What I don't share with the OP is the idea that adding NG to the Amp section would not be a good idea: on the contrary, for all the above it seems to be by far the best placement for this control, because you'd be able to optimise it depending on the profile's intrinsic noise.
You did a much better job than me explaining some of the challenges some might face, but I just wanted to clarify I agree with you that it would work there on the "Amp" page too. I personally think the best place for it would be on the "Rig" page. So it would get saved to a rig, which is basically a profile.. It could be in the "amp" settings sure, in my head a noise gate is part of a rig but amps don't usually have one built into them, so that's really the only reason why I suggested/think it should be under "Rig" and not "Amp". Semantics
Is it the ability to globally adjust CS and DS, alongside the noise gate to avoid making changes to every rig ? Would that work? Surely the interchange between the gain levels etc would still not be right and require tweaking?
If I could pick and choose, what I'm asking for is for "Clean Sens", "Distortion Sens", and "Noise Reduction" to be separate, so I can lock one or two or all three to global, or save them to a rig, irrespective of one another.
Hey. I just wanted to try and start a discussion, not sure if it sticks, but I want to discuss the noise gate being stuck to the input section.
If I am switching between a clean and a high gain profile, I can either set the noise gate to the clean profile and have lots of added noise on the high gain profile, or I can set it to the high gain profile, eating up a lot of the clean tone. I can lock the input section, but that also locks the sense options, which means if I switch between guitars (which I do) I have to edit those settings every time.
So it's either noise/squashed sound, or I have to edit either the noise gate settings or the clean/dist sense settings every time I swap profiles or guitars. There's currently no way to be able to set up so it's plug and play unless putting some limitations on yourself, like only using one profile, or only using one guitar.
It seems to me the noise reduction should be its own separate thing (separate from stomps, amp, cab, eq, post fx - it's own separate entity in the chain) / attatched to the pre amp Stomps section somehow / should be in the rig settings. Or something to that effect. Is there a particular reason why it isn't? Has this been suggested by anyone before, have Kemper made official comments on the matter? What are other people's thoughts?
A while ago I just got tired of putting myself through the waiting, excitement and disappointment continually, so I decided to not care about it for a while and stop worrying about the dates. It's been working alright because I wasn't really expecting anything when I came here, so it was a happy surprise to see we're so close.
Also appreciate the update, G-String. Sure some people will still have laughs and make memes about it, but I'm convinced everyone appreciates it on some level, regardless of what they say.
I am currently whining about the fact that 7.0 is in fact not in release for my Kemper rack, only for the newborn Stage. It's like having a younger brother all over again. Whatever is different about the two has created a really unfavorable situation where my stuff used to be primary, and now it feels kinda secondary, and I'm just a human so that gives me some feels. I'll get over it for sure, but the way I see it, they should strive to have one uniform release date for both products, and I only say that because the Stage isn't meant to compete with or absolve the ol' Kemper, it's just a new form factor. It is supposed to be the same product. The Kemper is like a hot girl, it can get away with being a female dog, because everyone wants to get in on it anyway. That being said, this doesn't feel great to me.
I put ferrite cores on all my power cables and all my digital cables. The main power cable going to my Furman power conditioner is a high end $150 power cable, but from the Furman amd on to every rackmount I am using cheap cables because I have yet to find a high end C13 type plug. There are a few high end cables that have high end wall socket plugs and a high end C14 plug at the end, but in my search I didn't find any C13 plugs that are made to the same specs. So in other words, no C13 to C14 high end cables are available anywhere that I can find.
I am now wondering how much my high end cable really matters, and also, if putting ferrite coreson every power cable is somehow affecting my high end. Nice experiment.
By the way, I have also noticed that the reverb Volume parameter, which I usually morphed in many performance slots, has disappeared from every reverb ...
Ah, that explains why a bunch of normalized profiles became louder when I was zeroing out the effects slots.
To be honest, I kinda prefer that since the Kemper has a linear output volume control "at the end of the chain" anyway. Spreading out gain stages like that gets to be confusing. You can already outout only REV/DLY if needed, and there is already the mix parameter for reverbs, so you will never be at risk of your reverb not being loud enough unless the problem is that your entire playback system including dry tone isn't loud enough. That would be a problem with the playback system, however, and not caused by lacking a volume control between the REV block and output. You can already overload the output like 3x between the clean sens, rig volume, main volume, amplifier block volume, any boost/eq/compressor/clean gain, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a stage or two of added volume control on top of those, too.
Ofc I'm speaking in purely selfish terms here was your point for the reverb to feel like it was "growing" around the dry guitar tone, but with the dry tone staying at a constant level?
I only have one, but I dream of a second one too. There's two things I could see myself doing regularly, one is dual amps panned to each side, the other is layering distorted and clean guitar sounds. Or heck, just layering clean with clean and distorted with distorted. Lots of fun to be had.
In my dream rig, I will have a Switchblade GL, a Helix, two Kempers, an Eventide Eclipse, two PCM81s and a couple of pedal trays. Too bad the rate of technological development far exceeds my income.
I remember way back, hooking up my first guitar right into my audio interface and doing processing on the computer. I remember trying to record at like 10-12ms input latency (this was long before I understood buffer settings and so it was left in the default near-middle position) and feeling like it was unplayable.
Right now, I use a G10 Relay into the Helix, XLR out to Kemper, SPDIF back again, 1/4" out to two Strymon pedals and a rack compressor, back into the Helix a second time, then out to Powercabs through AES. In order to go from Kemper via SPDIF I have to use a box that translates SPDIF to AES, not sure if that has any inherent latency, but one should figure I had tons of latency in this rig. However, it's totally playable. There's no way I'm above 8ms latency. I haven't played straight into an amp in a while, but it feels like there is no actual latency, that's how tight it feels. So that's five rounds of AD/DA and any latency introduced by any of the four digital signal processors (five if you want to count the SPDIF/AES box) that are in line. That's just mindblowing to me. So in all actuality, it doesn't really matter. I don't mind when things are optimal, however.
Why would low values of Pure Cabinet help in this situation? I see the opposite.
I pictured a spectogram of a recorded guitar signal and how the pure cab seems to smooth out the visual peaks in a spectogram-like representation. So if we accept that fewer and smaller peaks in the signal equals less audible diversity (which isn't given, but I'm ready to make a case for it), and that more diversity = more complexity, on that basis alone I was ready to totally agree with the guy.
But only because OP described their tone as "dead", "sterile", "lifeless" and that it lacks clarity
First off, there's not enough information to diagnose your problem, but it is not possible that it is a matter of profile. If only a handful of profiles out there do it for you, "sterile" isn't the right word to be using. I'm not questioning your preferences, but a direct profile sounds exactly like the line out of the amp it profiles., so much so that people regularly fail blind A/B tests. There's probably a million Youtube videos like that.
You then proceed to say you want your guitar to be "dark", and that what you get is a guitar that sounds almost "happy". I read the word "scratchy". Overall I'm not getting a very good idea of what your guitar actually sounds like to begin with, and I'm not really grasping how you would like it to sound. When you say that it sounds "scratchy" and you want it to sound "dark", I'm assuming your guitar is pronounced in the mids, and you want a typical, mid-scooped BBE Sonic Maximizer sound, but without the high end. That is easily EQable, but there are parameters in the amp section that interact with the EQ. Clarity and definition both do something that sounds like EQ. If they are set too high, they will make the profile sound artificial (unnatural). There's also the "Character" parameter in the cabinet section. That too can cause some artifact-like things in your signal if set too high. And then there's the Pure Cab parameter which smoothes out peaks in the frequency spectrum. They all play a role in your tone, and the way you're describing it, it sounds like you should look at those settings and play with those.
What kind of guitar are you playing? And what kind of playback system do you use? FRFR speaker or cab? Monitors? Headphones? I'm just asking to ensure you've ruled out that it's the speaker you're using that is making it sound "sterile". And about the guitar because the "whine" noise you're describing makes no sense, so I'm wondering if you have a hollowbody or an LP and it could be your strings ringing out above the saddle or below the bridge. Either way, that's not something I've never heard anyone say about the Kemper before. Mine definitely has no whining noise on any profile, and I've probably demoed a few hundred profiles. They only ever sounded sterile or unnatural to me when those parameters I mentioned above were set to some out-of-whack value. Imagine if your playback system is bright and the person that made the profile you are demoing used a playback system that had a darker signature. Any settings in the profile would be dialed for that speaker that was darker than yours. Everything would sound brighter on your system. That could be a thing maybe?
I also know some people have reported that they updated their unit, and afterwards it sounded like shit (thin tone, I believe the word "shrill" was used to describe it and I connect that to your "scratchy"), but a factory reset made it sound like normal again. This is more of a long shot than anything else I'm posting, but thought it was worth mentioning. I've heard three or four accounts of people having that happen to them in the FB group.
Like others already pointed out, if you post a clip of what it sounds like on your end, it's way easier to understand what's up and give you the right advice. Also, suggesting a song with a guitar track that has a tone you like would benefit you as well.
Edit: okay, I just kept coming up with more stuff to add, this is my fourth edit lol. Anyway, check this out:
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This video shows you what the Definition parameter does to the signal. At 10, everything sounds a lot more scratchy to me than at, say, 2.
What can be a possible explanation for why SPDIF adds more latency? So that means, for live playing, analogue outs are more optimal? I just recently startef using SPDIF due to no AD/DA noise. Not sure it's worth it with added latency. I mean, I can't tell a difference, but I go wireless through a Helix into the Kemper and back into the Helix again and out to digital. Any latency reduction I can squeeze out is most wanted.
I haven't used a stop watch but to me , my Kemper boots up pretty much in the same amount of time as when it ran on version 4
Isn't that kinda like saying "I don't have ears, but to me that one sound was pretty much as loud as that other one"?
I don't know why this, of all things, was what I had to bring to the table today, I have never cared about boot-time as long as I owned a Kemper, but there it is. Not trying to start a fight!
I'm thinking they want to make each update have some kind of theme, for whatever reason. So if patch 5.0 was the delay overhaul, patch 6.0 was the reverb overhaul, and patch 7.0 will be the file system overhaul. Patch 8.0 hopefully OD / DS stomps?
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(Imo Kemper should have designed the menu’s like that right from the start ...)
In this video, he said they're showing the acoustic simulator at NAMM too. Did anyone see any vids showing that?
Just to be technically clear, if you put a compressor into slot A-D somewhere and run it into a high gain rig, you aren't compressing the gained tone. You are compressing the raw signal. It then runs into an amp model that makes it gainy and compresses it some further (but not necessarily). Using a compressor pre-stack would effectively change how everything sounds after applying gain, but it's not technically the same as placing a compressor after the stack and compressing the gained sound, which in turn would yield a different effect. It's the latter that is a supposed "no-no", and I suspect more so in a live situation than studio. I got the impression that that wasn't entirely clear, but it's an important distinction. Compressing the signal going into the stack can be very beneficial.
What about using the Helix for the second parallel Amp instead of a second Kemper?
You've probably tried it already, so what's your experience?
It definitely works. This is just GAS talking but two Kempers could have many uses. I picture being in some kind of band at some point, and I envision taking it way more seriously than anyone at my level of playing, nonetheless I would care about the overall product we'd create. I could use them for connecting 3 or 4 guitars to this one rig, elaborate dual amp setups on one guitar whilst chasing the elusive ultimate tone. But yeah it's mostly just GAS haha.
Another thing is, from the Helix to the Kemper there's added AD/DA conversions that potentially could cause phase issues. Two Kempers could be run at constant latency. This isn't an issue I've actually encountered although I only set up a quick patch to try it out. It sounded good to me then and there but I didn't qualify the experience. I could've just had unattentive hearing at the time. I dunno but probably it's just GAS trying to talk myself over about how good the idea is on paper lol.
What I really want is a huge rack with lots of blinking lights. Different colored Kemper screens. Lmao.
It would still be a closer approximation. It definitely feels like a 6.0 or 7.0 kind of huge feature update and I'd gladly welcome it. No more having to use several performance slots per amp, each rig is an actual entire rig. I've heard that the Kemper was released with more memory than it was actually using. It's not far-fetched that the unit could do it.
was your point for the reverb to feel like it was "growing" around the dry guitar tone, but with the dry tone staying at a constant level?
