Posts by Klappy

  • Kemper caused me an injury

    Quote from whippinpost91850

    I've been using Ernie Ball strings for 30+ yrs and I have never had that happen. VERY STRANGE

    Yeah, I've used them before in the past, but never on a marathon session with the strings fresh out of the pack. I seem to remember having the grey fingertips a little bit, but not like this. I thought it was just a general nickel thing, but I had Black Diamond nickels on the same guitar just before these and there was no discoloration.


    My acids, their alloys I guess. I did like the tone though, similar to the Black Diamonds.

  • Speaker selection for Kemper?

    Mike, sorry to hear my suggestion isn't working out. Mine is the 10" version in a closed but ported cabinet and I don't get the flabby sound. It actually sounds decent even on bass. The culprit is probably the open back cabinet. I thought it might not be a problem at guitar frequencies, but apparently it is. This speaker is designed to go much deeper than a typical guitar speaker (57Hz rolloff vs 80-120Hz on a guitar speaker, and 47Hz resonance vs 75Hz resonance).


    There are two things I can suggest:
    1. Try running a High Pass filter at 100hz on the Kemper in the effects section and see if that helps. This will give a low frequency response closer to a regular guitar speaker. This kind of rolloff was occurring naturally in your old speaker. If that works, then maybe the monitor EQ can work well enough too, freeing up your effects slot.
    2. If you like the sound other than the flabbiness, you might want to consider putting a back on your cabinet, which could be a simple piece of plywood. If you send me the internal dimensions of your cabinet, I can run it through my speaker sim software and see what that will look like. Generally, closed cabinets provide tight bass without super deep lows, which might be perfect for you.


    Keep me posted, it was my idea so I'll help you through this.

  • Speaker selection for Kemper?

    See these links:


    Woofer



    Tweeter



    Crossover




    The only other stuff you need is some short speaker wire and crimp terminal ends if you don't want to solder to the crossover. Also, you'll need some short screws to mount the crossover inside your speaker cab. The rest is pretty intuitive, pos/neg inputs to the crossover from your speaker jack and pos/neg outputs to the woofer and tweeter. Optionally, you can line your cabinet with eggcrate foam to help control internal resonances to help flatten out the response a bit, but you can play around with that later. This is more important if your cabinet is sealed or mostly sealed. Not really required for an open back.


    Maybe try converting just one cabinet first to see if you like it. If you need any help, give me a holler.

  • Speaker selection for Kemper?

    Mike, The avatar looks like a nice speaker. But for reference, you could replace your speakers in both of your existing 1x12's for about $300, including the woofers, tweeters and crossovers. In addition to saving money, this would also provide the option of running in stereo if you ever wanted to, or using one for backline and one for a monitor.

  • Inception Profiles

    I like that idea. I wonder if instead of actually profiling, you could do some type of render instead. All the information is already there, so it wouldn't necessarily need to re-evaluate itself. If DSP is an issue, then it doesn't have to work quickly. Of course this wouldn't work for any time based/modulation effects. It would be cool to render an OD stomp and an EQ though.

  • Speaker selection for Kemper?

    I just built a cabinet using a coaxial Eminence Beta-10cx and ASD:1001 horn and it sounds pretty darned good. It also measured pretty flat. I think this is what Xitone uses.


    I'd recommend the Beta-12cx and ASD:1001 with the PXB2-2k5CX crossover. I tried the 3k5 crossover first and it was peaky around 3k5.

  • Speakers for Profiling and IR making

    I was re-reading Chapter 0 of Dickason's Loudspeaker Design Cookbook 7 tonight. That chapter is an introductory chapter that focuses on the design of the speakers themselves. There was an example of the author designing an evolution of 10 different 10" speakers, changing various parameters one at a time like voice coil length, spider stiffness, and magnet sizes to demonstrate their effects. Towards the end, he starts changing some parameters that effect speaker durability, such as venting the speaker pole to help dissipate heat. It really got me thinking about all the trade-offs that designers need to suffer in order to get a speaker that meets efficiency, power, and durability considerations.


    I wonder how many awesome sounding speaker prototypes are sitting on the shelves at Celestion and Eminence because they couldn't handle the rigors of 1000 hours at stage volume, or were too expensive to sell. I imagine that designing a speaker to last a few minutes during the profiling process could allow for some interesting results not possible when designing a speaker for a road amp. Maybe someone with a little pull like @lonestargtr could borrow a few of these prototypes for profiling. Also, I known @sinmix is very interested in the speaker part of the overall sound. This idea seems right up his alley.


    Just a thought.

  • Guitar setup

    Why are you adjusting the truss rod? Is it related to your tuning issue or is your action fluctuating? I'm just trying to understand if they are related/unrelated issues.


    Regarding the tuning issue, I concur with others about it being a nut issue. I'm a total Gibson guy, but I'll be the first to admit that the headstock design they used (and almost everybody else used pre-Fender) was a design flaw. The lack of straight string pull potentially causes nut binding. You need much more wiggle room in the slot than with straight-pull headstock designs. The reason the PRS guys don't have this issue is the straight string pull. Same for Strats and Teles.


    I currently own about 60 guitars with many more in the past, and only the offset string pulls ever gave me problems. I had to recut or replace the nut on almost all of them. Lube helps, but it isn't sufficient in most cases. Factory nut slots are almost always too deep, too narrow, and too high. In fact, the easiest way to make a guitar play better from the factory is to cut the slot to be planar to the rest of the frets. I have NO idea why even some good luthiers treat a nut different from a zero fret in terms of height.


    My quick guide to solving tuning problems:

    • It's not your tuners. Really, it's not your tuners, move along.
    • It's not your saddle or bridge unless you are using a non-integrated trem or have a long distance between bridge and tailpiece. In those cases, you either need the strings to slide well over the saddles or have a bridge that can rock easily back and forth.
    • It's probably your nut. Even if you believe that 1 and/or 2 do apply to your guitar, your nut is still probably contributing to your problem.

  • What cables do you use?

    In my humble opinion, cables can be judged on four criteria which affect quality:

    • Robustness
    • Microphonics
    • Flexibility
    • Capacitance per foot

    Even the cheapest cables these days do pretty well in all these departments. I also use store-brand Guitar Center cables, the cloth covered kind that look like vintage appliance power cords. They lay down great, don't tangle, and are really easy to spot on the floor or in a gig bag.


    The whole cable-sound thing is wearisome to me. After your first buffer, the capacitance doesn't even matter anymore. If I were running a 100' cord to my amp, I MIGHT worry about capacitance. But I used to run my unbuffered signal through a 100 foot snake and two 15 foot guitar cords. At worst, I would need to goose the treble or presence by a click. Any other spec besides capacitance is BS too. Take resistance: considering the 6-12kohm DCR's on pickups, adding a few ohms of series resistance is meaningless. And don't get me started about OFC or other audiophile nonsense. ;)


    I own a low-capacitance Elixir cable with a PTFE dielectric. For a nano-second, I convinced myself it sounded better, until my friend helped me out with a blind test. What I do know is that that cable still has a kink in it from how it was packaged and is stiffer than the Kemper CAT5 cable that came with the remote. I never use it.


    I'm also still using some Pro-Co's from the 70's (with new ends) and plastic molded patch cables from the 80's, the multicolored ones that came in a bag of 10 for $12. Not a single one of those pariahs have ever failed me.

  • Can we please get some kind of Kemper Editor Software for your computer

    I agree 100%. I'd much rather have a bank of 12 knobs and screens. By default, it would have my favorite go-to parameters. But when editing an effect, all the effect's parameters would show up while editing.