Future Updates?

  • I am happy with my Stage and I am already deep enough down in the rabbit hole trying to find the perfect rig :)

    However it would be nice to have some more and improved effects.

    Now it is more than a year since last real firmware update(drives).

    Do you guys think there will be any major future update or are the Kemper profilers more or less obsolete?

  • Delays, Reverbs and Drives all took quite a while in development. New features like the editor and the Kab/Kone also. Things are quiet just now so I would guess some new developments are cooking away somewhere.

  • Sorry -obsolete were perhaps wrong word(I am Swedish :)).

    I mean that everything develops, so also the competition.
    Fractal is releasing FM9. I am not interested. I had Axe Fx2 and all the options drove me crazy. I had a Line 6 floor. Good interface but the sound not the least drives was not good enough. I also owned Boss in the past.

    I bought my first Kemper in 2012. One year ago I switched to the Stage which was a game change and I really love it.

    The only problem is the rabbit hole with the enormous available rigs.

    What I meant with this thread was to ask you guys if you think the present is the final firmware or if there could be future main firmwares update.

  • @mikitan - for sure there will be further updates. Even if a Kemper II is released, they have said support for the older hardware will be maintained. I don't think they will just put their feet up or abandon the guitar gear caper to bring out a range of green toaster ovens.

  • My Marshall Lead 12 is like 30 years old and still not obsolete. Same goes for my Westone Spectrum which only had one update in it's life -- fret job. ;)

    Larry Mar @ Lonegun Studios. Neither one famous yet.

  • Even if there were no more updates, why would that make the PROFILER obsolete?

    I am not even anywhere near the latest OS ^^


    My kemper never felt obsolete. In fact, when i’m gigging with it in 10 years, it is still “just” a guitar amp. It can’t really be obsolete, unless it stops working, and can’t be fixed.


    Doesn’t mean there aren’t features i’d line to be added, but my feature requests are not really mainstream, but more “things to make my life easier” stuff.

    And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

  • The only problem is the rabbit hole with the enormous available rigs.

    What I meant with this thread was to ask you guys if you think the present is the final firmware or if there could be future main firmwares update.

    This rabbit hole will get bigger and bigger :) That's the thing with all of those devices, you can get lost in options so you need to develop a strategy which works for you. Mine is: I use mainly my own profiles and if I make a new bunch of them I only keep the ones I really like. Also with the RM database or commercial ones. If a profile doesn't give me something that I do not already have or inspires me to make some music with, than it goes directly into the trash can. In my own database I use the rating function a lot to remember what's nice and most of the time I need about 30 seconds to guess if it fits my guitars and my music style. Maybe I've thrown away some good ones, but who cares when you have more profiles available than you can ever play.

    And I don't spend time with tweaking to see, if I can bring an awful sound to live, only with sounds that are nearly close to what I want. And for quick and dirty songwriting I have a collection of all what I need so I don't need to search for a basic sound until the idea is gone.


    And the thing with the Kemper software is: The main algorithm is done, there aren't a lot of things which can be improved on that side. Maybe they can develop a more advanced refining process with a more generic approach so you don't have to work your way through that whole thing on your own. But I think if this is doable, they would already have done it. But that's also the part of creating "your" sound if you make a profile.


    The Kemper Drive and the Kemper Fuzz were a huge step into a very interesting world where you don't look at the same old "oh lets make a software clone of an old boutique pedal" thing. Instead they gave us a tool to create a more unique sound inside the digital world which is awesome. I can imagine that there are some other applications like compressors or anything like that for that kind of approach. Don't know about the processing limits for those kind of algorithms and if everyone is so excited about those tools as I am.


    And for all the other stuff there are tools available. In my personal opinion the whole pitch shifting thing for tuning the guitar up or down has too much latency and doesn't sound as good as the popular alternatives for what I want. But that unit costs around 100$ and I don't care about that anymore. :)


    Overall the infrastructure is done. And you have to ask yourself if this tool is the right one for you or what you are missing to achieve what you want. Feature requests for a Kemper 2 are already all over the place and if they will ever release one they will surprise everybody with something completely unexpected. My oldest Kemper which runs in my studio (have a touring rig also) and is working since 2013. That's a freakin long time for a guitar tool and in this crazy festival year you could see Kempers on all stages. I am curious if a lot of the players ever needed to fire up their B Unit. Me not one time. The only time I really needed the B unit was when the amp of another bands player failed and he needed a fast solution. :)


    But Kemper was always really good in not telling everybody what their next plans are and than surprise, surprise there is something no one had in mind :)

    Edited once, last by Navar ().

  • I hope we will get an OS 9 with improved modulation effects.
    But a new hardware is probably in the works since our beloved Kemper is not in many conversations online and i bet sales are declining.

  • TBH, I think sound-wise we're already long into a "saturation phase" - pretty much all digital guitar amps, be they modeling or profiling in nature, are currently "good enough" both for live use and for studio production. So sure, some incremental improvements may please some "sound nerds" among us, but from a business perspective, I don't believe they will make or break a market.


    What I really hope for in a Kemper II is rather a massive improvement in usability - I think this is where the next battleground in this field may be. You do need to be a bit of a nerd to become comfortable with operating a Kemper - there's not a lot of pleasure to be gotten out of operating its interface. Compare that to a nice amp with chunky knobs, switches and a wild pedalboard with crazy-colored boxes and funky-named controls - the Kemper feels more like a computer than a musical instrument.


    The Quad Cortex with its big touch screen is currently probably the most "usable" device - and its screen still looks like an electrical circuit diagram...


    Compare that to, e.g. the on-screen experience of Positive Grid Bias FX with all its lovingly-designed images of amps and effects. Just makes creating tones and editing more fun and intuitive, even though functionality-wise, it's not much of a difference (high-level) to a Helix or a QC.


    So I'd be delighted if the next phase of competition in the digital guitar amp space could be the "usability wars".


    Second: to please the sound nerds, maybe open up the ecosystem and add some modularity for third-party developers to provide their "Kemper plugins" - just like the VST standard opened up a huge and diverse market for software effects for DAWs. Of course this would open up a whole new can of worms regarding stability and performance, but hey, one can dream...

  • I am happy with my Stage and I am already deep enough down in the rabbit hole trying to find the perfect rig :)

    However it would be nice to have some more and improved effects.

    Now it is more than a year since last real firmware update(drives).

    Do you guys think there will be any major future update or are the Kemper profilers more or less obsolete?

    I am curious, what does "more and improved effects" mean? I hear this a lot but IMHO, I have an FM9 and the effects in the Kemper on the latest firmware sound as good as the same types of effects in the FM9. Are you looking for some of the really out there effects that make your guitar sound like a synth or something like that? That is the only thing I can think of that the FM9 has that the Kemper doesn't.


    IMHO, the Kemper amps sound and feel more like a tube amp than the Fractal stuff. The Fractal stuff has way too much gain IMHO. I have some amps that are modeled in the FM9 and I can tell you that the models have a lot more gain than the real amps. I have profiled some of my amps and those profiles sound and feel much more like the real amp. I notice a huge difference when rolling my volume back a little. The Kemper responds like my amp. The FM9 takes a lot more of a turn on the knob to start cleaning up. You then start losing a lot of volume as well, which the Kemper doesn't do.


    I would also suggest to not go down the profile rabbithole. There are many good profiles stock in the Kemper. I was doing some recording a couple of days ago and browsing some of them in the Michael Britt folder. There is one in there towards the top of the list that has "solo" in the name. I got stuck on that profile for a good while. I altered the reverb and delay on it and was really liking it. It cleans up nice with a little volume rollback on the guitar. I would recommend checking some of the stock profiles out and modify them a little. Find the ones that are in the gain range that you want and adjust or turn off the effects and build up from there. I highly recommend profiling your own amps at settings you like playing them at as well. I did that with the amp I have been gigging for about 7 years and they really work for me.

  • Wouldn't be surprised if new hardware is in the future - but I'm not missing anything major at the moment. My wish list is less about the basic tones, and more about features on the fringes. Such as:

    - better tuner options (sweetened tunings anyone?)

    - more control over the leslie effects (like setting the max and min values, which I don't believe you can do at the moment)

    - synth style patches (I'll take mono... but poly is even better ;) )

    - switchable mono/stereo power amp internally (why they simply bridged a 600 watt amp to mono is a point of confusion for me)

    - better remote control (i.e., wifi connect) options for the editor (which is missing in the Toaster, but addressed on the Stage)


    I hear people asking for things like multi-amps going left right, "better" effects, etc. For myself, as a gigging and occasional session guitarist, I don't need those capabilities, and never understood why it was so important to others... but that's just me I guess. I think Kemper 1.0 sounds fantastic for what I do. Is FM9 or QC "better?" At this point, I don't need to pursue that line of questioning. I'm sure I could work with any of them, but Kemper, out of the box, just worked for me, more so than other "amp simulator" solutions I've used in the past. Oh, and I've used just about all of them (like most of you :) ).


    and now for the obligatory "ymmv" - :)


    Peace Out,

    Dango