Posts by fretboardminer

    When you download the Firmware you always find a pdf called How to update your KPA.pdf. This description recommends to put the kaos.bin into the "OS Update" folder. And this procedure does not need the thing with hold both '<' and '>' keys.


    Quote from wiKPA.pdf, page 18

    INSTALL OR REINSTALL THE FIRMWARE

    • Switch the main knob off
    • download the latest KPA firmware
    • use your usual KPA-formatted USB stick
    • copy the unzipped firmware file kaos.bin into the root folder of the USB stick (NOTE: there must be no other copy of the kaos.bin file elsewhere on the stick)
    • plug the USB stick into the KPA
    • press and hold both '<' and '>' keys
    • switch KPA to tuner while still holding both keys
    • something like 'booting and installing' will be displayed
    • wait until the firmware is reinstalled.

    This is a kind of forece install of Firmware. And here the kaos.bin should be put into the root folder.

    I use TOTAL COMMANDER for this. I just click on a .kpabackup file like it was any other directory. This means I don't have to tar/untar. Instead I just backup, delete and then, instead of saving as .tar I go back, up in the directory hirachy and it is done.

    These guys at IRCAM are certainly clever, but this here is not really putting the sound of something else right on to the strings of your guitar. Like the Kemper Profiler puts other amp-sounds on your strings. This is the great benefit of the Kemper, that it does not change or limit your musical expressivity, it just offers you a wider range of sounds.


    For me a software that "learns in real-time typical features of a musician's style and plays along with him interactively" is quite frankly the opposite of Improvised Music. These kind of experiments have been around for quite a while and are admittedly very demanding high tech, but the musical results (if you compare it to machine translation) are more or less on the level of babelfish.

    When people ask me about the Profiler I always say: "I can record the sound of my amp, but not the music I play, only the sound. So then later I can play new, live music with that recorded sound." I don't know it this is really technically accurate, but it gives them quite an instantaneous idea of how it works.


    I hope I will live up to the day when we can profile all kinds of sounds, like on an audio-recorder, and then play with them like malleable samples. Todays samplers sound so rigid, unchangable. To me they always sound a bit like parrots, meticulously repeating the same sound over and over without the ability for variations. Granular synthesis can offer some degree of flexibility but it very soon sounds very digital, artificial.


    Wouldn't it be cool to play a guitar solo with the sound of a jet engine, or a tiger or a blackbird?

    My point was, that saying: "A rig (..) contains all parameters, tweaks and additions made inside the Kemper Profiler." is just not true and might mislead people to thinking that once you stored a Rig, all your settings are save. (Which they are not - the System and Master/Output settings might get lost if you do some kind of reset and then just only reload your Rigs.)


    Maybe you are right and this is delving far too much into encyclopaedic semantics.


    So now (after riding 20 Kilometers around Flughafen Tempelhof :D ) it suddenly dawned to me that we might just take out the word "all". That would still serve the purpose of explaining Rigs against Profiles and yet would avoid the pitfalls of going too much into misleading details.


    So my proposal:
    "A rig is the signal chain based on amp profile and/or a cabinet profile but it also contains all parameters, tweaks and additions made inside the Kemper Profiler."

    Good explanation! But it needs some fine tuning:


    " it also contains all parameters, tweaks and additions made inside the Kemper Profiler."
    All sentences that contain words like "all", "always", "never" and such are always wrong, and never say it all. ;)


    I mean - there are those System parameters that are not stored in a Profile.


    I will make a proposal later, but, hey - sorry guys, now I have to hop on my bicyle and do a few kilometers in the marvellous summer sun!

    I am not really a fan of Lukather, but hearing him play these chunky Blues riffs is quite revealling: he sounds great on each of all these amps. Ok, the guys in the studio for shure did a great job in selecting the best amps they could find for this. But after this selection the differences are pretty much deep in the details and they are less important than often we tend to think. So basically there is only two kind of amps: god ones and bad ones.


    And one more thing: later at 24:55, when they are in the control room and the engineer is bringing up and down the faders of different mics, the differences in the sound are way much stronger than before on the audition. This is something I find very often when soundchecking with analog amps and especially when testing different rigs in the Profiler: compared to the type of amp, the micing is way much more important in bringing the final result towards or away from your personal ideal sound.

    I once was confronted with the meticulously painstaking process of supervision and super-supervision and re-revisors at wikipedia.org, when I just wanted to have some details fixed in an article about myself, that someone else has created there. That was a bit awkward, but at the same time I perfectly understood: if we want it to be relyable it needs a lot of work from these guys.

    I hope he meant active editing support where needed. :)

    Yes!

    I was only reacting to Per's post. And I still think that freely assignable quick access buttons would be cool for many things one of them being what Per wants to do.


    But I personally am totally happy with a neutral Gain knob. AISB: I like the dynamic range of my amp and I also like the dynamic range of my amp's profile inside the KEMPER. I don't even use the Gain knob, as I control the gain with the (active) volume knob on the guitar or with an expression pedal set to volume positioned post stomps. This is also a fine, neutral gain control.

    Now that it is all rocketing up into science fiction. Why not have multiple profiles layered in different dynamic zones similar to multiband compressors in mastering studios. This would also shoot the complexity of it all into the range of mastering equipment. But, hmm, aren't we guitar players and dont't we like it, when it goes to eleven?


    [Blocked Image: http://www.amoeba.com/dynamic-images/blog/Kelly/20111110_nigel_tufnel_49.jpg]



    But to be honest: I like the dynamic range of my amp and I also like the dynamic range of my amp's profile inside the KEMPER. :D

    I've been thinking about setting up and maintaining a real online Wiki with a proper domain name for our beloved KPA and to transfer the content collected by Gianfranco to the online Wiki.
    1. I wouldn't mind at all to put a PayPal donation button on Gianfranco's behalf on every single page of this website
    2. It would enable all KPA users to contribute to this resource whenever they want.
    3. It would probably lower the work load for Gianfranco and it would be an effort under Creative Commons License.
    What do you guys think about that?

    I would support this idea!


    Besides providing information to the users a manual always has also a legal aspect to it. We all had been marvelling about manuals where it says: "Don't wrap the cable around your neck. Don't stick the blender into your butt..." and such. You know what I mean...


    I guess this legal aspect is why the KEMPER company is so reluctant in supporting a WIKI. It is beyond their control but could end up in making them liable for mistakes. Not so if we, the users set up a WIKI!