Hi all, I would like some advice about the use of click tracks in live
audio.

I am working with a band that is starting to introduce a lot of
sampled/pre-recorded material into their live music. Because many of the
sampled arrangements are rather complex and don't fall conveniently at the
beginning or end of a song the band will be playing along with a
sequencer/sampler that will be playing back the samples as the song plays,
necessitating a click track (many of the samples won't start until later on
in a partiocular song so the band will have to be right on tempo, and at the
same place in the song as the sequencer playing the samples, etc.).

Unfortunately I do not know the first thing about using a click track live,
so I was wondering if some of you might shed some light on this or point me
to some documentation. One point: the band uses in-ear monitors exclusively
so hearing the click through the stage monitors is a non-issue.

Does typically only the drummer hear the click track, and then everyone
follows him/her? What is most commonly used to generate the click track and
where is it connected in the signal chain? A sequencer application running
on a computer via MIDI, like the metronome in Cubase/Nuendo, etc? A
standalone piece of hardware dedicated to this purpose? Any real-world
application examples for bands that use samples a lot in their live
performances that you can share (Peter Gabriel, for exmple)?

TIA,
-Ben