Posts by DigitalBliss

  • Work Flow Help

    Thank you very much those are some great suggestions, and I will follow them up when I have a chance. I have not set up the spdif recording yet on my KPA, but I've been meaning to. I don't think I would go through this effort on every tone I want to dial in, but for the tougher ones this sounds like the ticket, and it would allow me to explore all of the deep editing features without a guitar strapped to me. This is good because I really do need to sit down and learn more about the KPA. If only there were more hours in a day. :rolleyes:


    dB

  • Old and Forgotten amp profiles

    Hi Oraakkeli,
    Your web site looks great! Thanks so much! One thing that might make it even better is some sound samples, but I would not burden you with that after you have already done a ton of work to profile and post these nice amps. Rather, I would suggest putting a little note on your home page that says something like "I'm trying to include audio samples of these great vintage amps, so if you record any of these profiles, please send me a copy in mp3 format and I'll link it to the appropriate amp, please also provide your name if you would like credit for your submission. Thanks." Or something to that effect. I'm kind of new to the KPA, so when I get some time to set it up for recording, I'll try to donate a clip as well. Thanks again!
    dB

  • Work Flow Help

    Hi OC


    You got me thinking, so I scanned through the rig exchange and there are a couple Dual Showman profiles done by a fellow named Simon B, so I may try those out for a Dick Dale type surf tone. I hear you on the reverb too. It's funny, a lot of those old live recordings have so much reverb on them that you hear an audible ping when the players dig in. I guess some would call that an artifact - some would call that character. 8)

  • Work Flow Help

    Well, thank you all again for your great words of wisdom. Just to clarify, I don’t want it to sound like I have buyer’s remorse. I love the tones I get out of this thing. Many is the time I’ll sit down with this box intending to practice a new song, only to get distracted by a profile that I think sounds great and I end up noodling away an hour just exploring how that profile sounds in different contexts. I don’t consider this a bad thing. I’m just trying to maximize the utility of this amp when I am really serious about finding a specific sound.


    Don, yes, I agree about mic position as it relates to sound sculpting. However, I’m not really using the KPA as a profiler for my own amps. The tube amps I own are ok, but I really bought this to have access to the hundreds (maybe thousands now) of other users fabulous amp profiles, and I can’t really control the mic placement on those (unless they include profiles of a variety of mic options).


    Viabcroce, thanks again for your insight, no your post didn’t come out in a wrong way; I appreciate all the ideas you put forth.


    meambobbo, I am continually amazed at how amp-like this machine is. I’ve even put some of my own analog stomps in front of it and it reacts like I would expect (I have tried this before on other digital solutions but never had very good results). So I agree with you on that, not sure what stigmas you refer to, perhaps that one should not be scared of eq-ing or swapping cabs. I am totally open to any ideas that will help me zero in on the tones I seek. BTW, I’m a techno geek, so I’ve tried just about every digital solution there is from the early days of digial stomps, to pedal boards, to vst/daws to the latest stand-alone boxes like the Kemper, so I’ve got a bit of history (and a big closet of junk, lol). I hear you on the fake thing. I think that’s actually one of the strong points of the KPA is that where it does expand the possibilities beyond analog counterparts, it does so musically. I can’t tell you how many times over the years, I’ve run into that patch that sounds like the soundtrack to the 1950s movie “Forbidden Planet”. I just don’t need that in a guitar amp. LOL Anyway, I’ll keep poking at all the possible controls and maybe in time I’ll get to the point where when a buddy comes over and says “Hey, set me up with a “Crazy Train” tone, I’ll be able to dial one up in in less than a minute.


    webdiver, great idea. That’s sort of what I’m doing today, except for that last line. When I do manage to get a tone I like, I’ll save it and I do try to craft a new one every day or two. Then when I start in on my practice time I’ll play some of these and others that I still haven’t quite found a good tone for, and that will help me decide which tone I want to work on next time (refinement of an existing tone, or creation of a new one). Note; when I say it doesn’t have a good tone, that just mean that it doesn’t sound the way I want it to, not that it isn’t great in it’s own right. Another good point several of you have made is to limit the choices. I’ll try this, even though I find this counter to trying to understand all the possibilities.


    Thanks again for the help. I really do apreciate it.

  • Work Flow Help

    Thank you both for responding. Your suggestions give me much to think about. You are right viabcroce, sound sculpting is what I would like to do. That is the exact word for it, and I know that this goes against the grain of the profiler concept. However, I don’t really feel the need to build a tone from the ground up (like a full on modeler), since so many really great profile are out there already. I just want to be able to find the best profile to start with and tweak them efficiently. If I follow your advice Ingolf, and keep the cabs linked with the amps, I don’t see enough knobs (both on guitar or KPA stack) to get the tones I seek. Maybe I don’t have enough experience with it yet. I play several hours a day (although this is just a hobby for me – not my profession) and I really try to focus on playing rather than tweaking so I may still be a little green on what the KPA controls can really do for me. I will take that as an action to work on this week.


    I guess what I’m struggling with is how to efficiently find the tones I seek, as opposed to just pseudo-randomly trying different profiles in hopes that it will give me what I seek. Note: I make this sound worse than it really is because I do know what different amps sound like and I do know what specific gear various artists used, and I have my collection organized by gain (thanks to Maurizio for the start there). So the choices I make are educated guesses and not really random.


    Thanks again, you’ve given me a lot to contemplate.


    Oh, while I was writing this I see Gizmo and meambobbo have added some good advice, yes I will try the loop idea. I use my tablet (with guitar apps like slow downers, metronomes, etc) on the Aux input line so I can easily record my guitar and loop for browsing. Good suggestion! And about the IRs Yes, I had thought about that too, but doesn’t that then disable the cab slot? (or more accuratelu replace it?) I believe I read that the IRs results were not as good as the profiled cabs, so I would like adjust the cab profiles rather than build or eq match IRs, but I will give that a try one of these days too. Thanks . Great conversation!

  • Work Flow Help

    LOL, Yah, see that's the rub. I like lots of genres, so I know some people that have "their tone", but I'll play a little Teenage Bottlerocket, then switch to Johny Cash. :)

  • Work Flow Help

    Hey there,


    I’ve had my Kemper about a month now, and enjoyed every minute of it. However I have a work flow problem with it (maybe you power users can help me out). Here is how it usually goes. Say I want to play Wipe Out by The Ventures. So I sit down at the Kemper w/ my Strat and dial up an amp that gets me in the ball park. Something vintage clean to crunch. (Ventures used Fenders and Mosrite amps). There are lots of similar amps to choose from. Good. The only problem is the cab it comes with doesn’t provide the tone I'm looking for (despite twiddling the available knobs in the amp/eq/cab). So I need to find a cab that when paired with the amp has the surf sound that I hear in my mind. Ignore the obvious delay/reverb for now. This cab choice is much harder for me than finding the amp because there are so many more parameters (basically I want the whole stack spectrum to be close). This is where things break down.


    One way could be to lock all but the eq and cab slots and walk through my 700 or so rigs playing a riff and seeing if it sounds good with the amp I chose (hugely time consuming). Another way might be to use Tills cabs (a smaller and more parametric search) but again this is time consuming, and his collection (although great) is only based off a few cabs, so they tend to fall into a number of discrete families of tones. Yet a third method would be start one of those previous searches, and when I get close, use the 4 eq knobs in the eq section to tweak it, but I find that to be not enough control to usually get me where I want to be. So I could add another eq in the x slot or mod slot, but you can see now I’m just adding more and more band aids to this problem, and consuming more and more time when all I wanted to do is play the song with a fairly close tone. What bugs me about this is I can actually see the frequency content I want in my mind. I know roughly where I want the peaks and valleys and I want to quickly select a cab (or really amp/eq/cab combination) that represents this.


    So I’m open to suggestions.


    I had thought about injecting a sine sweep or white noise into each cab on my KPA and capturing the output so I could graph each cabs frequency response. But then I have the problem of how do I rapidly scan through 700 or so plots when I have a sound in mind.


    I could organize the data in different ways… Boomy to bright might be good, or maybe how mid scooped (or not) they are, etc. But then I have the problem of locating the one I want to try, quickly, and then if that doesn’t work, look for another one that that has a similar response (but may be far away on the browse knob), again not a good solution.


    Another possibility would be to analyze all 700 or so, but only keep 10 or 20 cabs as presets that cover the widest and diverse amount of usable tones (auditioning 10 or 20 when tone searching is not bad). Then fill in the gaps with eq tweaks.


    Does anybody have some good suggestions? How do you guys accomplish this? Thanks in advance.


    dB

  • KIPR Tag Editor

    Gotta say I'm w/ viabcroce on this one. I've been burned so many times w/ Windows alowing things I don't want it to do, that I have taken a minimalist approach as well. Gotta pass for now.

  • KPA attracting women´s attention

    My wife is the same way. I think I have mine set with the briteness too high, because I'll walk into another room and come back in and it looks like it dominates the whole room with it's flashing multi colored LEDs. My wife calls me the mad scientist when she sees me maniacally cranking the knobs and pushing the buttons..

  • "Starting Pack" for Beginners: Maurizio70 RIGs, PRESETs and BACKUP (updated to February 10th 2014)

    Thanks guys.


    I successfully backed up my Kemper then restored your full backup Maurizio. That was really a fun evening. I like your way of organizing the rigs. I played most of them (I think the wife wanted to get to sleep when I got to the MT Mesa Boogie Tripple Rects section near the end of the list, so I had to stop LOL). My favorites were the$Surf's Up, one called sLD Ada MP1 Liquid, and the yMT Mesa RectSing. I put those in my favorites, but many others were really awesome as well. My ears were pretty tired by the end, so I'll probably go through them all again after taking a break and re-listen.


    I have another quick question. In the original Factory rigs there were two that I reallly liked which I think you have somewhere in yours as well, One was called Acoustic B, and the other was Steaves Lead. I'll look through the spreadsheeds that are posted here on the forum that list all the tags and try to identify the corresponding names in your backup, but here is my question. Is there a way to know if or what you modified from the factory originals (assuming I got the correct rig name for each). Or is this just a case of - load the originals and listen to both?


    Thanks again for all the hard work.