Rig Manager 3.0 Editor

  • Having recently come over from fractal im very used to the work flow of an editor, and that editor is refined and quite brilliant. BUT i was fully aware of the situation when buying the Stage and i knew the editor was in the works so im not complaining for buyinging into something that wasn't owed to me. Using the native controls on the Stage has been a learning curve but its not a deal breaker and far more intuitive than the Axe FX 2 front pannel, so again i can still get stuff done and above all the sounds are just wonderful.


    Having a tour looming there is definitely a part of me that craves the editor because i have so many sounds to program and trial/error. Keeping the stage on the floor to see what feels comfortable on the foot-switching front whilst using the mouse to click and tweak from the comfort of my chair is 'subjectively' my ideal work flow for long programming sessions and for that reason i really would love a beta available, even if its a little crashy. If its got beta or even alpha stamped on it i would still be happy with that and submit bugs as i find them etc. I get the impression many would be happy with this idea and gladly help out so i can only hope they might consdier putting something up for us to play with. I can't see why anyone would be angry at them for that, those that want to get their hands dirty with full knowlege of the the software's state would do so, those that want to wait can wait.


    I just speculate my subjective needs might be in accord with yours because i'm terribly self-centred :D


    I certainly frequent the downloads page and I know, I know... 'a watched kettle never boils' but the thing is being from the UK i drink a lot of tea. :S

  • Who are you really? LOL! Over six years and only 17 posts? I smell an alias/sock puppet! :D:D:D:D

    I've owned a Kemper since they were first released. As a matter of fact I've had the pleasure of having only 1. A first release green lunchbox. Sold it to a bass player friend and bought the Stage. Anyway my point is that I don't have that many posts either. But I'm a gigging musician and just recently got back into the forum because of the Stage and the editor.


    Once it gets release I may slowly fade back into the shadows too.

  • I have both an axe fxII and a kemper. I use my axe in the studio and the kemper for reharsal and gigs. Its very easy to sit in the studio and edit in the very nice editor fractal have. If they dident have this editor i would have sold it now. Its a nightmare for me to edit directly in that unit. The kemper is far easier to fix great sounds directly in the unit. But ofcourse i would like to have an editor for my kemper as well. Then maybe i will not even use my axe in the studio. So hopefully a kemper editor will come to us in the next weeks.

  • I've noticed something recently, and it's not an all-encompassing rule, but seems to be broadly true in my experience:


    Kemper users often tend to be a bit older, lots of boomers converting for the first time from the tube world. Part of why Kemper appeals to them is its simplicity and taking its sounds directly from the source, which happens to be a source older players are far more familiar with (tube amps).

    Other modeler users tend to be younger. It's something they grew up around and used, including being able to control at their desktop whenever making changes. I'm no spring chicken, but growing up in the 90's and 2000's, it's something I'm more familiar with than tube technology.


    So, there seems to be a group of people who just don't find an editor needed or necessary and are used to complex hardware setups, having to lug around heavy electronics from door to door. The KPA is convenient enough already. Then you have a group of people who are more familiar with lightweight gear and computers. Of course, there are people right in the middle, but the polar extremes seem to often overtake this discussion because their prisms are so dramatically different in how they view things as a consumer and can't rectify the difference.


    At the end of the day, we respond to wants more than needs. We all come from different places and nobody values conveniences exactly the same.

  • Truth is I always hated the sound of VSTs and thought my KEmper would be unbeatable in term of SOUND quality, that was the only reason why I kept it, I always hated using its user interface and never ending knobs turning, I hate having to rely on hardware and not being able to change the sound after having it recorded, don't talk to me about reamping, that's way too time consuming.
    I sold the head and bought the Stage, finally when I got frustrated waiting weeks for a promised editor that did not seem to be anywhere I tried another VST amp sim that I hadn't tried before and thought the sound was almost as good if not as good as he Kemper, and for way less money, plus being able to tweak settings with my mouse on a big screen is really appreciable.

  • Truth is I always hated the sound of VSTs and thought my KEmper would be unbeatable in term of SOUND quality, that was the only reason why I kept it, I always hated using its user interface and never ending knobs turning, I hate having to rely on hardware and not being able to change the sound after having it recorded, don't talk to me about reamping, that's way too time consuming.
    I sold the head and bought the Stage, finally when I got frustrated waiting weeks for a promised editor that did not seem to be anywhere I tried another VST amp sim that I hadn't tried before and thought the sound was almost as good if not as good as he Kemper, and for way less money, plus being able to tweak settings with my mouse on a big screen is really appreciable.

    I thought you returned your Kemper. Are you still using one?

  • Truth is I always hated the sound of VSTs and thought my KEmper would be unbeatable in term of SOUND quality,

    In most respects you are right I think.

    finally when I got frustrated waiting weeks for a promised editor that did not seem to be anywhere I tried another VST amp sim that I hadn't tried before and thought the sound was almost as good if not as good as he Kemper

    So you found a VST that sounds as good as a Kemper? Whats the name of this marvel? If its from Bias then yes it sounds good to me too but doesn't come anywhere near the tones in my KPA. As Always YMMV.

    If you use FRFR the benefit of a merged profile is that the cabinet is totally separated in the profile.


    For my edification only... ;) Kemper/Axe-FX III/ Quad Cortex user

  • You would have hated the Bradshaw rig days then. A rack full of separate devices. Ground loops everywhere to be fixed before you could even get started. Then sat on your knees programming each individual rack unit by hand. Each one with a completely different menu structure.
    I had never even used a Kemper until I bought the Stage the first week it was out. Had the full 18 song set programmed up within days. Even this morning, I decided to change out all the distorted sounds in the set for a different profile. Crunch, distorted rhythm and lead sounds in most performances.

    Even after copying all my performances to a mk2 version of each to work on, I had still managed to change all the rigs profiles to the new profile and set the gain for each rig in every profile in an hour. That included reordering these mk2 performances of every song back to slots 1 to 18.
    This thing is so easy to work with. Especially coming from using a Bradshaw system throughout the 90’s and 00’s.

    I am sure an editor would have been quicker but this thing is pretty easy to use.

    All of this was done directly on the unit without Rig Manager.

    Hahahaha man I remember those days fondly LOL!!! The worst was the eventides they only had XLR outs and the midi library LOL!!! then the rane mixer that everything had to go through to even out the levels!!! Yes present day much easier... however I STILL WANT AN EDITOR!!!!

  • So you found a VST that sounds as good as a Kemper? Whats the name of this marvel? If its from Bias then yes it sounds good to me too but doesn't come anywhere near the tones in my KPA. As Always YMMV.

    Lots of VST's out there aside from BIAS. I'd actually put BIAS on the lower end of the scale from what I've heard and my experience. It's not terrible, but I've heard "better".


    One interesting note at the Neural DSP booth at last years NAMM, they had the Nameless Suite and the Fortin Meshuggah amp it was modeled after, and they would switch back and forth while you were wearing headphones. Honestly, I heard no difference. I hear more subtle differences when going back and forth between the Kemper and its source in videos and comparisons. Still impressive, but the Neural test was a dead ringer. VST's have come a looong way.

  • You're probably half right in my case. I started playing in the early 70s and came up on tube amps. However, while I skipped the bean, I did buy the Pod Pro II. I really wanted to love it, but it wasn't quite there. Later, a friend came over with his HD500 and I thought they were finally getting close to something real, so I bought one. You could certainly get some good sounds out of it, but it was an excellent example of needing an editor. And ironically, one of the reasons I could never warm up to it was needing to use the editor, which was among the points you made.


    Much of my eventual slide back into the world of tubes wasn't so much that I had to use an editor on my PC, but the conceptual architecture in general, which it shares with Fractal. You take a bunch of widgets, wire them up to taste and adjust each one until you get the sound you're looking for, working from the ground up. Way too tedious on a small LCD screen to be sure, but also way too tedious for me even in a full screen PC editor. It felt more like crunching numbers in a spreadsheet than playing guitar.


    The big thing for me with the Kemper is partly what you mentioned - simplicity. While I'm certainly comfortable with technology since that's what I do for a living, when I play guitar I just want to play the instrument. One of the things I love about the profiler concept is that it's a snapshot of a complete sound, ready to go. With Line 6 and Fractal, there's a big sticker on the side, "Some assembly required." So, I just pick a profile that goes where I want to go and play guitar. I don't have to fiddle with the sound. This is about 80% of my use.


    That said, coming from a cover band background, a lot of times we need to get "that sound." As an example, I had to dial in a few effects for Whitesnake's Still of the Night. The core guitar sound was a profile that was awesome just as it was. However, for the middle section I needed some wobbly bits, so I found myself turning knobs and paging through screens. Not nearly as painful as building a sound from scratch in the Line 6 stuff, but not much fun, either. This is where an editor would certainly be handy. I can get along just fine without one, but I'm sure I'll appreciate it when I have it.


    A west coast friend of mine (also a software biz guy) spent a lot of time flying to central Africa to write a book on mountain gorillas. One of the people there referred to him as "the one who walks between worlds." I guess in terms of tube comfort and tech convenience that would be an apt description of my perspective as well.

    Kemper remote -> Powered toaster -> Yamaha DXR-10

  • Reading some posts here lately brings one conclusion:


    The editor is ready for years now but @CK worries about the sexual health of his customers and keeps it away ..don't believe me?Just watch the video again in which he said he stopped hanging around with pc-nerds because there were no women around..


    You think I am joking?Well..:/




    ^^;)

  • One interesting note at the Neural DSP booth at last years NAMM, they had the Nameless Suite and the Fortin Meshuggah amp it was modeled after, and they would switch back and forth while you were wearing headphones. Honestly, I heard no difference. I hear more subtle differences when going back and forth between the Kemper and its source in videos and comparisons. Still impressive, but the Neural test was a dead ringer. VST's have come a looong way.

    I must say that the Nameless was a kind of disappointment for me, but then comes the NTS then the Nolly and the Parallax (for the bass) and these were a whoa-experience to me. The progress the guitar plugins have achieved over the last 5-6 years is fantastic.