Posts by Grooguit

Quote from drog

Oh, sorry I missed the part about the Kemper Remote. I use the Voodoo Labs GC and can already do this.
Maybe edit the title to say for the Remote.

Will do. But I think such a feature could benefit you as well. Consider: if you move a few rigs or performances around in the Kpa, you may have to also edit your Ground Control to match. Obviously I don't know your set up. But consider if you program a particular preset on your GC to toggle a couple midi CC, say on off of an eventide H9. If you wanted to use that setting with a particular rig, you have to move both. So if you arrange your Performances on the Kemper, the preset you had that CC message going on your GC would not match up now, unless this is something that you set up globally. But to be honest, I've considered possibly trying to go the third party midi controller route with an external loop switcher, such as the voodoo lab hex

Quote from drog

You can toggle on/off already with CC messages. CC16 all on/off, CC17-24 are the stomps (look in the manual to see which number corresponds to which slot). As far as external effects, just depends on what they will accept.

Im not sure I understand you. What I want to be able to do, is to use one of the effect buttons on the Kemper Remote to toggle external effects, beyond the one effects loop that is. Since there's only one physical loop, the only way to do this is with midi. Specifically, I want to buy a midi loop device, like the boss Es-5 or RJM effects gizmo and have each of my overdrive pedals in its own loop. Then be able to be able to assign a switch on my remote that allows me to select presets on this external device so that I could have the ability to call up different combinations of my overdrive pedals, or none at all, without changing rigs, just like I can do using the internal modeled Overdrive pedals in the Kemper. Likewise, I'd love to be able to toggle my H9 either between its own presets or on and off (since the KPA still doesn't allow spillover when turning the effects loop off.) And to do this without having to change rigs.

Midi Toggle “Effect” There’s been some talk for years now on how to improve midi capabilities, specifically in regards to toggling things without changing rigs. Here’s a simple way to integrate with or without the remote:

Select an effects slot, either A, B, C, D X mod, del, or reverb. With “type” knob select “Midi Toggle” This “effect” gives you controls for the following: a midi channel, an “On” PC # and an “off” PC#. Thus On and off messages will be sent corresponding to the on and off status of the slot. Perhaps you could have option to do something similar with CC messages? Perhaps a second or third set of PC messages as well to control two devices at once? Since this “effect” is just sending a few number commands, it should take virtually no processing power. The best part is that you could then save these just like your presets for all the other effects, which you can now access with the browse knob. And of course, “Off” doesn’t have to correspond with your external device’s actual off status, so you could actually set it up so that you can toggle two different presets on this one device, say a heavy ambient reverb with a more subtle reverb. If two or more sets of messages could be sent on their own channels, you could also effectively toggle between effects from two different devices. Likewise, since it is such a simple non-processing intensive effect, there's no reason why you couldn't have several of these going in different slots, like you now can with the delay effects, so you could toggle different things with different switches.

This benefits both Remote and third party midi controller users. Since these midi messages are saved within rigs, if you do some cleaning up in the Kemper and move some performances and rigs around, your midi controller doesn’t have to be reprogramed much, as all the messages are part of the rigs themselves. (other than making sure your midi controller toggles the correct effects slot on the Kemper of course)

The only downside to this? You essentially lose an effects slot (depending on another feature I suggest below). However, if you are using this feature you are clearly getting at least some of your effects from external devices anyway and therefore you shouldn’t need all 8 effect slots in the rigs you are using these midi toggles anyway. Since it’s not global, but per rig, you of course still have your 8 effect slots on any rig that you don’t want to send these messages. Furthermore, you still possess the ability to send messages in the traditional way only on Rig change, which doesn’t take up an effects slot of course. Plus it doesn’t matter what slot you put the midi effect as the messages themselves aren’t a part of your signal chain.

Further enhancements:

1) Option to send these toggle messages as part of the KPA loop: it would also be possible to give these midi effect toggle controls as an extension of the parameters you can currently control in the effects loop. However a “loop always on” option would be useful in this case. In this scenario, you select the external loop effect to a slot, say X. You select “loop always on” and assign your midi on off messages and channel within this effect. The effect loop now stays on and just the on and off messages are toggled when you activate and deactivate the X slot. This would save a slot for those who are using external effects within the effects loop anyway. However, I could see many reasons why someone would not want the midi messages as part of the loop effect, which is why I think offering both a separate “midi toggle” effect that can be assigned to any slot and the ability to use them as part of the loop effect would be beneficial (for example someone using a midi-controlled multiple loop switcher up front for overdrive pedals, but who also has a pedal in the KPA loop wouldn’t want the midi toggle controls to be a part of the Kemper loop effect parameters)

2) Perhaps allow these messages to morph as well? That is, a heal message and toe message. Obviously this wouldn’t allow you to get a gradual change in the in-between spots when morphing, but for those of us that use morphing only for instantaneous toggling of two sounds within one rig, this would be a welcome feature. (For that matter, why not allow morphing to reverse on off status of the effect slots at the heal and toe extremes? )

3) "Skip first message" To make this “Midi Effect” feature even more useful, an additional choice along with channel, on, and off would be “Skip First Message.” If this option is selected, the first message that would be sent is not sent when the rig is selected. For example, say in a certain rig I send PC#5 as an On message and PC #100 as the off message, on channel 2, which controls my Eventide H9. I save the rig so that the status of this effect is in the “On” status, but I don’t want the On status message sent on rig change because my device was already sent this message. Why would this matter? PC #5 is an ambient delay/reverb that I’m using on this rig and the previous rig in the same song, I don’t want the H9 to get the same message twice. The other rig I’m coming from already told my H9 to turn on preset 5. So if the H9 gets that message again when I go to this rig, the H9 will receive the same message twice and then reset the delay trails. With “Skip first message” selected, the Kemper won’t send PC #5 to my H9 when I first select this rig, even though it’s saved in its On status. Instead it will not send a message until I press the button (or corresponding footswitch ) to turn the effect off, which I set to PC #100. However now if I press the button again to On status, it will now send PC# 5 and then continue to toggle between PC 5 and 100 as normal until I go to another rig. This would also be extremely simple to implement and could be ignored by users if its usefulness isn’t apparent to them.

I love the Kemper, so much that I refuse to replace it with other products that would solve some of it's short comings.

One of the supposed benefits to all-in-one systems is that they are simple. The Kemper is no exception, at least when using the Kemper exclusively. However, on thing that the latest generation of products is coming to terms with is that guitarists want that simplicity, but the ability to bring in other pieces of gear into their set up, and the Kemper is extremely limiting in this regard.
The biggest hurdle to simplicity with the Kemper is two-fold. First, there isn't a floor version. The vast majority of guitar products are pedals, precisely because guitarists need live control of them with their feet. Because the Kemper is either amp-shaped or racked, by its very nature it's natural location is 15 feet away from the rest of a guitarists rig. Therefore, using the features of the Kemper requires the four cable method, plus either a cat 5 for the remote or midi cables for other controllers going to and from the pedalboard to the Kemper.
This gives Kemper users on final option for simplicity. Keeping the entire rig in a rack with only a midi controller or remote at the guitarist's feet. The Kemper, at least in its current firmware also severely complicates this. Since there is only one effects loop, the only way to include a few more pedals is to buy an external looping system with midi control. However, even here, the Kemper is extremely limited, since it can only send PC messages on rig changes. Thus I have an external overdrive pedal that I can turn on or off within a preset. I must either keep the physical pedal at my feet, and therefore lose the ability to at least trigger it to turn on on rig change, or create more carbon copy duplicate rigs just so I can have a pedal on version and a pedal off version. What I wish was that I could automatically trigger loops on (or off) at rig change, but then also have the ability to toggle that without leaving the rig. To have this flexibility would require then either the four-cable method or having some sort of separate midi controller for an external loop switcher at my feet. One could get an dedicated midi controller to control both the Kemper and other effects and loop switcher, but things are getting pretty complicated at this point. First, you still don't have a tuner at your feet, so you need to set up something extra just to have that. Now you're dealing with a larger rack full of gear, not to mention the fact that there aren't really any great rack case options that accommodate pedals and rack gear all that well either, beyond those silly drawers. All this could be solved by what the Helix offers: four external loops with spillover options plus the ability to assign various midi messages to switches that can be toggled on or off without changing presets on the Helix. not to mention the fact that the Helix is available either in a rack or floor configuration. If a KPA 2 could do these things, I'd buy it in a heart beat. For now, I actually have the Kemper head sitting on the back of my pedal board, because there is no logical or cost effective way to use just a few OD pedals and my eventide H9 with my KPA. I'm actually thinking of getting a Boss ES-5 and trying to make room on my board for that, just so I can utilize the OD pedals with less tap dancing.

Is the glxd 16 the stomp box? I have that and discovered it had an issue. When I first got it, I had noticed that when exiting tuner mode it takes about 3 seconds to allow signal to pass again. I just thought it was the design. I had the pedal mounted inside the hole on the back of the KPA, thus never used the footswitch and had flawless operation for a couple years. I hadn't used the thing in a while and decided to sell it. The new user returned it, pointing out that he had another one and there was no 3-second delay and contacted shure for me to discuss the issue.

Yeah, I think a 2-button version would be cool too: as long as it had midi. Just learned about the atomic amplifier. Wish Kemper would do something like that, with or without effects.

Quote from timo

Really? Three Threads?

Yes three threads. I created this thread hours after 4.06 beta was released. (the beta being identical to the official release that came out weeks later) I created it because I got tired of trying to sort out everyone's experiences and which version they were talking about on the 4.0 beta thread and thought it was counter-productive to have folks still commenting on issues they were experiencing with older versions, as the original beta thread was a million pages long by then as well. However, despite a few users commenting on mine right after it was posted, some folks apparently scrolled right past it, and started posting about 4.06 on the tired generic 4.0 beta thread. Then as mine moved down the list in recent activity, some other clever cat made a new 4.06 thread. No my feelings aren't hurt But I didn't needlessly create an identical thread, the chap that created "Is everyone on 4.06 now" did. And for that matter even the official release thread wasn't needed, as all that would have been needed was renaming this one, as 4.06 beta and the official release are identical. But by then, this thread had already been ignored and forgotten, so I didn't bother to change it.

How about just a kemper amp pedal?

Say 9" wide, 5" deep. Has four footswitches so you can have easy access to four profiles. No effects, just the amp stacks and the excellent noise gate. You'd essentially have a four-channel amp, except the flexibility of any four amps and cabinets. Since traditional pedalboard guitarists usually get their gain stages from OD pedals anyway, four instant accessible Amp Blocks would be more than enough. For guitarists that would want all their gain from the Kemper, few guitarists need more than four anyway. Moreover, the four switches could have double functions, when you hold them down, such as hold for tuner, bank up and bank down, giving you access to more amp stacks. Jacks for input, midi in out, send, return, stereo out, monitor out, and headphones. Allows you to directly import Rigs you created on the big Kemper (minus the effects of course)

Many folks that use the Kemper now still use a traditional pedalboard. Then you could simply place this not too big pedal on your board and use it inline with your effects pedals. The way it is now, guitarists that use such a set up need to keep the Kemper behind them perhaps in a rack and run 3 guitar cables, a midi cable, minimum to and from their pedal board, but for what benefit? So they don't have to bend down to adjust? Or try to put all their pedals in a rack with the Kemper and some elaborate and expensive midi system at their feet. In the first case, they still have to bend down to adjust the rest of their pedal board. They also benefit from a significant reduction in set-up time, whether live or just when wanting to practice for a few minutes. For direct-only and FRFR players who don't have a rack of gear but prefer pedals, the only benefit to a backline Kemper is not bending down to adjust- a convenience that requires lugging an extra piece of gear and a longer set up time. No thanks I'd rather bend down and adjust as I'm going to have to do with the rest of my pedals anyway. Yet even this minor inconvenience can be addressed during practice by sitting your pedalboard on a table, I do this all the time.

Plus they'd corner the market. There are few pedals that do amp + cab modeling. The few that do don't have a lot of flexibility, nor have they reached the higher end quality of say Kemper, then aXFX or even Helix.. The only current way to get high-end at your feet is to use one of the all-in-ones like the Helix. But traditional guitarists still prefer to have lot of pedals. At least the Helix gives you four loops, which is still not enough for guitarists that have 8 pedals and want amp to add amp modeling to their pedalboard, besides you'd have a pedal board the size of a surfboard. Currently the only small high end device I know of is the Torpedo cab pedal, which doesnt even give you preamps! You could pair it with one of their Preamp pedals, the LE series, but the torp cab is 7x5 and the LE's are 5X7. That's a lot of pedalboard space, especially since their dimensions don't line up well unless you turn one sideways, and that's 14" x 10" even if you do!

I'm using MBritt Guyton profiles. Sound great with all my guitars. I stack a JHS morning glory and a MXR Lil' Torino into it. Honestly though, I could get all the sounds I need with just a few Guytron profiles, aside from the built in OD's. I mostly use the external stomps because it give me that 'hands-on' ability to tweak on the fly, since those pedals will be used in most or all of the rigs I use live. (as opposed to going into a dozen Rigs and making the same edits over and over again and saving each one.)

I think they at least glance at the requests, though I doubt they read through all the comments though, unless they are intrigued by the initial feature request.

A good work around for what you are trying to do is if there is a block you can spare, say D, use that as an Eq block. Then dial in to match the guitar you want and lock that slot. I'd say the X slot would render the EQ more powerful, as before the amp it tends to shape how it will distort in the amp block, whereas after it will shape the distorted sound.

Even something as simple as using morhping to decrease or increase the delay mix with an instant morph is advantageous to switching rigs. In almost every situation it's better to have fewer rigs.

Most professional guitarists settle in on a few gain stages at least in a live environment, often achieved by a few stomp boxes. When they invariably want to tweak their tone a bit, they bend down and adjust. No matter how elaborate their switching system and the rest of their pedal board/ rack is, tweaking their core tones that will be used on various presets will always be as easy as adjusting their OD pedals and amps.

However, for those of us with digital all-in-one devices, we are stuck in "preset land" for our core tone. If we need several dozen rigs for a live set to cover all of our combinations of effects, we have our work cut out for us when we want to tweak our core tone as we probably have the same 3 or 4 core tones copied into all the various rigs we need to cover our effect needs. (for those of us using internal effects)

And for this, morphing can significantly save on the number of rigs we need, and therefore the time needed to tweak our core tone.

looks really. Cool. I've been saying. All they really need to design is an exterior as all the software (okay beta 4.06) has been worked out. You're essentially just attaching the knobs, buttons, and jacks from the KPA and Remote in one floor shaped box.

What also would be cool is just a KPA small pedal. Like the size of one of the big strymons. It wouldn't do effects, other than the built in noise gate. Then you could use it on a traditional pedal board with all you other pedals. A lot of guitarists want all the benefits of an FRFR system, but don't want to give up the tactile feel of what you see is what you get pedals. The three switches could dial up three profiles. Hold the left one down and go to tuner making the middle and right become bank buttons. Give it midi control for the guitarist with big pedal boards and those new fangled loop switchers like the RJM Mastermind PBC and the new boss ES-8.

First thing I noticed is there seems to be less lag on the remote screen when hitting changes compared to the 4.5 which some of us were complaining about. Plus when going to rename a slot, the character movement kept up with the knob. At least as far as my memory serves, it seems as fast as when I was using 3.3. It also seemed to boot up faster.

I figured, it made sense to start a new thread specifically for 4.06, as the generic 4.0 is like 50 pages long now and is tough to sort out what versions folks are talking about anymore. We can use this one to discuss experiences specifically related to 4.06.

I use MBritt Guyatone profiles and The Amp Factory PhilX evil robot. Actually one set of the other depending on my mood. Mostly the Guyatones now. (Should I really be using an amp named "Evil" in church!)

The Kemper effects are similar in quality to TC G-system, which is what I owned prior to the Kemper. They are also similar to the extent that they are more traditional effects, as opposed to the wild stuff by Eventide and Strymon. If you like the TC stuff, you should like the Kemper effects. This is why I own an H9 max. It can do all of the wild stuff in a small single pedal, but I can rely on the Kemper for all the basic stuff, as they are musical.

That being said, part of the value of external effects is that they can be set independently of rigs. In other words, if I tweak a preset on my H9, all of my rigs that access that preset via midi don't need to be adjusted. Whereas if you use a Kemper delay or other effect and have a particular delay setting you use across multiple rigs in various slots and performance banks, to tweak it, you have to go to each and every rig you use it and save over it. (This is why I feature requested aliasing-being able to adjust an amp block or effect block that's the mother preset and have all the aliases adjusted with it in the various rigs that use them. )

Quote from domsch1988

Not really. The point of Beta's is "We have something ready we think is great. Test it and tell us what you think". Sometimes bugs like the ui latency aren't easily fixed and it hasn't been out that long. I personally think they should add some kind of "kown problems" part to the download page. Apart from that the lag is annoying but not funtionally breaking the KPA. Maybe they aren't sure what the problem is, so 4.0.4 and 4.0.5 where attempts to fix the behavior, which didn't work out. Such a complex Software isn't allways easy to troubleshoot or fix.
Apart from that (coming from a android developer background) if some ui hiccup is bothering you, you are maybe not the target audience for Beta Software. I'm not trying to offend anyone, but if you expect everything to work as good as the last stable, the beta version is not for you

I don't expect everything to work as good as the last stable; what didn't work for me in the beta was the reason I went back. It's just my opinion that they'd get more productive feedback from users if there weren't so many versions floating around. I had an entire performance ruined because of no sound coming out because of a glitch in 3.something. A glitch that was intermittent, yet part of a release version, not even a beta! Each time one thing is changed, there's no telling if there will be new unintended consequences. 4.03 was stable as far as working without any sound glitches that would ruin a performance, at least in my trials. But who knows if that will be the case if I try 4.04, 4.05, 4.06 and so on? Each time something is changed, there's always the chance that a new problem will emerge. Therefore, it's to everyone's advantage to have as few versions to put through the paces as possible. Thus my point, why release a beta that has known issues, at least without a disclaimer of what the known issues not addressed are? Such as "this beta addresses these problems, but still has these known issues." Plus with so many imperfect versions and various feedback on these forums of issues, it's hard to sort out which version people are complaining about. This then results in fewer people (such as myself) willing and able to try out betas and therefore fewer users to discover any new bugs, in particular ones that are more intermittent and easily missed like the one I experienced in 3.whatever it was.

I went back to 3.3. I was using 4.03 but the visual lag was slightly annoying. Trying to name something was absolutely maddening, as trying to get the letter you wanted to pop up. If you wait more than a second to give the visual lag time to catch up it auto places the character before you have time to turn the knob. Since this apparently isn't addressed in 4.04 or 4.05, no point in trying them out.

I'm not quite sure what is going on with these updates. Why bother releasing even a beta if there are still plenty of issues that you know need fixed? I though the whole point of betas was "this thing is probably ready to go, but try it out and let us know if we missed a glitch here and there." Why not just release a new beta once you've fixed the known issues first and then get feedback?

I didn't know you could profile a patch cable, but if so that sounds like a work-around to access the amp controls. However, I wouldn't expect any magic from a profiled acoustic amp.
After, let's consider what acoustic amps are for. In general, pickups for acoustic guitars were designed to sound as much like a real acoustic as possible, so a guitarist can have the sound of being mic'd up while being able to walk around like an electric guitarist does. However, even with this, acoustic players were still at the mercy of the sound man to give them enough volume in floor wedges. Acoustic amps that they could control gave them the stage volume they wanted, just like an electric guitarist has. Furthermore, it gave them the portable amplification that an electric guitarist has when there's only a weak PA system for vocals. Finally, it has a few things built in that are useful to acoustic players, in particular EQ controls helpful for the range of a guitar. In other words, they were designed to be glorified active monitors with the power and range needed to amplify an acoustic guitar. But the Kemper already has EQ's and effects voiced for the guitar, albeit with electric guitars mostly in mind. However, since nothing is entirely flat, it's possible that a particular profile would be flattering to the acoustic guitar you plug into it, in which case you'd benefit from having the profile vs. profiling a patch cable. I've personally had fine results just turning the amp block off.

That's great news, CitizenGain!!

I had no idea they were planning on rolling out such a feature. I thinktheir calling it an alias is a good way to describe it. I had personally requested this type of feature 3 years ago, but couldn't find where I wrote it. If they implement this feature right, I think it could be a ground breaking feature and I don't know of anyone else in the modeling/digital market that's rolled out such a thing. But in my opinion there's three things that have traditionally kept many guitarists away from the digital all-in-one systems.

1) tone and feel (Kemper solved this completely with profiling, others have improved drastically Line 6 and axe)
2) Breaking free from the global/preset paradigm, emulating the hybrid systems of traditional pedal boards and amps whose knobs are fixed and controlled with switching systems with audio loops and midi messages.
3) No desire to change