Posts by heldal

Quote from Lokasenna

I can't find the quote right now, but I'm 99% sure someone from Kemper previously said that this is what performance mode does. It's always possible that it does preload them and the switching latency is caused elsewhere in the box, who knows?

It may also be worth looking at other mechanisms than OS or I/O cache as I suspect the KPA rearranges and re-priorities its memory along the way. Sometimes the rig-switching time suddenly increases to several seconds, even within the same performance, if I have been playing one rig for a long time. There may be a memory leak in the code for all I know, but there are ways to handle cache within an application that makes it less exposed to re-prioritisation happening at a lower layer (operating system).

Quote from lerniberni

I don't think the Pedal is the problem.

Agree. I see the same behaviour regardless of method used to switch between rigs. There's some caching going on that improve the switching along the way, and it seems there's room for improvements in future firmware. The KPA should at least load and prepare all slots in the currently selected performance for use, as well as groups of 5 or 10 of the numbered slots in browse-mode. I.e as a minium prep all rigs for immediate use that can be reached with a single pedal-click on a controller in either browse or performance-mode.

This has been debated a lot in the past. Profiles do not work equally well with any guitar, despite the fact that your guitar isn't part of the signal chain that is profiled. The manual playing part of profiling is just an extra step to verify that the finished profile is able to reproduce the signal from manual playing just as well as the weird noise the profiler runs through the amp, but the actual tone of the guitar doesn't mean anything here. The influence from the guitar comes from before you start the profiling process. Before profiling start you dial in your rig for the tone you want, and at this point the type of guitar you have is crucial to how you dial in the amp, and the behaviour of the amp is what the profile is modelling. The profile you end up with will most likely be a best fit for that particular guitar. There's no absolute rule saying that for example a profile made by somone playing a telecaster won't work with Les Pauls. It is however very likely that those two people, when using the same real amplifier, would dial in the controls very different. Until the profiler develops robotic arms so that it can twists knobs during profiling and become able to exactly model the complete behaviour of an amplifier, profiles will be somewhat dependent on the guitar used in the process.

I certainly use different profiles for different guitars, and I think most KPA-players do.

Quote from Per

Actually quite often there's a lot of in the room tone on records, distant micing produces quite a different sound to close micing, and while modern pop is all very very ultra close mic'd (and often just pod's) it's not a sound we think of for the kinds of classic tones many of us were used to growing up.

While I do understand your angle, there's no reason why you can't create profiles using distant mics. You can even use a combination of mics if you use a small mixer with the profiler. Although it won't produce the exact amp-in-the-room feel through your monitor(s) it will at least produce the wanted effect through FOH or on your recordings.

You can set up one rig for each sound, assign a number and choose with any MIDI controller in either browse or performance-mode, but if you want the added convenience of being able to add to or subtract individual effects from a rig I recommend a mod-chip for the FCB1010. You get the uno4kemper with glow-in-the-dark labels for €32.

Is the number of stored profiles and configured performances the same on both boxes?

I would expect identical performance given the same firmware and dataset as the hardware, except from the physical button layout, is identical. Performance should be the same on both units if you back-up, then wipe, and restore the same backup on both boxes.

What I'm missing is some form of background smart-cache as the first switch between slots in a performance or between rigs organised in the same MIDI-bank in browse-mode takes far too long.

How you use the modes is up to you. Personally I view the "Browser" as a place where I play around with "factory presets", and "Perform" is where I customise and organise the sounds as I need them for live performances. "Perform"-mode eliminates the complexity of having to deal with snapshots as you make a copy of each rig every-time you choose one for a performance-slot. Being old-school I tend to view a "Performance" as a "Bank" and "Rig" as a "Slot" which is what I'm used to from other MIDI equipment.

If your FCB1010 is a dedicated controller for your KPA, then your first step is to go get a mod-chip. I doubt you would ask this question if you had a mod-chip w/documentation. I've got the chip from uno4kemper.com which makes this very simple.

Quote from WillB

Facts? References?

Fact: You can't get reliable low-latency audio or video processing with an OS that may get stuck in unrelated blocking tasks for seconds at a time.

Reference: For a comparison of the operating-systems real-time capabilities just look at the functionality offered in their respective developer libraries.

The choice of OS for an application such as rig-manager doesn't matter that much, but musicians are likely to use their computer for other tasks where certain OS-characteristics are crucial for performance, reliability and audio-quality. For reliable audio (and video) processing you need an OS-kernel with proper realtime characteristics. I.e. that an application can be guaranteed near immediate access to hardware resources. Neither Windows nor OSX is ideal for the purpose, but OSX is a lot better than Windows. You can get reasonable results by throwing extreme high-performance hardware in the mix, but reliability still requires real-time properties. What is unfortunate though is that Kemper seems to have stumbled hard into that ditch also known as .net so. I'm afraid that support for other operating systems will require a complete redesign.

Quote from chick

Is there any plans for an app or something to get my ipad/iPhone connected to my kemper think this would be just the best thing in the world

For each one of us it is of course the best thing if applications are targeted at our chosen platform. Kemper has so far slipped into that proprietary sump called .NET with Rig Manager and it is certainly going to take them a lot of time to design their way out of the pothole. The only platform other than windows they've committed support for so far is OSX.

Quote from DonPetersen

A 'sort by Definition' option might be cool to have, right?

Yes. That would probably fill the same purpose. I agree about your point about inconsistent characteristics between pickups of similar construction. My intention was to form some guideline, not an absolute as there obviously is none. Besides, I was thinking of a pickup-characteristic being a combination of warmth/brightness and output level and I'm not sure how your definition of "definition" cover that, but this is just semantics.

You should think twice about the naming of parameters though. Try to use terms that are already well known to guitarists and other musicians. Experienced guitar-players would easily be able to order a collection of guitars by "brightness". If you ask them to order the same guitars by "definition" you would probably have to offer an explanation for that. Things are so much easier, at least for beginners, if you stick to well known terminology. Another example of this from the KPA is the term "performance" in performance-mode. If I'm part of a show where there's a programmable midi-controller that is interacting with every midi-capable piece of equipment on and around the stage, and i tell the person in charge to activate "performance" this or that nobody knows what I'm talking about. Just about everybody else in the midi-world group their programs (or slots) in banks which IMHO would make more sense to use in the KPA too.

Quote from SoZack

when the Mac version is due?

The windows version seem deeply entrenched with .NET so my guess is that it will take some time before there is a mac-version. There's MonoDevelop that offers a .NET runtime for OSX ... sort of, but it is lacking in functionality, performance and stability. A decent native OSX-application must therefore be rewritten for a different tool-chain. Not only does it have consequences for the initial version, but future bug-fixes and revisions will suffer from the same problem. If you look at successful multi-platform applications that offer efficient native binaries on several platforms they've got a few things in common. One being that they are not based on .NET.

Quote from Delinquent

It's about the person doing the profiles

I agree that it is all about personal preference, yet:

The experience from my own work with the KPA is that if I take a versatile amp, dial it in for a crunch-tone with a standard Telecaster and create a profile I won't be completely satisfied with the resulting profile when used for example with a Les Paul. Nor will I be satisfied if I dial the tube-amp in for the Les Paul, profile it and use the profile with the tele. Now I have two profiles, one made for a guitar with humbuckers and one for single-coils. If I then plug in a SSS stratocaster I'm most likely to find something I like in the profile made for the tele, and with a ES335, SG or PRS-SC I'm more likely to be satisfied with the profile made for the LP.

None of these are absolutes, and I will still play around with various profiles across guitar-models. However, with a large number of rigs available I'm convinced that it'll be faster to find the tone I'm looking for if it is simple to focus on profiles made for a guitar similar to the guitar I'm holding in my hands.

Quote from drbill

I haven't checked it in a while; it used to have a web server that only brought up a placeholder page.

The KPA (latest firmware) does hook up as a DHCP-client but there is not much else happening. I just scanned (nmap) all ports. For TCP there's nothing, and UDP-scan shows:

PORT      STATE         SERVICE    VERSION
137/udp   open|filtered netbios-ns
49153/udp open|filtered unknown

I would like to be able to see roughly what type of guitar each rig is profiled for. The guitar doesn't affect the profiling-process itself, but has everything to do with how the real amplifier is dialled-in prior to profiling. The KPA front-panel-controls for EQ, gain and presence tries to model the behaviour of real amps, but won't behave exactly the same. I would even make this a mandatory attribute by implementing it as a set of pickup-models from which the person doing the profiling is forced to choose. This could also be a useful filter in the rig-browser.

A useful, but not exhaustive list of pickups could be as follows:

• Passive single-coil
• Passive humbucker
• Active single-coil
• Active humbucker
• P90
• FilterTron
• Piezo
• Other

Quote from lasvideo

Brand new J-59 (Les Paul). Great action. No button issues. My other guitar is a 2000 Jackson Soloist SL1 USA.

You've been lucky then. I had 3 JTV-59s over a period of about a year, all faulty, before giving up on it. It took the distributor 3-4 months to come up with a fix or replacement every time there was a problem so it wasn't that may weeks I had the guitar during that year. I won't deny that it sounds good, both as a regular electric with the magnetic pickups and with the variax-modelled sounds, and that playability is great, but I also need reliability. Hopefully L6 will get some help sorting out their QA now that they'be been acquired by Yamaha.

The characteristics of your guitar determine how you dial in the settings on any amp to get the sound you want. This obviously has to be done to a real amp before profiling it, but the guitar has no part in the signal-chain while profiling. The "refine" step at the end of profiling where you play a guitar is meant to ensure that the modelled rig reproduce the sound from manual playing just as good as it handles the generated sounds, but the characteristics of the guitar doesn't matter here either. A finished profile differentiates between various guitars just about as well as the real amp does if you plug in different guitars without touching any of the knobs.

A profile is a snapshot of an amp-rig and doesn't model how amps characteristics change as you move the various knobs, although there are elements of modelling in the algorithms that try to emulate how the amp should react to gain and eq-changes. Still, it is not given that a profile made from an amp dialled in with a guitar with single-coils (ex. tele) works equally well if you try to play through it with humbuckers (ex LP). If you go back to that real amp and plug in something with a humbucker you are also more than likely to change a few settings which in turn change the characteristics of the amp from what was previously profiled.

The KPA would need some robotics hardware so that it could turn the knobs on the amp while profiling to be able to extend the concept of profiles (snapshots) to a complete model of all characteristics of an amplifier.

Web-based tools such as forms may be useful for the user-interface in a rig-manager application, but there are other components in such an application where web-tools do little to help with or provide portability. There are abstraction-libraries for USB-communications, networking, embedded databases and GUI-components that work across all potential platforms (win/ios/osx/linux). Granted, portability-libraries do carry some functional and performance-limitations compared to native solutions, but we're not talking about an application that is pushing such boundaries here. I'm really surprised that what we've seen so far is so deeply buried in that proprietary quagmire they call .NET Unless Kemper deliberately have planned to maintain almost completely separate implementations for each platform they've made one of the worst possible choices.

For a web-application to provide an OS-agnostic interface as this thread suggest it would have to either run on the KPA itself across wired net (if its network interface can be used for that) or with a USB network dongle. Another option is to run the application in a computer on a stick (USB) with networking capabilities that plugs into the KPA. This obviously comes with an extra expense per user, and I doubt the development of such a solution is going to be less expensive than maintaining a true multi-platform application.

Quote from layne81

Is it true that when a profile is taking of an amp...the user that is profiling the amp...does it take all the entities of the profile such as wood, pickups, etc. to make the new preset?

A profile is a snapshot of what happens in the signal-chain between an amplifiers input-jack and the FOH/studio mic-preamp (guitar-amp, effects, cabinet, microphone). What guitar you use is essential to how you dial in an amp before profiling it. The guitar is also used in the "refine" step towards the end of profiling, but this is mostly to verify that the profile works as good with manual playing as it does for the computer-generated input signal. The sweet-spot for settings on an amp may vary a lot for different guitars so it is not given that all profiles work well with all guitars. However, is it possible to make different amps produce a set of sounds you want for your guitar then it is also possible to create a set of profiles to achieve the same with the KPA. You are less likely to find pre-made profiles that work for you if you have a "quirky" guitar.