I've been using a borrowed 60-watt, six channel Yamaha mixer plugged directly into the speaker of my guitar amp. It's adequate for what I'm doing...I could borrow speakers with stands from the same person that owns the board, but frankly this gig doesn't pay enough to do all that on my own. Decent mikes make up for a lot of hardware shortcomings--and indecent ones will just make any amplification sound like crap. You make do with what you can get away with...but its true, you can't have too many channels and a four=channel alone is probably not enough to provide sound for a duo. And what if one of the channels goes bad? (Frequently happens). Wouldn't happen soon with new equipment, one hopes.

Those little Mackie mixers WhistleStop mentioned are a wonder, Susan, although I've never seen anyone using them as the main mixer in a PA. They are unpowered, very compact and quite inexpensive. Usually eight channels.(I don't know what they cost in the States, maybe $250?) Since its an unpowered mixer, you can plug one into a channel of a mother sound board (even a 4-channel) and have individual sound control at your fingertips. A lot of multi-instrumentalists use them like this so they can set up and manage their own variety of sounds without having to have to trust the sound tech (if there is one) to set up all the eq's and balance everything to suit each instrument.

Willie-O