Posts by javi garcia guitar

Quote from Wheresthedug

Just thinking aloud but maybe it is viable mid song. If the performance loading is set to Pending you can change to a new performance ahead of being needed then trigger it by stepping on the appropriate Rig slot when required. Definitely a work around for javi garcia guitar rather than an ideal solution but might actually work OK..

That I thought at first, but I've preferred setting the performances to change immediately to the same slot I have on. Usually this works because I'm using the same gain-stage sound for that long reverb, but if not there's no difference between an analog pedalboard and the Stage since I have to press 2 switches - one changing the channel and another one enabling the reverb.

Thank you all guys for the replies, they've been quite insightful although I'm still considering buying the Neural Quad Cortex, not that it's gonna fix the software issues that I have with the Kemper but at least it is smaller 😅😂 thank you again!

Quote from V8guitar

I agree with you that switching performances mid song is totally not viable but mid set should not be a problem? I actually have a dedicated performance for a different guitar as its for a different part of the set, but I would never change performance mid solo as you are right, totally not practical.

I also think your ultimate is answer is the feature improvement to select pre or post for effects so nothing we say is the solution but only suggested work arounds.

Without going through the songs and set, I can only suggest areas to look at further ( all are of course some level of compromise):

1. Was there any reason why the octaver needs to be post as the issue seems to be around 1 slot
2. Its interesting you use the slots for 5 different levels of gain, which is similar to how I do it but I only boost for 2 reason, solo and punching up rhythms. I have a solo slot dedicated which sort of frees up needing to morph every slot. However for accenting riffs, I use morph.
3. You don't need to lock effects to have them on. You can have the slot with the effect already active or deactivated - I think its a red herring but it stood out in your comment
4. You can morph multiple items although I assume the change in reverb is independent to boost OR you could use the booster in pre effects to free up morph?
5. Could your answer be browse mode? Its worse because its scroll up and down but you are not limited to swapping between performances. Down side is to reduce selecting you would need to map everything out in advance - pretty sure this won't work but some people use it....
6. Use less effects ...thats a joke of course

That's exactly what I do when I need to switch on that long reverb, change the performance - mid song, yes.

Yeah, that feature would be incredible because it doesn't bother all the other features about the Kemper (I believe), just decide for each effect where do you want it and you're good to go. But of course workarounds are welcomed and you all have been so nice writing new ideas!

Answering your ideas:

1. First thing I'll try tomorrow! Another user said it before and I thought about it.

2. That's a nice approach and I'm sure it's useful for most users. For me I have solo parts almost in all gain stages so I can't have just one slot (meaning one gain stage) for the solos, not all solo are metal or mid overdriven sound 🥲

3. I probably didn't explain myself: What I need is to keep the effect on even if I switch the slot, just like you needed to change the channel on an amp and switch off certain effect that's on or viceversa, but the state of the pedal won't change unless you do something. Sometimes this is good but for me most of the cases is not so I have them locked.

4. That I thought at first when buying the Kemper. Not sure why I preferred the option I'm using now... 🤔 I'll check it too.

5. I'm not sure of this but seems to be a little time-consuming haha

6. That's the real solution, tbh hahahaha

Quote from AndySchick

Maybe use a volume pedal for the boost. This would free up the morph for the second reverb. You can set the desired values with the pedal range. Or use a switch, that puls down a resistor.

Same thing as carrying another pedal: My main goal was to not carry any more gear than the device itself, but for now seems the most reasonable one to be honest! That Dunlop Mini Volume pedal wouldn't be that much to carry.

Quote from Ruefus

Morphing is still a solid option here. The algorithm stays the same, but using morph allows you to create two states for a reverb. Varying every parameter attached to a dial.

You'd can still have an on/off switch if you like, but also a switch (the slot number) to change parameters or an expression pedal to vary any where in between.

I'll copy here one of my previous answers on how this is not possible for me:

"Two performances. The first one is set as follows:

- Slots 1 to 5 are my gain stages - from completely clean to complete distorted metal-type sound.

- All 4 effect switches used (octaver, chorus, delay and short reverb). All effects except reverb are locked because I need to be able to change slots 1-5 without loosing the effect (I need to sacrifice the reverb).

- All morphs are set as my booster, increasing the amp volume (since I can’t use any effect switch because they are already been used)."

The morph option was the first thing that I thought about (although it'll oblige you to use the same exact effect but I was willing to accept that in order to have all my main effects on the same performance).

Quote from Kellerblues

Nope, was talking about this (or equivalent), you can connect 2, adding 4 more switches

[Blocked Image: https://shop.kempermusic.com/media/image/34/8b/b0/[email protected]]

Oh! Didn’t know about that, but same problem, can’t put more that 4 effects after the amp 😅

Quote from Finally

How many effects units do you run downstream of the mic on your amp with a traditional rig?

Of the mic?

If you mean in the effects loop, I used to have like… two delays (one of them programmable), “two” reverbs (BlueSky), chorus, tremolo and octaver. Also my amp had two channels and I put a dual channel drive to get up to 6 gain stages.

Quote from Wheresthedug

I disagree with this entirely.

the first approach should be to provide the best possible sound and user experience. This may require traditional behaviour in some cases but many times this type of unit allows the possibility of avoiding the drawbacks and limitations of traditional analog setups.

the question is whether the specific workflow and feature set which Kemper designers settled on is the best user experience. Kemper could have gone for full flexibility and massive routing options etc like some of the competitors but they opted for simple and logical. Neither is right or wrong just different approaches. A Ferrari may be the best car in the world (for country roads or track days) but I wouldn’t choose one pver a Range Rover to drive through muddy fields. Different beasts equally brilliant.

for me it is certainly very close. Of course there are some things which I would love to see implemented but none of them are deal breakers. I actually agree with you that it would be nice to have the ability to place any number of effects pre or post the amp section. I rarely use many Fx at all but having a split of say 5 pre and 3 post or 6 pre and 2 post would probably work better for me than 4 + 4 but there are plenty of other ways to achieve the results I need so I’m not losing any sleep over it.

I get it! I didn’t say anything about it but this discussion wouldn’t happen if the Kemper sounded horrible 😂 I think we all agree that at sound level Kemper is top notch. But for me -a guy who wanted exactly the same analog rig but weighting and occupying 10 times less- I didn’t find effective the approach of “here you have 5 slots that can be the 5 parts of a song”. That alone couldn’t work for me since I had to play 20min long mixes with really heavy changes in effects and gain levels of sound. 🥲 But for sure, most of the users will be okay with its little cons as you mentioned. The only thing that really bugs me is to oblige people to have a certain number of effects pre and post. That doesn’t makes sense for me with a digital device. It doesn’t have to be fully routable but having an option to select wether you want an effect pre or post would be a simple thing to do without being anything crazy in terms of millions of possibilities or anything. Just the effect you want, pre or post and its parameters.

Again, this is just MY opinion and the way I use it, I don’t pretend to re-make the wheel here 🤣

Quote from Kellerblues

Are you aware that you can add up to 4 (2 time dual switches) hardware switches to have all blocks on separate switches? You can even re-assign the Tuner and looper switches to activate fx-blocks instead

That’s another thing that bugged me. I don’t find the actual use of that dual switches, since it obliges you to have always one of the effects enabled OR both enabled or disabled. Would be nice if you need for example reverb+delay in a certain part, but whenever you want one or the other, you can’t.

I also stated before what you say about re-assigning looper and tuner, but the limitation of 4 effects after the stack persists, but thank you for noting!

Quote from dave5150

Nothing is stopping you using your pedals with the Kemper if you are unable to work within the supported 4x pre and 4x post effects.

Yeah right, what stops me is that I purchased the Stage to avoid carrying any other stuff. So -for me- doing that doesn’t makes sense but I surely get that for a lot of users do and is enough.

Quote from V8guitar

Thanks for taking the time explain and no bother to us at all.

I think your ask is reasonable - to replicate your analogue set up. However, every digital device has limitations. So you could add 1 million external pedals to your valve amp set up and no digital all in one solution will match that. Of course your request is more reasonable but 8 effects pre and post is not a small number - your issue is the assignment pre or post I think so I would hope this is addressed.

However, there are work arounds - if its the same effect morph. Does every effect have to be post? I would probably put the octaver pre...I wouldn't normally put this in the effects loop but the front end of an amp if it was a real pedal so why not pre?

Just to clarify your terminology - you said you have to change performance? Do you mean performance or slot in a performance?

How are you using your slots in a performance. For example, I have typically 1 performance per band. In that performance I run a pure clean, slightly dirty, main rhythm, Rhythm with effects, and solo. I morph all of them as well to various degrees. My point is, I have at least 2 slots "spare" from a normal 3 channel valve amp ( in this example slightly dirty and Rhythm with effects) for dedicated songs. The only reason I say this is because there are so many ways to set up your KPA and we can get fixed on copying our analogue set ups too much.

The other point of course is different devices have different advantages - the Quad might be for you but be aware it have negatives. Note a few people have questioned the footswitches in alive context.

Dude, I hope this helps in some way

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Thank YOU for taking this time answering! I agree completely with you. Let me explain how I use the Kemper, so maybe someone thinks about a different way:

Two performances. The first one is set as follows:

- Slots 1 to 5 are my gain stages - from completely clean to complete distorted metal-type sound.

- All 4 effect switches used (octaver, chorus, delay and short reverb). All effects except reverb are locked because I need to be able to change slots 1-5 without loosing the effect (I need to sacrifice the reverb).

- All morphs are set as my booster, increasing the amp volume (since I can’t use any effect switch because they are already been used).

The second performance is set EXACTLY as the first one but the reverb is set to be a long reverb and it is active whenever I change to that second performance.

For example, another easy thing would be to be able to lock things INSIDE a performance and not for ALL the Kemper. That way would be possible to have different kind of effects along performances but keep the state of the effect on the same performance.

Also if I change to that long reverb second performance and then fast enough I change again to the first performance, most of the times it keeps that long reverb although it’s not even active so I have to change again to that 2nd performance and back again to that 1st performance. 🤦🏼‍♂️

I agree all devices have its pros and cons (and Neural has so many cons) but for me I think it would be nice, but of course I’m not sure at all.

Since I see you both V8guitar and Steve5478 interested, I'm going to explain my issues and my disenchantment with Kemper OS.

What I wanted was to be able to replicate my valve amp + pedalboard live rig with just one digital device. This -IMHO- should be the first approach of these type of devices.

The first issue I happened to see with Kemper in general is that you can't purposely oblige people to just have 4 effects in their signal chain. That just is not happening in real word for most of us. The second is even worse: You're limited to 4 effects before the amp and 4 effects after the amp. So you'll have to decide which ones you want to be able to activate because you only have 4 hardware switches.

I understood these things and thought that their way to think about this device is that you use the 1-5 slots predefined for each part of a song - but that's limited to just the users that want to use it that way. In my case, my gigs used to be 4 hours-long with medleys of songs that could last more than 20 minutes straight of music - you can imagine that I wasn't able to use the Stage that way.

BUT what I believe is really simple - in terms of programming a digital device - is to let people decide where they want the effect blocks. If so, my case wouldn't be so dramatic because I just need 5 FX, all of them after the stack (because I used the slots for my gain stages), and as you probably know, it is possible to assign the looper switch to another effect. But no, can't do that since I have octaver, chorus, delay and short reverb already after the stack. If I want the long reverb -which is my 5th effect- I have to change to the next performance where I have the same setup but the reverb module has a long reverb and it's active whenever I change to that next performance.

This situation would be even worse for those who like to use a lot of effect pedals inside the same song after the stack. At least Quad Cortex -which obviously has its cons- let's you assign the switches to whatever block you want in stomp mode, so theoretically you'll get up to 8 effects.

I hope I didn't bother anyone on this 😅 Kemper still being an incredible device and I'm really happy I purchased it quite some time ago, but for me it has these type of cons that makes me wonder if Quad Cortex would be better in this sense.

Cheers!

That I thought... Well, it's time to watch reviews about the Quad Cortex 😅

Hi there,

Fast question: Is already possible to put more than 4 effects after the stack?

History: I've been using the Kemper Stage for almost 2 years now and I remembered how annoying it was at the time when I realised that -in a digital device- there could be just 4 effects pre-stack and 4 effects post-stack, but I supposed that since it is a digital device and I assume those buttons are not hard-wired it would change at some point, but the last question about this was from 2021 so hope is the last thing I want to lose.

Thank you!

HELL-G Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not common... But well, Hoki Toki is also right, it may be worse. For now I'm seeing okay the screen although it's a little frustrating to see that dust. Maybe it's a good thing to keep in mind for future Kemper designs 🙂

BayouTexan thanks for the tip! Idk if it's gonna be useful for dust between the plastic cover and the screen, but it's worth a try 👌

BayouTexan 😂😂😂 yeah, dust is dust, but the complaint is about the non-sealed screen, or at least some easy way to clean it without voiding my warranty... Because I assume that if I open it for cleaning the screen, warranty will be void, right HELL-G ?

HELL-G I have a dog! Okay.. that makes sense... I get that the Kemper is not hermetic, but it's strange for the screen to not be hermetically sealed, just the screen from the outside seals all the way to the back of the LCD, because you could imagine that this could happen, and for now I can see the screen okay, but imagine if this happened several times... 😅 And my room is pretty clean from dust.. Any recommendation on opening the case to clean it? Somebody done it?

BayouTexan that makes sense too, but the not-sealed screen doesn't, from a designing point of view it's strange!

Hello there!

This past weekend I've gigged for 4 shows using the Kemper Stager and now I took it out of his bag and this is what I've found:

As you can see, since I've own it I didn't remove the film protector but the funny thing is that THAT dust is between the plastic screen (the one where the film protector is sticked) and the actual screen beneath it. I know this because the plastic screen has some move around the frame and the dust moves with it and -of course- because I didn't remove never ever the film protector.

Someone has experienced this? I don't want to disassemble the Kemper Stage just for that but... any thoughts?

Thank you,

Javi.

Quote from Wheresthedug

as others have said, the Aux In works fine without an interface. I have used my phone at rehearsals several times and its LOUD 😬

Did you listen your guitar mixed with the aux in directly through the headphone output? If that's the case, at which volume did you have this output? And do you have an iPhone?

Aux in was working ok if I set headphone volume at 0 dB, but at this volume, guitar rigs could've blow my eardrums.

I don't think the problem is something wrong with the Kemper, since all works fine and with the audio interface aux in was loud enough. Either way, I'll contact Kemper Support.

What I really think is that iPhone/iPad don't have enough output voltage to drive correctly the return input, but I don't have any other audio device to check this aside from the audio interface.

Thank you for your replies 👌

In my previous reply I quoted what I said, which is what you're quoting from the manual 😅

Quote from javi garcia guitar

The manual says that you can use return 1/2 on the Kemper Stage to feed an auxiliary signal into Main, ----> Monitor and/or Headphones outputs <----- using an "mp3 player".

My solution was to bring my audio interface to the rehearsal, which wasn't a big deal but to be honest an aux in shouldn't need an audio interface or an amp to work as expected, and it's even worse when the manual says that you can connect an "mp3 player".