Modellers vs loud Tube amps

[DanTravis62]

My last gig about a week ago, I was playing by muscle memory for the first song. So i'm singing and looking at my hand and just going by where it should be. Meanwhile, my bass player apparently had a 747 jet engine for his backline and was ripping my skin off with sound.

Yep. Unless you've got great monitoring this is the experience that everyone has with modelers live.

 

[DanTravis62]

Im not counting it in what you would need if you ran an amp, the entire band is going to need the PA.

You are conflating two different things. "a pa" and "a pa that is extensive enough to make a modeler sound great in a live band" are not the same thing.

If you play all your gigs with extensive professional gear, great sound engineers, and gobs of monitors to make your experience awesome, then yeah modelers are going to be awesome and work fine.

If you, like 99.999999% of the guitar playing universe, are playing small clubs where you're lucky as hell to have any monitor to hear the vocals through, a modeler is just going to be a pain in the ass and is going to sound like shit - unless you run it with a power amp in a rack or whatever.... in which case you are carrying just as much stuff as if you were bringing an amp.