Posts by DigitalBliss

  • Kemper humming

    I am in the same boat. Real bad case of EMI and I have shielded all of my guitars with only minor improvement. I built a portable EMI sniffer (battery brick -> high gain 40db solid state amp -> single coil pup, and small speaker) and have mapped out the worst areas of my house. They are all near electrical outlets and wire runs in walls and under the floor. I have an old house and some outlets are not grounded (they only have the old 2 prong sockets). I have not been able to identify any particular appliance that might be causing the noise, but I haven't ruled that out yet . I think I'm going to put my sniffer in a noisy location and have my wife cut power at the fuse box to various rooms and see if I can narrow the search. If I cant find a particular device to turn off that will help quell the noise, I am planning on calling an electrician out and show him my problem to see what he can do.


    Oh, and I should add that I've had my Kemper and guitars out of the house and they always sound way better just about anywhere I go. Way less noisy, and then I always come back home and swear at my stupid house when I cant get a good mojo going because of the noise.

  • My FRFR shootout

    Hi All,
    I was the other bay area tester. It was great of OP to set up all the gear and let me have the opportunity to try these all out. I only played with them for a half hour or so, but I agree with everything the OP said.


    I will add that although I thought the Atomic sounded the best to me as well (it was a little crisper and punchy-er on the high end than the Yamaha), but I would probably still go with the DXR10 over it. The DXR footprint is just so much nicer, and in my opinion the price difference was not worth the small edge out in tone. I will also add that I thought the Yamy had the most even dispersion pattern of the bunch. OP had it in the wedge position on the ground and I kid you not, it sounded the same even up to 45 deg off to either side, and only when you got way off to the sides did the treble fall off a little. Either the Matrix or the Gemini had a very narrow sound stage and rolled off quickly starting about 20 deg off axis (OP might remember which one this was). Also the Gemini was quite large (if size if a discriminator for anyone) 52 lbs, 2 feet across and about 20 inches tall. Also both the Gemini and Matrix were a little hissy while the Atomic and DXR were very quiet when the guitar was muted. The tiny hiss was insignificant at loud volume though, and might only bother you if you tried to play them in a quieter environment. Thanks again OP for the opportunity to try all of these.

  • Question on Correct Setup for a new user

    Welcome Angus,
    You only really need the UR22 to record. So if you record frequently, you can use the UR22 as the mixer by bringing the Kemper outs into the UR22 inputs. But then every time you play you have to power up the UR22 (and maybe your computer depending on where you monitor). If you record infrequently, you can just bring any backing track source into the Kemper and use the Kemper as the mixer using the Alternative Input and Return on the back. You need a special cable for this, but there are directions in the manual, and pictures on this forum. Just google Kemper Alternative MP3. In this case you just plug the headphones into the Kemper and you're good to go. You can even practice without the computer if your just doing scales and such.

  • Noise issue

    @ PaulReedSmith
    The noise you hear is electromagnetic interference. This can come from lots of sources around you (PCs, fluorescent lights, switching power supplies, motors, etc.) It is not coming into your Kemper through the power cable (as evidence by the fact that some orientations of your guitar produce almost no noise) Rather it is coming into your guitar pickups from a radiating source. Your pickups detect this noise and send it out your guitar cable to be amplified by the Kemper along with the good signal produced by your stings. The more the amplification (gain) the more you hear it. Especially at high gain levels when lots of compression is occurring. At high gain, your guitar signal and noise are both amplified by the same gain, but the guitar signal being stronger begins soft clipping (distorting) while the noise just gets louder. So it sounds relatively louder (compared to your music) than it does at lower gain. Single coils pickups are the most susceptible, but even guitars with humbuckers can pick this noise up especially if there is no shielding in the electronics cavities where the signal wires are just an unshielded pair. I have a PRS Core Mira and was disappointed to see no shielding in the cavities. I shielded it myself to make it more quiet. Why an expensive guitar like this is not shielded amazes me. Of course the ultimate solution is to get away from the source of the offending electromagnetic interference, but in my case I could not identify where it was coming from. I actually took my guitar and a portable amp, and walked all around my house trying to find where it was coming from and could not. So I live with it, but I can minimize it by ensuring that all my guitars and cables are well shielded, and this makes it more tolerable.

  • Profiles sounds bass heavy/no clarity (SOLVED)

    Two comments for the OP.


    On your point number 5. The volume knob is actually velocity sensitive. The faster you turn it, the more it moves. So you could spin it slowly but around a whole turn and the volume might only go up a bit, if at all. You could also spin it just a quarter turn, but quickly, and it would change the volume a lot more.


    I have a number of really different sounding guitars, and if I find a profile I like, but the eq is not what I'm looking for. Sometimes I'll dink around with all the deep editing features to try to get it where I want it, other times I'll load up rig manager, navigate over to the rig exchange, and sort all the rigs by gain. Scroll down to where the gain is the same as the one I liked, lock any stomps or effects I want to keep from the original rig, and just scroll through 40 or 50 amps in the same gain neighborhood, and I usually find something I like.

  • My Pod HD profiles

    Hi MAB,
    I wanted to get back to you after trying out those two profiles. The GnR profile is ok, but doesn't seem to fit my guitars very well. It sounds quite a bit different than the clip you posted. It's nice, but for my guitars I have some that sound better for that tone. So for that one, at least for me, I would say it's not worth the effort to try to tweak it much more.


    On the Clean JP profile, that one is very good. I compared it to a profile that I like to use for my Everlong cover, and found it surprisingly jangly. I intentionally dulled my existing profile for that song because I wanted to recreate that droning rhythm that makes me feel like I'm driving on a lit up big city freeway at night. When I played your profile, it was a nice change and I was still able to create that feeling. I might actually try to find something right between the two. If I get a chance I'll make a recording and post it for a fun comparison. Thanks for this one, and again no further tweaking is required, at least by me, since I'm not really trying to recreate the JP tone.


    Thanks again for putting all these out. I have them in a MAB folder in RM and keep updating these and your reverb/delay profiles whenever you make improvements. Great work!

  • Palm mutes, low end sounding blown out

    I agree with Michael_dk's diagnosis. I have this problem all the time. Actually, it's not really a problem, it's more of an observation. I just now recreated your flubbly sound by searching through my free profiles to find a similar tone, and was able to get it to sound nice and tight just like the G1 clip by adding a studio eq in stomp slot A and leaving everything zero except the low shelf I set to 200 hz, and -2.5 db gain. I would consider this early-in-the-chain studio eq to be more of a pickup/guitar tone shaper that sculpts the input to the amp profile itself.


    I don't hear much of a gain difference between the two, but the G1 clip is a little more balanced, and yours is a bit scooped. Again this could easily be due a pickup/guitar difference, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to take that same studio eq and give it a fairly wide bandwidth (low q) mid boost of just a dB or so. If you do this you may need to reduce the vol in the eq down a similar amount. Sort of like a make-up gain adjustment. Once you have that set up, then you could save that eq as a preset, and load it whenever you load another G1 profile to get them sounding similar again, that's how I would handle it anyway. Good luck.

  • My Pod HD profiles

    Those are great sound clips, really a nice variety of tones MAB.


    I particulary like the Classic Metal tone at 30 sec. I call that a buzz saw tone, and I've gotten close but you nailed it here. If you could post that profile I would love it. It's just so... classic.


    I also like a tiny little clip you did at 16 sec on the Clean Patches. It only lasted 3 seconds but reminded me of the acoustic version of Everlong by the Foo Fighters. I can cover this and have a decent tone for it, but it sounded like from that short clip, this clean tone might be better than what I currently use.


    Thanks.

  • Aux input volume vs rig volume

    Since my windows tablet and android phone don’t have this problem, I was curious, so I did a little research. It seems the iPhone 5 (and to a lesser extent the 5s) sound circuitry has unusually low output impedance which tends to make them quieter than most devices. Also there is an EU restriction on headphone volume and in your settings if you turn off the limit, and max the volume slider, and then on the side of the phone (even though the displayed slider shows max) keep pressing the up vol button, you might get past the EU volume restriction. If it’s still too low of an output, the mixer is a good idea, or you can get a tiny rechargeable headphone amp that some iPhone users reported work pretty well and are good quality. One that was mentioned is a FiiO E6 which seems to last about 8hrs on a charge.