Posts by dhodgson

    Diamo,


    I spent a good amount of time reamping your (original) DI and came to the same conclusions MonkeyMan did - it was extremely challenging to dial in a good dirty sound, largely due to the extraordinary bassiness of your (single coil middle, really?) pickup. Try again on the bridge and make sure your tone control is full up. Even as a Saber collector I've never heard anything quite like that! This is a problem that has to be addressed at the source :)

    (P.S. I run the "Ibanez S Series Worldwide" group on Facebook, so I'm very very familiar with these guitars)

    I snagged the whole bundle. Five profiles stood out for me; three from the Halo collection, one from the Aloha, and one from the Gala. 5 keepers out of 99 is a pretty high hit rate for me - in general only about 1 in 50 ends up making the cut, and by that I mean being better than something I already have.

    And another reason a guitar goes out of tune is simply because too many use too thin string gauges. A saw a video on YT a luthier who work with ACDC and he said Stevie Young hit the strings very hard and therefore use 12-56 string gauge and they're playing in E standard. If you're a light picker then thinner string gauges are fine but if you pick little harder then you will benefit with heavier gauges and the strings will stay in tuner better and longer. I got a 11-49 set for d drop and have a 56 on low E on a Schecter BlackJack and damn, the guitar stays in tune better than any other non-evertune guitar I ever owned.

    Just as an aside, it's key to note that the Evertune standard saddles are good enough for most people, but if you're detuned with light strings (or play in standard with unusually heavy strings, I imagine) you may have to spring for a lighter/heavier saddle set. It can be a little unsettling when you can't dial in Zone 2 correctly on one particular string, and while it only happened to me once the alternative in the short term might be to simply go for a different string gauge.

    I have a couple of Evertune guitars, and have had a few in the past (and tried others...)


    Neither of them stays in tune when putting new strings on. I always have to fine-tune a couple of cents. Not that I'm complaining about that, I rather do that once every two weeks than tune every songs / take. But I just don't believe this since I've had my hands on a number of Evertune guitars, where NONE works as you describe :huh:

    Cederick,

    I'm not going to argue about a couple of cents on a new pack of strings any more than I'd argue about a couple of cents on a settled-in pack of strings. There is a tremendous amount of compensation on tap, enough that some folks use the 3-zone tuning to start off a set with the low string in drop-tuning and then go straight to standard mid-set simply by giving their low tuner a couple of twists.

    It either works, or it does not. And if it does not, you're playing too close to the edge of Zone 2/Zone 3, mate.

    I'll chip in here just to add another Evertune owner. I absolutely love the device, and would have it standard on all my fixed-bridge guitars if not for the fact that it requires a fairly thick body to install and therefore I won't be seeing one on my favorite S-Series babies anytime soon. The "play" with regards to the sensitivity of bending in Zone 2 is completely up to you; the tradeoff between having generous resistance to pitch instability vs. "I can barely feel it" is yours to decide, and instantly tweakable. It's also pretty damn cool to be able to put on a new set of strings without ANY tuner whatsoever, and have it rock solid even before the strings are broken in.


    If you keep an eye on Evertune.com, every so often they have free installation deals where they will install a [EDIT: Evertune] on an existing guitar (or heck, even more commonly - a new guitar) for no more than the cost of the item. They are also a reseller for a number of factory-installed models, it's worth checking out often.

    All screamers profile accurately except for that precision drive since it has a built in gate.

    I'd be careful about the word "all" there. There's a reason why the Tube Screamer is called out specifically in the Kemper docs.


    From the Kemper Profiling Guide, pg. 8:


    "Profiling with Effects in the Recording Chain


    Many guitarists get their signature sound by combining their tube amp with distortion pedals, booster pedals,
    and equalizers/filters. If you want to, you can keep these in the signal chain during the profiling process — they
    will all be accurately profiled as a part of the reference amp sound. However, there are a few exceptions: some
    distortion pedals use a special design that cannot be profiled accurately, for instance the Tube Screamer™.


    ...Also, the gate in the Precision Drive can be turned off.

    I have one of these and love love love it! There's been a few other attempts at multi-circuit overdrives (BOSS, VHT, Line6, JHS Bonsai) but the Elektron really -feels- like a multi-circuit pedal rather than one or two basic circuits with minor tweaks. And, like Vaughnfats said "it's almost impossible to make it sound bad." There's a lot of flavors on tap, and they're all useful!


    The (active!) EQ controls are also super sensible - you can dial in lows and sweepable mids, which most overdrives don't allow. Even in Clean Boost mode these are real problem solvers.


    My only gripes with the pedal are its size (large!) and the price. But it's worth it.

    JoshGoldie:


    "Hi everyone, I am relatively new to the kemper world and I am struggling with getting a tight realistic sounding heavy metal rhythm tone.
    I have MBritts "heavy pack" but the Revv and 5150 still sound muddy to me, and when i increase the clarity and definition it just becomes thin and harsh..."


    Tightness issues are going to be trial-and-error without some guitar pickup EQ discipline. Seriously, the zone between 105-160Hz is everything, and every amp & overdrive pedal manufacturer has their own idea of where and how much to scoop that zone - because there's no such thing as a "standard" pickup, and there's no such thing as a "standard" amount of gain to calibrate that to.


    I keep a MXR KfK EQ pedal in my signal chain for this very reason, although there's nothing about this that can't be achieved in the Kemper's input section with the Studio EQ. It's just convenient to have it there.


    On the KFK: 125Hz, 250Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz: Learn 'em, love 'em, use 'em. Absolute gold, those EQ sliders.


    -djh

    Sure you can. Easiest way is to reamp a single-sample impulse via S/PDIF through the Kemper that has everything turned off except for the Cab. Once you've captured the reamped result, you can normalize and crop. Voila, there's your new impulse.


    -djh

    I love snapshots myself. Super useful, like browser bookmarks. Say you're auditioning a new library with 100 profiles; weed out the weak by playing a riff on a looper pedal and spend a few seconds on each profile. If it's good, Snapshot it. By the time you get to the end, you can do the same with your Snapshots and weed those 100 profiles down to the oh, three that matter and delete the rest.


    Similarly, I might take a single profile, lock everything but the cab and waltz through my profiles auditioning the same patch with different cabs. Snapshot the good ones, then waltz through those and keep the best.


    Indispensable tool! Compare to saving each tweak of a patch under a different name when all you're trying to do is find the one variant that fits the mix.


    -djh

    If your pedal chain is noisy, consider putting a sidechain gate at the front of your pedalboard. Best I've found is the G-String Decimator II, but make sure to put your dirtboxes in the sidechain. Chances are you'll be able to use a lot less gate on the Kemper and the sensitivity will be better because the Decimator has apriori knowledge of the clean guitar signal making it a smarter gate.

    The Kemper's cab emulation doesn't work like a garden-variety convolution engine unfortunately; by the time an impulse has been transcoded via CabMaker, the time-spatial information is lost. That's not to say it couldn't be done, it's just that it wouldn't result in much of a stereo effect.

    I think the Evertune is a wonderful invention and would put it on all my fixed-bridge electrics if I could. They had a discount deal on installation recently that was hard to pass up, but alas the Evertune is only suitable for thick-bodied guitars (i.e., body thickness @ bridge + string height @ bridge >= 2.1") and the one I had in mind was just a bit thinner than that. But man... what a studio timesaver!

    "Loudness" is often the first thing that determines whether a profile makes the cut for me, and without overthinking it I've assumed it was due to Fletcher-Munson type concerns namely that certain profiles are just way ballsier in the midrange than the rest and don't suffer from "bedroom tone" scoopiness. This is with all things being equal, namely that all the Usual Suspects (Rig Volume, Cab Volume, etc.) are set to their standard defaults.


    That said, I remember back in the Kemper's early days there were changes made to the "profile volume normalization algorithm" to address concerns like this but I don't think it ever worked that well; at least, I doubt any psychoacoustic approaches (ala LUFS metering) were used to determine the adjustment. I'd love to know what other people think, though.