Posts by Will_Chen

No Kemper stuff on it yet, but some demos of other stuff. http://www.youtube.com/user/FrugalGuitarist

Quote from diego

Have now the Whammy DT. It is a nice pedal, however, tuning down for half or two steps playing clean it cannot handle an usual chord arpeggio. Nevertheless it acts better than the KPA effect. For heavy sounds the drop tuning with the whammy it is really ok. The Variax Tyler guitars are obviously the best solution to tune lower. I am sure in some years this type of gear will work perfectly. Just a matter of processor power.

Somebody here said that Kemper should develop a profiling guitar. I think this is probably a very good idea!!

Cheers and rock on

Sacapuntas

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Really? That's pretty surprising as the Whammy V does very well when picking through chords. Here's a little comparison I did with the initial KPA pitch release versus Whammy V and the while not perfect, considering what we're trying to do, the polyphonic pitch tracking the Whammy V performed tremendously well and was very stable.

https://soundcloud.com/willchen28/kpa-vs-whammy

Thanks Bill! Are the Holdsworth and Cathedral rigs different from profiles now included in the KPA?

EDIT: Nevermind, I see the link leads to the KPA download. If yo're on 2.1 and have restored factory rigs, you already have these. Good stuff!

Quote from Guitartone

The only difficult thing is choosing what stomps you want switch 6/7/8/9 to control, assuming 10 is your Tap/Tempo.

It would have been nice to be able to assign 1/2/3/4/5 to do whatever you want instead of only the option of scrolling through 5 'Rigs'.
I find most gigging players don't need 5 rigs per song, in fact most only need 5 rigs or less for the entire gig.

I think I've mentioned this before, but you can have any pedal send any command. Even in stomp mode, the pedal set normally for PC changes can instead be set to only send CC changes. In fact, you could set up the the FCB1010 for 10 stomp mode. It's just the synching of LEDs which would be off...

To the OP. Perhaps one might present the question to you, what can be better than the real thing? The Kemper finally offers what I feel is an equivalent tonal response but in a convenient light weight package and is absolutely consistent at any volume.

Seems I remember there being a limit to prevent clipping on the output. But I could be mistaken,

Quote from ckemper

Why do you use 48 kHz at all?

I was wondering the same. I can only guess that either they do a lot of video production or they use a DAW which was initially rooted in video production. Seems to me that recording at 48 and then down-sampling would result in a worse end product than staying in 44.1 the whole time.

I would go analog. If you down sample to 44.1, there is absolutely no benefit to trying to upsample back to 48. In fact, given the vast majority of music consumption is MP3, or "CD" quality 44.1, unsure of what the benefit is of tracking at 48.

Quote from Sportsfreund

Good point, let me add to that, that I will never again pay for the one week+ long vacations of a company owner!

If either of you buy any products at all from almost any manufacturer on Earth you are absolutely paying for marketing and vacations for every employee of that company and there's zero you can do about it. Anyone who owns a private company can shut operations down any time they want for as long as they want. You are paying for a product. Period. Either it meets your needs at an acceptable price point or not. As a consumer, you have absolutely zero insight into what employee's of most company's make nor how they treat profit nor any right to dictate how the owner of a company lives their lives.

Dang it! got sucked back in...

Quote from rmesic

<snip>

Ducking delay, ducking reverb, Slow-Gear (attack delay), Static phase shift / static flange (sweep rate = 0), simulated Varitone / ToneStyler simple filters, build library of named EQ profiles

+ on the reverse reverb and reverse delays. Would like a reverse playback effect... if we keep this up I won't need any other gear at all...

Ducking delay and reverb are already in the box.

A watt is a watt. It is a measurement of power, not volume. The amplifier industry is horribly inconsistent with how amps are rated. That said, the rating is supposed to be an indication of the amp (tube or solid state) operating without any clipping, in other words clean. For example, a 50 watt solid state versus tube amp should (if rated using the same methods and feeding the same speaker in the same cabinet) deliver the same decibel output while both are running clean. The misunderstanding of most guitarists is that maximum clean volume on the tube amp is probably with the volume at 4 or under and close to 8 on the ss amp. Now the tube amp will likely get much louder than the solid state amp with both amps set to 8 but now we're comparing apples and oranges as the tube amp is operating in excess of its wattage rating while the ss amp is designed not to exceed it.

Yes try the Whammy V or DT. Previous versions are not polyphonic. At 1:12 you can get an idea of the results you'll get from the Whammy V. Not perfect, but better than what you'll get out of the KPA. You'll need the DT if your trying to drop a half step. The Whammy V's smallest interval is a whole step down (down 2nd).

Quote from DonPetersen

I know I should have added 'reasonable'

It's a good idea, but would require the same amount of processing power as running two amp profiles at the same time.

Huh? Why? Dirt boxes exist in the KPA right now. I presume they are programmed using a complex set of parameters which define the gain, pre/post EQ, tone stack freq, etc. Could not those parameters be automated through a profiling type of process? I guess what you are implying is the results would not be as close to the original as is the case with the amp profiles due to the way the code is written? Oh well. I presume we have a pretty definitive answer on whether or not we will ever be able to profile dirtboxes to rub with amp profiles. Not until the Kemper II

Quote from K3MP3R

I'm not sure if we are still talking about behrninger or just ranting on Chinese labour, but behringer actually set up their own manufacturing plants called music corp that have pretty good working conditions.

We've done to our products what we've done to our food. People subsidize processed and sugary sweet food by buying it cus its quick and tastes good. Now it is expensive and hard to get healthy food at price levels of garbage food.

Same with products. If everyone buys products with farmed out labor, other companies may have to farm out their labor to be able to compete.

The only way to stop the trend is if enough people vote with their wallets and then the people who make garbage food and farm out labor will start making the products people support.

Sounds easy, but a lot of people don't buy on ethics, they buy on frugal budgets and impulses for attractive and trendy products and not the stories behind their manufacturing.

Quality can be subjective because some people just want a product that works for the cheapest price possible. Other people are all about brand loyalty while a lot are just thinking about best bang for Buck.

There are a lot of products I would not skimp on just knowing how they are made and what makes then worth while for quality and durability. At the same time I have a couple Chinese and Korean guitars I would not trade for any expensive brand name guitar I've tried. Sometimes you just find gems or a good company. Anyone can make a good product if they wanted and any reputable company can make a shitty one. Its not even reasonable to label or group people or a product into some category based on random crap we hear or read on the internet.

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Last post in this thread, don't want to go too far down the political path...

People have voted with their wallets and price is factor for which the majority feel is the highest priority. This is partly due to the super-consumer nature of the western world ("I gotta have more stuff!") but also the amount of discretionary spending one can afford ("I'd love that Gibson Les Paul, but I've got a family of 4 to feed on a single income"). The cheap Chinese labor market is tapped out. Soon, the cheap labor will move to Africa the biggest untapped labor market left in the world. But, before then we may simply see a rise of alternate"just in time" business models using highly automated machines like 3D printers and/or Fab Labs which will not only in-source "manufacturing" but bring it to a degree of locality not known since prior to the industrial revolution. No shipping, no inventory. Place an order with the "general store" and they fulfill it on the spot. Every retail store becomes it's own factory. But I'm drifting way, way off topic...

Quote from nightlight

The scary thing about "Communist" China is that there's a creamy layer of society that's making a margin on companies' "labour savings".

You read stories about some General's son crashing an expensive sports car and dying completely nude inside with some girls next to him, or some other General's kid that's accused of gangrape of some waitress and you got to wonder what those "upstanding" politburo members taught their children. And where they're getting their funding from.

And if you read about how Foxconn and companies like it charge rent from their labourers for staying in company-owned hostels, while also setting up canteens and monopolising other services in that area, and you realise that those people cobbling together $600 phones are not making enough to send to their parents in rural China. But they need the job because they're either forced into it, or they have to feed themselves.

I'm not too sure about Behringer's practices, but as far as I know, price point is no way to determine labour practices at a factory. People traditionally used China to manufacture cheap goods that could flood the market. The dynamics have now changed, because the Chinese rulers have realised that ISO certification is not that big a deal and their cut gets bigger.

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People often like to focus on the people in the worst conditions in China to characterize the state of everyone in China, and that's absolutely not the case. Are there exploited workers in China? Absolutely. Are there exploited workers in every country in the world? Absolutely. I think every country in the world has gone though the growing pains of unregulated industry and worker rights (in America, the Industrial Revolution). According to recent articles, approximately 300 million Chinese are considered "middle class" (about 25% of total pop, 50% of urban populations). China is the largest consumer market of flat screen TVs and laptop computers in the world and second in digital cameras behind America. Of course, one could argue due to having more people of course they would be purchasing more. But the point is that there is a market with people who have the money to spend on discretionary items such as these. I'm not Chinese (my blood line technically flows to the indigenous people of Taiwan though my father, and to Germany and England from my mother), but it's very obvious that in America (and likely in much of Europe) China is characterized as an enemy for convenience to simplify the the real issues with globalization and building consumer based economies.

Quote from DonPetersen

plug a stompbox in a speakersim and profile that.
chances are, you'll get very good results already.
(unless there are multiple distorting gain stages in series as CK mentioned)

so what you're asking for is already there, but you'll need two profilers.

Not exactly what we're asking for...

Wow funny thread.

#1 - Companies are free to charge whatever they want. It's on the consumer to decide whether or not the price is acceptable. Many factors go into the decision whether a price is fair, and it is a personal decision. The idea that someone is ripping people off because they take a vacation is absolutely ludicrous.

#2 - Characterizations of an entire country of people are ridiculous. Do people really believe China as a whole all share the same value system and beliefs? If you really want to look at the "Chinese problem" from the global scale, they represent the end game of an absolute free market system in what little regulation there is is largely ignored. The catch is the factories are extremely competitive for foreign contracts so quality is relatively high. However, they are limited by the cost per unit set by the foreign companies. When your cheap electronics break don't blame "China", blame the company who designed and speced the unit to hit a low price point. Blame yourself for placing the absolute highest priority on price rather than quality.

To all who think it impossible to profile a dirtbox. Before you played a Kemper, did you think it was possible to accurately profile a tube amp? Personally, when I want a higher gain tone I simply select a higher gain profile. But it really shouldn't be too difficult to implement a profiling feature for dirtboxes IF the code behind the dirtboxes is as thought out as the code behind the amp profiles. What we're really talking about here is setting behind the scenes parameters to mimic the analyzed response of a signal sent to a dirtbox. Given that that process is already implemented in the KPA for amps, if things were written in a modular nature it makes sense that it could be ported to the dirtbox section as well. Now, of course the team has their priorities and likely many ideas already in the pipeline. I hate to say it, but a feature like this might make more sense to either save for a future model with more power or release it in a pedal format featuring just dirtbox modeling...

Quote from Desiato

You just described a lot of labor - casting, soldering, and wiring. It might not seem like much taken individually, but they add up faster than you might realize.

Labor costs are ALWAYS a significant factor in total manufacturing costs.

I'm suggesting they probably have a highly automated and efficient manufacturing process. Casting and wave soldering is automated these days. And with the wiring on a harness with connectors, it's pop and go. I'm sure I'm minimizing a bit, but there's not a whole lot inside the FCB1010. It's really not a complex piece of gear compared to a mixer with a ton of moving parts.

Here's a look at some of the automation at the Behringer Factory, Looks like most the labor involved with the printed boards is QA.

To be honest, labor really isn't even a factor. The body is cast, the board is likely wave soldered, and all connectors are on jacks and harnesses. I bet the final assembly on these only takes a few minutes.