This is the Kemper's frequency response with absolutely nothing turned on:
[Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7231524/Reference.png]
There's a ~6db roll-off below 50Hz or so, but anything more than that is coming from the Amp or Cab section.
"How hard the compressor is compressing"
- There's always a delay in the signal path, that's unavoidable. As hjscheffler said, Constant Latency will at least give you a *consistent* delay, so you can reamp the same track a hundred times and they should all line up. Without it, the KPA's internal latency changes from patch to patch depending on how much processing is going on, etc.
- If you recorded an amped track at the same time as the DI, and then you use the DI to get a reamp with another rig, there's going to be a time difference between the original amp and the new one. You can either manually correct the reamp, or reamp both the original tone and the new one so they match.
- It might go without saying, but SPDIF reamping will give you less overall latency than analog.
I'm not sure, but wouldn't cranking up the Power Sag and Tube Bias knobs be similar, in theory? As the amp loses voltage, I assume your headroom would go down and it would struggle more on transients.
I think your pedal might need calibrating. With the pedal at zero, I get correct pitch.
I think maybe the KPA's being inconsistent then. Using Wah effects with "Bypass@Heel" works fine, and it turns on the tuner just fine at 0.
Edit: Alright, it was the pedal apparently. I had tried restarting and recalibrating earlier, still had the issue, but now - several hours later - it's gone. Oh well.
try lowering the Definition parameter and maybe use a Green Scream or One DS with Tone at noon or lower. Lower Presence.
This is a big one. Sometimes I'll take a rig that started with Def around 9 and end up with it down at like 3, with the Green Scream or Treble Boost in front to clean things up. Also potentially helpful, I like to use the amp's Direct Mix parameter very gently, say 0.5 to 1. It helps retain some of the body from the guitar tone if it's disappearing in the amp.
Anyway, you mentioned Nirvana. I did a quick Google to see what Kurt used on Nevermind and came up with (among many other things) a Mesa Studio .22 and a Boss DS-1. Off I went to the Rig Exchange, where I found a fairly recent collection of profiles by 79 Sound. After a quick bit of tweaking...
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.…/teen%20spirit%20test.wav
Not amazing, but definitely in the right ball park. Definition at 2.2, Power Sag at 3, the amp's Compressor at 2.1, and then a One DS being kicked on halfway through. That's it.
What style/genre are you playing? "Fat" can mean different things to different people.
I was just fiddling around with the Vinyl Stop effect, which is awesome, and I realized that it's active even in the heel position - the signal is still being dropped about a quarter step.
Could it perhaps fade out the effect as the pedal goes to 0?
Alternatively, I noticed there are a few existing FRs to expand the options for this stomp. How about just adding...
Heel (0 to 10)
Toe (0 to 10)
?
With a value of 0, the effect could internally set the Mix to 0%. A value of 0.1 would start where the current Heel position is.
Cheers.
Edit: My pedal was just acting up, I guess. I had tried restarting everything several times, recalibrating, and it still had trouble, but now (a few hours later) everything's hunky dory.
Not a clue. I get it once in a while, but not consistently enough to pinpoint a cause.
and if not, Kemper's rather arbitrary settings might be why.
I could swear they've said at some point, much like the other effects, that their choices are based on what sounds good, or is more musical, etc, and in this case I completely agree.
80Hz is the fundamental of a guitar's low E string.
160Hz is where all the "boominess" comes from, notably when palm muting.
320Hz often has a lot mud.
640Hz is right in that area where you can scoop out some mids without instantly sounding like Pantera.
etc, etc, etc.
Whereas on the MXR...
30Hz, 60Hz? Guitars produce nothing down here. The amp will, a little, but if you turn the amp's Bass knob down to a sensible level there's not much left.
130Hz is... nothing significant. It's a C, centered below the lowest string of a standard guitar.
250Hz, sure, some mud.
500Hz is awkwardly placed, IMO, because it covers both the mids you typically want to cut and the "meat" that you really don't want to.
and so on...
4000Hz is a good one, since there's often a bunch of hiss right there, but the Q is too wide to do much without killing all of your presence.
...
16000Hz is well beyond anything useful you're going to get out of a guitar speaker.
I'm all for customization, but it's important to realize why the existing values were chosen.
For the record, I can hear what he's talking about in both his clips and when I reamp his DI through my own plugins or KPA. It sounds like a few hundred milliseconds of brown noise under the pick attack.
More buttons, more customization options, you can plug in your own pedals and footswitches to the remote instead of having the flimsy ones on the FCB. For typical gigging where you just have a few patch changes, I wouldn't worry about it.
You would have to do a few other things first.
- An FCB, by itself, needs two 5-pin MIDI cables and 120v power.
- That adapter lets you combine two 5-pin MIDI cables + low voltage power into one 7-pin cable.
- Unless you modify the FCB to run on 9v DC, which is pretty easy if you know what you're doing, having low voltage power in the cable wouldn't help you.
- Without modifying the FCB's MIDI jacks, you need to split the signal back into two 5-pin MIDI cables when you get there.
So, if you bought two of that adapter, it would let you run a single MIDI cable from the Kemper to the FCB instead of two. You could always do the power mod at a later date if you wanted to.
Are you using the analog or SPDIF input on your Tascam? If you run into the Kemper and use SPDIF out to the interface, that would rule out the interface's preamps/converters.
So the Kemper Facebook page shared this link with presets earlier today: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o56…Ns--SyXSk6dx5fl7m0ia?dl=0
Only... I think they're using the additional modules from Bill's video above that we don't have access to yet. When I load them, it shows a Loop module in the Delay slot, but I get some sort of pitch-related delay effects happening.
Get 'em while they're still there, I guess?
Can i use this Gordius Little Giant in between my kemper and my bfc 1010? I think there is just 5 pin connectors on both 1010 and the kemper but on Gordius Little Giant it has 7 pins...will it work anyway?
The Little Giant is a foot controller, not the cable adapter in the picture.
Nice find. This looks like it would be make my FCB1010 single cable project a little cheaper. (Can't use Xavier's solution because it would cost something like $200 to get over here)
Sounds like the Kemper's soft-clipping to me. Is your input LED turning red at all when you play hard? If so, you need to turn Clean Sense down.
Can you throw up a clean DI track?
