The Kemper Of Guitar Pick-ups? Keyztone Exchanger

  • Keyztone Exchanger Pedal
    https://keyztone.com/product/keyztone...

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    Ash

    Have a beer and don't sneer. -CJ. Two non powered Kempers -Two mission stereo FRFR Cabs - Ditto X4 -TC electronic Mimiq.

  • Interesting, Ash.


    What I don't understand is that it doesn't seem like you need to tell it what PU's you're using, IOW, what's feeding its input.


    Logically, if it doesn't know what it's receiving, how can it accurately translate that? It's kinda like using Google Translate without the software's knowing what language is input in the left pane.


    I'd love to know wassup wit' dat. :/

  • The "bright" switch is used when you have single coils if I recall correctly. I watched it a while ago.

    OK, so that'd be a vague-ballpark adjustment that'd help with the "problem" I described. Using the Google-translate analogy again, this'd be like telling it the input / left pane is an Asian language.


    Thanks man.

  • I find this approach more appealing than the Sim1 xt1 tbh!! Especially because it does NOT "learn" my pickups, but rather interacts with them.


    Let me explain: I don' know how it works, but maybe it has to do with impedance/pickup load combined with an eq and boost. So if you use it as an "pickup enhancer" that can get you into the ballpark of a few pu-characteritics (single coil, modern humbucker...), this is a way more creative way to sculpt your tone. You have the bright switch, tone and level knob to further adjust (or adapt to different pu and position you use) to your OWN taste.


    As far as I know it works best with passive pu and is analog (no latency added!!).


    The downside (for playing live)would be the unpractical switching possibility.

  • Not quite.


    Those systems "emulate" the entire guitars they offer as models, whereas this attempts to approximate only pickups.

    Ah, okay. Like the pickup simulator in Boss GTxxxx, but with more possibilities?


    Wait, it's more like the Ernie Ball Game Changer!

  • It's beyond my pay grade, Tobi.


    When I first saw it I assumed it'd have to be doing more than cutting / boosting and EQ'ing, but it's apparently an analogue device so there's definitely no DSP modelling going on.


    My guess is there's possibly some compression and / or saturation happening in there where appropriate.

  • Since it's analog, could it really be anything more than an EQ pedal with set voicings? It's certainly cooler if there's some impedance stuff going on though.

    I'm thinking that for a pedal like this to do what it advertises, it would have to do a couple of things:

    1. Analyze the EQ curve of the incoming signal and match that to each virtual pickup setting. This can easily be done digitally, but I've never heard of it being done with an analog circuit.

    2. Apply an envelope to the matched EQ, so that the attack and decay of the EQ curve matches the modeled pickup. Singlecoils aren't just brighter than humbuckers, the brightness in turn has a different ADSR curve than a humbucker, so simply EQ-matching two pickups wouldn't be enough to turn a humbucker into a singlecoil.

    3. Analyze the compression characteristics of the incoming signal and match that to the modeled pickup. Never heard of anyone pulling that off.


    So while I do think this pedal sounds really good, I think you'd be a little nuts to spend that kind of money instead of just learning to use an EQ yourself.

  • Cant believe that this is just an analog device.

    It would be interesting what amplifier and/or box was used in this video and did they change the amp setting between th modes?


    The sound was not so bad :)

  • Since it's analog, could it really be anything more than an EQ pedal with set voicings?

    As I said earlier, compression and saturation are also possible, John.


    As you said and as I also said earlier, without the ability to analyse what's incoming and act accordingly, this thing's gonna fall way short of being the Kemper of pickups.


    It's also lacking in the most-obvious area in terms of Kemper-likeness - it can't Profile a pickup; you're stuck with the "models" (basic circuit-switching in order to approximate EQ / compression / saturation characteristics) or pre-determined "notches" the pots offer.

  • Guys, here is a text from the man behind the product. The original post is in French from a guitar forum, I just made a copy paste into google translate, that’s too long for me to do a complete translation so sorry for approximations


    Many people wonder if we have made a disguised EQ and if not what are the differences. Besides, which one do you use? The empress? There are 4 major differences with an EQ (I speak of an analog EQ that would be placed at the beginning of the chain to have the same effect).

    - On an EQ, one rarely manages the boosted / attenuated bandwidth and this one does not generally correspond with a pickup resonance (or a resonant RLC circuit). The bandwidth is often too wide and amplifies a much larger frequency spectrum.

    - The management of a slope of a first-order (or even second-order) filter is clearly not optimized on an EQ and difficult to achieve. This would require a fairly large band number. And even with that, the linearity of the slope would rather become a cross track. It should be added a low pass filter whose cutoff frequency would be configurable, which is very simple to achieve. But are we still talking about an EQ as we know it? NB: I do not know the answer

    -On an EQ, there is no input microphone correction section, that is, we work blind (or at the ear) to add or remove frequencies to a frequency response which already exists. Add to that the previous 2 remarks and we end up with a frequency response made to the blind who can of course very well do the trick, it is a question of taste but does not correspond to a response freq pickup.

    -And the last, well demonstrated by Guitar2tiste, to correct the input microphones by looking for the frequencies that are missing and then re-apply a character (which re-amplifies again) and must clearly get up the ass to not have a breath . In summary, we have smoothed the frequency response of the input pickup (from a few Hz to a little less than 20kHz) to make it neutral and especially to have a clean basis and redo a model behind which corresponds perfectly with the frequency response a pickup (and do not mix characters in particular). All easy to use

  • Thank you 'Mousse.


    He's basically saying it's not a standard EQ, and avoiding talking about the other processes that are likely taking place, such as the ones I mentioned.


    It's the ol' "This product contains no [insert every irrelevant ingredient you can think of here]" trick that marketers use to give the impression that a food product is healthy. Saying what something is not teaches us nothing, unfortunately; I wish people would learn that as I hate to see folks' being taken advantage of.


    Anyway, thank you for sharing his "non-description", mate! We'll just have to keep guessing, I s'pose... :/

  • My thoughts also. Can't judge someone's words too harshly over a Google Translate of course, but it definitely seems like the marketing is kind of over-selling through omission how innovative the tech is. I think it could be cool if you're a die-hard analog tube rig player who wants a little more options without going digital, and the sound clips seem worth €240 to you. I'm not knocking what I've heard from this at all. But If you already have a digital rig and €240 to spend, you could get 1-2 full days with a pro mixing engineer creating custom EQ presets until you're both blue in the face :) Or simply use whatever Match EQ plugin you have in your DAW to see the numbers and just put them into your Kemper EQ yourself.