes back on the loopbacked SPIDF channel.
 
I didn't do this Saturday, but I wish I had. Now that I think about it, I could have made 1 the monitor mix and 1 the mains mix rather than maintaining 3 mixes. SPIDF-loopbacked-inputs could have been sent to multiple analog outputs enabling me to use the same mix for more than 1 send (for multiple monitors for example or for 2 mains).
 
Really, I often think that the biggest limitation is my own skill with the stuff I own.

You know, I've never investigated the sdpif channels at all. Don't use it so never bothered with them.

Totalmix is a huge application once you start digging into to it, isn't it? Sounds like you're using it in a much more complex way than I've so far found a need to.