Posts by Chris Duncan

    It try to never sell gear unless I REALLY need to (i.e. the wife finds out). You never know when it might come in handy again somewhere down the road.

    I lived by that philosophy for most of my life. As there's currently no wife, I don't have to get things approved by the purchasing department, which of course leads to even more gear. Buying the Kemper really just set off a chain of events I'd been thinking about for quite some time.


    Lots of amps lying around, many of which rarely got used (one of the things I sold was a Lab Series L5 that I bought in 80 and probably haven't played since 83). Some of the stuff that did get used, a Marshall and a Fender in particular, were 20 years old, had been in the shop a time or two and hadn't been quite right for many years. Probably leaky caps or whatever other indignities come with age. There was also studio gear of a similar nature, like a pair of NS-10s that had been on a shelf for over a decade (life's too short to subject yourself to mixing on NS-10s).


    So, I used the Kemper as an excuse to clean house. I now no longer have to worry about old tube amps getting sketchy or taking up lots of storage space with gear that I simply don't want to use anymore. No more bad pedal board cables, scratchy stomp box inputs, power / ground adventures, bad tubes or the rest of it.


    The pack rat in me (a loud and persistent voice) said, "Yeah, but you never know when it might come in handy!" It was shouted down by the OCD part of me that starts to twitch when the clutter factor gets too high, which replied, "Screw that. Buy it if you ever need it again. [Expletive deleted] unlikely." And so, off to the garage sale it all went.


    I thought I'd feel regret over not having it around, just in case. I find that I don't miss it even a little. In fact it's incredibly liberating. With a toaster and DXR, I have a rig so small that I'm still amazed by the size of it. And yet, I have a thousand times more good tone options than I did with all that stuff I'd collected over the years. I can walk into a room with the toaster & remote slung over my shoulder, the DXR in one hand and a guitar in the other. Life is good. Of course, that's not without it's problems.


    Now what the heck do I spend my gear money on? :)

    A question for G String or the other Kemper guys...


    The new reverb beta is 5.7.xxx. From what I've been reading, overall it's pretty stable with only a few known issues.


    Are you guys planning on doing some fixes and then putting up a production 5.7 release with the reverbs, or will 5.7 stay in beta and the next official production release be for 6.0?

    Update:


    Aaaaaand its back.

    I changed not a sing,e thing, yesterday morning it worked, evening it didn’t.

    I’m clueless.

    Did you run the test I suggested where you turn off the Kemper and completely disconnect every cord of every kind from it, then listen to your DAW / audio setup to see if you hear any noise there (you may need to turn up the volume higher than usual to confirm / deny the presence of the noise)?


    I would do this first before contacting support.


    If you get the noise in your other audio stuff, it's probably electrical line noise. If you don't, then as stratdude suggested, it's likely a problem with the unit and time for support. Best to isolate where the problem is before taking the next step.

    This will probably sound a bit strange to many, but I've lately taken to buying refurbished Dell precision T3500 Workstation Windows 7 boxes off of Amazon. For around $250 I get around a 2.5 Ghz Xeon chip & 12 gigs of memory. The box only supports 24 gigs, so I max the memory, throw in a better video card (particularly if it's a video editing box) and for around 500 - 600 bucks have a workhorse full desktop that's easily upgradeable.


    My studio is running one now (with another hot swap spare sitting in the wings since they're so cheap). Haven't had any reliability issues from it being a refurb. For the classic rock oriented studio stuff I do (Cubase Pro), I'm not running 500 track sessions, so I can load SSL strips on every channel plus all the other plugins I need, and it's never squeaked once.


    Full disclosure, I'm a professional geek, so I'm comfortable with this sort of thing. That said, if you're okay with replacing some swap out components, this concept is certainly high in the bang for the buck category.

    Maybe this is a dumb question but were you able to somehow test and confirm that the low volume originated from the Kemper itself? I didn't see anything like that in your description but I may have overlooked it.


    I mention this because it seems unlikely that any of your Kemper settings would have magically changed, so unless you've verified that it's low coming out of the Kemper itself, perhaps the glitch is faulty gear somewhere downstream in the signal path.


    My default approach for debugging usually starts with eliminating as many moving parts as possible from the suspect list.

    Running just one or the other is easy enough but combining them is a real pain.

    The first thought that came to me would be to just run the electric and the acoustic into an A/B/Y stomp box (electric: A, acoustic: B -> Kemper input: Y) as presumably you'd only be playing one on any given measure of the song.


    Am I missing something?

    Afraid that it's too complicated and afraid that I went over my head buying two very technical products at the same time.

    I've only had mine a couple of months. I think you'll find that you can wade into the water at your own pace rather having to dive into the deep end. I was up and running with the toaster in a matter of minutes. Plug it into the wall. Plug a speaker cable into my 4x12 (I have the powered version). Plug guitar into the front. Browse to any of the installed profiles. Play guitar. At the most basic level, it really is that simple.


    Rig Manager was equally easy to use, very intuitive. Drag a few profiles into a performance slots. Press the button on the remote. Play guitar.


    There's lots of exploring you can do but none of it requires terribly deep diving. This is a fundamental difference between the profiler concept and the modeling concepts of Line 6, Fractal, etc. You don't have to wade through a ton of menus to build up your sounds. You just pick a profile, press the button, play guitar. Want effects? Push and hold an effects slot. Browse to the effect you want and (dare I say?) play guitar.


    I make a living as a software developer, so I'm not afraid of complex technology. I just don't want to screw with it while I've got a guitar in my hand. Even if the Kemper didn't sound so incredibly good, the ease of use alone is awesome.


    Don't worry. You'll get up to speed in no time. And when you have questions, this is an unusually positive and friendly place as Internet forums go. Guys around here go out of their way to be helpful. They've certainly been patient with me.

    Usually one tends to use bridge pickups for solo and neck for rhythm.

    A guitar is still a guitar. If that's how you play, it'll be the same with your Kemper. It's just an amp. Every time you change profiles, close your eyes for a moment and pretend a band of half drunken elves ran in and yanked the Marshall stack off the stage while an equally rowdy (but quiet) group snuck a Bogner into its place. Open your eyes, you have a new amp. Play guitar. That's really all it is.

    why do you guys think normal pedals are still so popular in the market?

    Guitar, like any making of music, is a highly personal experience. Everyone has their preferences, for different reasons. There is no right or wrong. It's just a matter of finding the path that you're most comfortable with. Some guys like pedals. Some (like me) delight in placing them on the shelf where they can sit, undisturbed, for the rest of their days.


    Besides, the elves have fun with them when the lights go out.

    [speculation]

    You forgot your closing [/speculation] tag.


    Now we're going to have to assume that everything else you say today is speculation. :)

    For "amp in the room" people, this will be a God-send

    I think this is the target audience for the speakers.


    If you're sending your output to FOH, your stage monitor isn't a factor (unless you mic the speaker, which is kinda like owning a hot rod then getting out to push). So, I suspect this will be a) to make playing more enjoyable for the amp in the room guys, and b) to deliver that kind of tone for the small gigs where FOH isn't involved.


    Any way you shake it, a great idea that I'm sure will go over well once it hits the streets.