Posts by Gary_W

    I certainly wouldn't sell my Kemper due to lack of an editor - it's too good at what it does and I love it. But, like most, I cannot understand why it isn't here a looooong time ago. It means that I only use a handful of the profiles I have because managing the amount it's capable of is too much like hard work. So I don't bother. It's a shame to have something this good and not use the full potential because of (what would appear to be) a simple thing.


    The trouble is that I can't imagine the Kemper being the first digital device we've all had - if you've played guitar long enough to justify the outlay on a Kemper, you'll already have tried to 'go digital' before and will probably have stumbled through Boss, Line 6, Tonelab, Guitar Rig, Amplitube etc.


    For this reason, many members here will be several generations of modelling in..... and they'll be assuming that an editor is a very basic thing because all of the companies who make (tonally) inferior products were doing it many years ago. And the Kemper doesn't.


    So for me, the Kemper feels like a vast leap forward in terms of the sounds. It does good things with its front panel (a knob for everything so you don't have to menu-hop). But I can't get why the editor isn't here in terms of it being a 'basic' for other companies. It's like in this parallel universe, the jet plane has been invented before the wheel. Which isn't usually a problem but makes landing awkward ;)


    Now that would be quite helpful: A VST/AAX plugin that shuttles profiles from the librarian/editor to the Kemper. That would be similar to the Universal Audio Apollo Console Plugin that loads all the plugins and routing options from the DAW into the Apollo. All the setting are saved on a project-by-project basis. The sky is the limit with the Kemper. Who knows... maybe the foot pedal will integrate with the DAW, too.


    For me too this would be awesome.

    I have a kit-build boutique style wah. Sounds great with the Kemper..... Basically, if your wah sounds good with your amp, it'll sound good with the Kemper.


    As far as tone suck goes, the wah just needs converting to true bypass and you'll be fine.... 10 mins with a decent switch and a soldering iron and you're good.


    Basically, if you've got a *really* traditional wah, the circuit is 'seen' by your guitar pickups even when it's off..... that's why you get tone suck.


    With true bypass pedals, you can still get tone suck (potentially) because of all the cables, switching etc.... Basically, it's the capacitance of 'everything' up until the guitar hits the first buffered pedal OR hits the high impedance amp (or Kemper in this case). So if you have a whole load of true bypass pedals connected with poor quality patch cables you will still get a fair bit of treble loss vs plugging straight in. But a true bypass wah connected with decent cables won't be noticable IMO.

    I've ordered a few times from him and it's been instant. As stated above, he's a good guy.


    Both him and Armin are 'one man bands' though (I believe) so if there is a website issue and they are away on holiday or whatever then I guess this kind of thing can happen.


    Try a PM to him on the board here maybe? Frustrating I know but I'm sure it'll come right in the end.

    Hi Ingolf,


    I just listened to this and I think it's excellent - a really nicely put together song. I very much like the backing vocal harmony and little hooks and the way it all works. I can see the Crowded House comparisons others have made and they are well deserved. Sounds like you had fun with this one. Well done :)


    Gary

    Paired with the right guitar, the TAF Fender Toolkit will cover a fair bit of the ground you are asking for.


    Also at TAF in Pack 2 he does a Hiwatt for The Who stuff.


    And as far as jangle goes, back off the gain on the free Morgan AC20 preset - that one is good for a lot of things. Even if it's not exactly what you're after, it's a keeper :)

    There are some great factory profiles. There are some great free profiles.


    But however true this might be I recon I spend 95% of my Kemper hours playing 'something' from the Amp Factory.


    The noise level tends to be better than the bulk of the factory / freebies out there and the 'wow to meh' ratio is exceptional. I love them.

    Hi Andrew,


    I've been through similar..... Our kitchen dimmers are quite a way from my studio but still put some hum on the Kemper. The big offender in my case was actually energy saving light bulbs in our hallway. Not dimmed, but just horrific. They were far worse than the dimmer in my case but in general I absolutely feel you pain. Any noise bar what I'm making drives me nuts!!!!


    At the moment, it's a case of replacing the energy saving ones in the hall and lights off in the kitchen' when I'm recording. The dimmer switches are decent quality so, other than replacing the switches, that's my cure.


    As for shielding the switch - I'm not convinced. These are in metal, earthed wall boxes so all of the bit you could possibly screen are already done in my case. I think these things put noise out into the actual wiring.


    My long-term solution for out kitchen is replacing all the lights (12v halogens but there are 230w worth in there!!) with LED and getting rid of the dimmers. That'll sort it but I need floorboards up etc. Not for the lighthearted!


    Anyway, here's an article I found very useful. Good luck in your quest for silence :)


    http://www.recordingmag.com/re…s/resourceDetail/185.html

    Shame that Marshall doesn't spend more time on developing new amps that people want to buy as opposed to giving their money to lawyers who chase people for using their name....

    I gladly took part in the survey. I did claim my voucher and was very happy to get the Friedman Brown Eye. Which is great - thank you Andy :)


    It stinks that people would go to the effort of setting up multiple accounts for the sake of a fiver when they've spent 260 times that on the Kemper and lord knows what on monitor speakers / guitars etc. People are strange.

    Yup.


    I would class myself as a 'lower gain' player for 90% of the time. But I'm a lower gain player who adores a decent fuzz pedal.


    Cranked, this one goes in vintage fuzz direction. Without a vintage fuzz. It's great fun and I love it also :)

    Wood does matter IMO to guitar tone; it is a subtle ingredient in amongst a whole bunch of other subtle ingredients that , together, make a guitar worth playing.


    This does not mean I can listen to a particular guitar and say 'oooooh, that's ash from a tree called Cletus in a swamp'. I can't, maybe someone can but that someone isn't me :). What I CAN hear is body resonance unplugged and this can have some really wonderful overtones or can be pretty flat. It's why any new guitar I play gets played unplugged first - I want to hear all the interesting harmonics that are there. If they're not there, you can swap pickups and amps till the cows come home - you won't get them.


    If they're there, the guitar then needs pickups capable of passing these along. Lower output tend to be better at this. And wax potting reduces the amount of 'wood' that goes into the signal chain but of course has it's own advantages so most guitars have potted pickups.


    Once it gets to the amp, then the vital job of passing these harmonics along is given to the electronics. Some amps concentrate less on the 'harmonically interesting' bits that help you to hear wood. And then, as others have said, gain / distortion starts to mask them.


    Putting on loads of gain at this stage is akin to putting vindaloo sauce on a lobster. Eventually, you're having vindaloo sauce with something you can no longer tell what it it.


    For me, a low to just breaking profile on the Kemper passes along all the information. The body resonances come through and that is 'wood'. A strat at high gain sounds different to a LP but if you've got an ash strat with an ash board vs a basswood strat with identical pickups you'll still hear a difference (maybe???) but be hard pushed to say what it is :)

    The 'hardest' I can get it (ooer missus) is to put the depth at 10, crossover at minimum and then put the stereo at 0%. Rate as required by the song. But, it's still pretty polite compared with some out there.


    Doing this, it's still not a square wave thing and it does not kill the output dead.... it's then more like and opto trem.... If you set the rate at minimum and hit a note, you'll see that it ALMOST kills it in the troughs but not completely and it's going there and back pretty softly. I like it, but it's more 60's spy movie rather than an extreme jitter.

    Plugging a Tele into this after a long day makes me smile.


    Tonight it's Andy's Supro profiles (love those). Tomorrow it'll be something else.


    That's all I wanted to say :)


    :love:

    I've just read through it.


    Kemper as a company comes off very well in that thread; unfortunately, not everyone is going to read 6 pages to get to the heart of the matter.


    In summary:-


    1. Guy uses 'Kemper Big Disappointment' as a thread title which is obviously going to get a lot of clicks.
    2. Actual problem is a system fault. And it has possibly been bought from an unauthorised dealer.
    3. Turns out replacement unit has been shipped to the guy's unauthorised dealer ages ago and he hasn't called them / Kemper to say 'where is my unit'? CK points this out politely for all to see and looks rather good.
    4. Guy disappears off the face of the earth whilst others suggest that the title of the thread is misleading / moderators say 'if you don't like the fact that people can post misleading threads then we don't need your sort around here'
    5. South Africans get banned from thread. Unsure exactly what was said but he may have suggested that the mods would have changed the thread title in a heartbeat if the whole thing had been a problem about A.N. Other brand of guitar gizmo. Perhaps the title the mods would choose in that case would have been 'Axe Support is Wonderfull - come and look here to see why' if the whole thing had been about 'the other premium guitar box' :thumbup:


    But now we will never know.


    The Internet is a powerful tool and all manufacturers and dealers live under the constant threat of a customer throwing mud on-line. It can cost you an awful lot of money. It's bad news if you let someone down and they tell the entire world - in this case, it appears that the support was great but the guy still told the world that it wasn't. He either needs to come back on line and say 'sorry' or he needs to come back on-line and say 'Actually, I'm still not happy because.......'.


    Hi Don,


    Thanks for your reply :)


    I agree, it is indeed very cool that you can do these things with the Kemper. I've got loads of home-made pedals on my board which, in the month since I've had the Kemper, I haven't really played with! I'm still at the 'turn the browse knob and grin' stage so haven't played much with what is down there. Now CK has confirmed my thoughts on the 'bad ones vs good ones' to play with on the fuzz side, I'll experiment. I've got 4 home made fuzz pedals here and they are all 'bad ones'. One is a Fuzz Factory, one is a D*A*M Meathead, one is a Sunlion and the last is a good old fashioned fuzz face. None of them like being after a buffer. I've got other home made stuff on there that will be just fine (Catalinbread pedals, a Klon, a King of Tone, a Zendrive). But TBH the reason I built all of those was to try and make my actual amp sound like something else. In other words variety. That is something I no longer lack since I entered Kemper land!


    I have a Muff ready to build and that is based on the Skreddy version. I recon that would work a treat so may be worth playing with but time is not my friend these days so 'when?' - not sure.

    Your acid test is correct.
    It can be even easier, as the Profiler does a buffer amp.


    Play your guitar first though the Profiler and secondly directly connected to the fuzz.
    If the difference is there, it cannot be profiled.


    If I had a brain I'd have thought of that :whistling: Thank you for the clarification that the overall reasoning on my post is sound to discover 'which fuzz is likely to profile well and which will not' even though my method was a little over-complex :)

    actually, to my knowledge and experience the Fuzz Face is quite unique in this respect (turn down volume just a little and the fuzz is almost competely gone). I have plenty of fuzzes that do not react like that.


    The Fuzz Factory is also known to be very picky about the input, so I wouldn't generalize the here mentioned difficulties with profiling a Fuzz Factory to be the case with all fuzzes. In fact we already have great profiles from the Musket Fuzz and the Pharaoh pedal and more in the rig exchange.


    ;)


    Hi Don,


    You're right that lots of fuzzes don't behave like this, but the Fuzz Face is a long way from being unique. There are lots of very pricey Fuzz pedals out there now which are just tweaked values and mojo germanium transistors in a good old fashioned Fuzz Face circuit. Look at the Analogman fuzz cataloge, the D*A*M catalogue etc. The Tonebender is another classic circuit that loads of makers use to make boutique fuzz. I recon with current fashion about half of what is out there will give you hassle. If it's based on a Muff then it'll be just fine. Based on the above (or several others) then it may give trouble IMO.


    The reason for this is that the input impedance is low and causes you to lose high end frequencies. With this in mind, the rest of the fuzz circuit tends to be built pretty bright (little extra filtering). So when you plug in a guitar straight into a fuzz, the impedance darkens the sound, the rest of the circuit does everything it can to not roll off any more highs. If you have a buffer in there, the high end roll off caused by the input impedance of the fuzz is gone. All the high end gets preserved and the filtering that IS present in the fuzz does nothing to counter this hence it sounding shrill and harsh rather than warm and fuzzy.


    The Fuzz Factory is (once again) based on a vintage design and has low input impedance. The thing that makes it funky and fun is that it has extra controls in there to alter the stability of the circuit. IMO, half the fun of the fuzz face is being able to tweak the knobs whilst you're holding a note to make it do squeaky weird motor boat farty noises on steroids. As a plain fuzz, I much prefer something simpler as the fuzz factory is a picky thing..... It has so many ways to create noise that, if you find a combo of the 5 knobs that sound musical, you need to take a picture so you can get there again - they are crazy-interactive. Please note that I'm basing this opinion on a home made version (the circuit is all over the web) as I'm too tight to buy a real one when I can have fun building one for 1/10th of the price :)


    Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying 'you cannot get good results profiling a fuzz'. As you rightly say, there are some in the exchange that are very nice already so it's worth a crack for anyone out there. But....... it's likely to sound mighty bright if you choose the 'wrong' fuzz and if you do get a sound you like then the whole profile won't react like the original signal chain as far as the picking dynamics / guitar volume rolloff because vintage fuzz does the volume cleanup in an unusual (and addictive) way.


    I would suggest the following acid test to answer the question 'will MY fuzz profile well'.


    Get a pedal with a buffer in it. Boss tuner will do, thousands of others. Anything that does not colour the sound in your opinion when the pedal is in the chain but bypassed.


    Connect guitar > Fuzz > Kemper. Play a profile you like and record a clip. Then connect


    Guitar > buffered pedal on bypass > Fuzz > Kemper. Play the same profile and record a clip.


    If you can't tell the difference, your fuzz pedal has a high input impedance and you can hope for good profiling results.


    If the one with the buffer in the chain sounds like nails down a blackboard, expect your profile to sound like nails down a blackboard too as the profiling process 'adds a buffer'. The good news is the Kemper has far more EQ options than a standard rig so you may still get a result that, whilst not like the original in terms of behaviour, still makes you smile. And that is what it's all about IMO :)


    FWIW, I love my home-made Sunlion pedal in front of the Kemper. With a vintage battery (I did enjoy that recent thread :D )


    So that's a total of 4 cents today so I suppose that'll do :)

    For me, part of the joy of a vintage fuzz is the way it interacts with different guitar pickups and the volume pot. If you have any vintage style fuzz (such as those based on a Fuzz Face circuit) then the whole design of the thing is flawed but in a wonderful way..... It makes a circuit with your pickups. A guitar amp or more modern pedal does not do this.


    For this reason, I think a profile of the amp with no fuzz and then use the fuzz in front of the Kemper. I know this isn't what everyone wants to hear but ultimately the Kemper has a high input impedance and so will not act like a fuzz pedal in terms of your guitar volume.


    Just my 2 cents. Or pennies actually as I'm British ;)

    I'd like more delays, more trem flavours and spring reverb. And I'd like the ability to put them pre or post amp.


    I have a Strymon Timeline, a Flint and a Mobius so that's my basis for comparison.


    The Timeline spoils me with delays in terms of 'idiots guide'. Tell it you want a tape delay, a bucket brigade or a digital and it does it. Yes, you can tweak till the cows come home but it already gets you in the ballpark. Tweaking Kemper parameters gets you some nice delays but being able to just dial a tape delay etc would fit in with its wonderful ability to mimic actual amps.


    The Mobius? I love it but TBH I've not got it connected at present. I like the phaser / flanger / rotary / chorus in the Kemper enough to not miss it. I prefer the harmonic trem in the Mobius to the Kemper offering and pattern trem is fun. The filters are great in the Mobius but I use them rarely so far and haven't really scratched the surface of those in the Kemper. The vinyl scratching thing is cool to use once but soon gets cheesy. IMO of course and YMMV etc.


    The Flint has the spring reverb. As to it's 80s and plate, I like the Kemper reverbs more.


    If the requests get added it would be difficult to justify keeping the Strymon gear. It's great but for my needs the Kemper is 'almost there' with these. The quality is great, just needs a bit more quantity to keep up with all its other brilliant talents.