Could do with some feedback on this today as we play this evening!

Had a practice yesterday before playing a gig tonight and am getting used to operating the PA I bought.

One thing I would like to improve if possible is the sound coming from the acoustic guitars. I realise that putting them through mics would be the best answer to get a decent 'guitar like' sound but that is not an option - I don't have enough (or suitable) mics and the two of us would probably not stand still enough to get a consistent sound!

I have a Fishman pickup which I take on and off my acoustic (which I believe is supposed to give a good sound) which goes straight into the input on the amp designed for such, Alastair's has a pre-amp on his guitar. The levels that come out are fine.

When we played live I must admit that I didn't think the guitar sound was bad, but listening to it last night on tape (I recorded it directly from the amp as all the instruments and voices are mixed through the amp) the guitar had sound that 'amplified twangy acoustic piezo pick up' sound which it would be nice to chop down on if possible.

Questions...

1 Is the sound on tape likely to be different or is it a 'true' representation?
2 Does the mix direct out of the amp to tape sound different than it does live - I think I read something somewhere that it does sound different? I particularly noticed that the bass was very up front whereas it didn't sound like that when we did it?
3 Are there some basic EQ settings that might make the guitar sound more like a guitar! If not such is life. I have a separate LOW MIDDLE HIGH on each channel. I realise every set up is different but any general hints would be handy

Other ones...

4 We are playing outside - anything to bear in mind?
5 We played in a hall yesterday at what we consider a similar volume level to today. As we have no monitor speakers we pointed the speakers towards us so we could hear. There were no feedback problems. Do you think we will get away with putting the speakers to the side and back of us - it's either that or trying to sort out monitoring

Something like:

  PA SPKR                                                                       PA SPKR
  
  
                                        US AND MICS
  
  
  
                                           AUDIENCE
  

There is an output called MONITOR on the amp which I presumed I could take a lead out into an amp and speakers but it didn't seem to make any noise through the amp which I can't pin down why yet. I was just going to use a small guitar amp as a monitor and can't see why nothing comes through - am I missing something obvious?

Thanks in advance

One other thing I noticed when practising. I am putting seven separate channels through the amp (it's a Phonics 1062 with 375 watts per side) - three vocal mics, two acoustic guitars, electric guitar and a bass - and the sound was fine generally. We are playing at a venue where we will be more 'background' music rather than high volume in yer face stuff (yesterday I would guess that we were only running at about 2 on a scale of 1 - 10 level-wise). I did notice sometimes when we were all playing together that certain elements rather overpowered others and (unless I imagined it) almost cut out other bits (bass mostly - and the vocals disappearing lower into the mix). I probably haven't explained that well , but is that normal/expected?

Probably in the future I will take the bass out and do that separately, but for today I quite wanted to make a recording off the mixer/amp to get an idea of how we performed and what we sound like with a view to improving in the future so wanted to include everything. As I said above the mix between the instruments and voices was basically fine and will serve our needs tonight.