This has/is being done. Actually, several tours of progressive jazz have been doing 5.1 surround, using a Digidesign ProControl and ProTools. In the 80s I was at a show, where a Christian rock band called Servant had a quad system set up in the Brady theater, Tulsa, OK. It was awesome.

You can't really mix a purists mix on something like that in my opinion, as the only people getting a real experience are dead center. But for effects it is cool.

Along those lines, theater productions have surround mixes in the teens or more. Discrete mixes/speakers handle effects for optimum localization. So a creaking door's sound comes from the creaking door, and not the left and right speakers.

sheet, do you know any other kind of gear that might work for this? i heard that Pink Floyd used to do that kind of stuff. it would be awesome for effects or farout jazz

Pink Floyd did indeed use quadrophonic effects in their live "Dark Side of the Moon" tour in the summer of '73, I remember it well. They used the quad stacks in the corners of the room as special effects. You know the parts of DSoM, where airplanes are zooming around, maniacs are screaming, etc.? (I forget the name of the song, maybe it was "Us"?).That's what they panned around the room. It was pretty awesome back then. They had a joystick set-up on what was probably an early Midas board. My music partner tells me that Bob Moog (who he worked for in the 80s at Big Briar) made some sort of customized 4-channel VCA box that could do quad panning with a CV joystick. He made it for the rock group Asia, but whether they actually used it in live performance is unknown. These days, it could still be done using either THAT or Precision Monolithic VCA chips and a logarithmic joystick controller sending out the appropriate control voltages to the different VCA channels. Too bad that hasn't been explored by the companies that are offering 5.1 panning in their digital mixers....

There have been guitars like that as well. My friend and former employer, Steve Ripley, made the first stereo guitar and 6 output guitar, as well as the D neck. Fender ripped off the D neck idea and Gibson the other. Ripley's guitars were made for and played by Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Frank and Dweezil Zappa, Joe Satriani, etc, etc. Anyway, discrete outputs from each string had effects sends and returns, and could be sent to 6 amps, or tracks, which could be assigned to 6 speakers around the room.

simple solution would just put effects in the backs... but would tend to be overdone for small clubs... balancing issues and all...

effects in the back is not at all what i want. i want to be able to move the music around the room, not just put sound in every corner.

Well you need a quad bus with panner.

Consider a low latency DAW like SAWStudio, that has a surround mixer. You could automate your mixes, etc. It would be far cheaper to buy a digital version than to build an analog live sound, quad bus console.