Posts by Chris Duncan

    Wait. That didn't come out right...


    The JCM 900 and Vox AC15H just walked out the door, and that's the last of the batch of amps I put up for sale. I kept my Rocktron Voodu Value preamp because that was my gigging rig for quite some time and it seems prudent to have a backup, even if it doesn't sound like a Kemper. Otherwise, the only thing left from my previous environment is the 1960a 4x12 cabinet and a couple of Crate cabs with V30s.


    One V30 + the Kemper will be my new gig rig, and hopefully whatever band I find will let me monitor IEM and run mains into the board, so the cab is just for the thump. Best of all, I can fit the amp, the speaker, a couple of guitars, a few cables, etc. in the car and still have room for the Passenger Side Blonde option I ordered along with the new Vette. I mean, you know, whenever GM gets around to shipping it.


    I shed no tears as the amps went out the door, and I'm not going to miss them even a little. This is the holy grail rig I've foolishly tried to build over the years, one versatile setup to get all my tones, each just a MIDI PC away on a gig. The closest I ever came was the Voodu because it actually has a 12ax7 in the preamp. Not bad, but still nothing like this.


    This living in the future thing certainly has its moments.

    I was going to suggest this, Chris.


    I take it you have sound(!) reasons for remaining on Win7. OSX or a later version of Win shouldn't get in the way like that, I'd have thought.

    Very sound (!) reasons. In Windows 7, you can disable automatic updates and download them (or not) to install at your convenience. Murphy dictates that the update that hoses your environment will always happen on a day you don't have time to screw with it.


    In Windows 10, you can no longer disable updates. You can defer them, but that just pushes the problem to a later date. Ultimately, Microsoft now installs what it wants, whenever it feels like it. And as the debacle with the recent October update (where it actually deleted people's data in the process), that's too high a risk factor for me.


    The desktop version of Windows 10 doesn't do anything 7 didn't already do. Per usual MS style, they just put a coat of paint on it and moved things around. One day, I'll find myself needing software that no longer supports 7 and I'll have to figure out how to deal with it at that time. Until then, 10 doesn't come near any box on my network.

    Solved the midi concurrency issue by just using two different midi devices and routing accordingly.


    That said, after connecting Toast and failing on the initialization as mentioned previously (dump length mismatch), it apparently has an adverse effect on the state of the Kemper when trying to control things, e.g. the input source from input to reamp causes intermittent cutouts on playback. Not terribly surprising since the data syncronization didn't complete successfully. After shutting down Toast and rebooting the Kemper without connecting Toast it behaves properly again.


    Really wanted to love Toast, and I salute Damian for spending his spare time writing it, but for my environment the best solution is to just bring the amp into the control room.


    Many thanks for your efforts just the same, Damian!

    I'm fishing for a solution and hope some of you might have one.


    My environment is Windows 7, 64 bit. One of my use cases is running Cubase and ToastME at the same time but that's not possible because both do an exclusive open on the MIDI ports.


    In the past, I've used Hubi's Midi Yoke, which allows you to set up a virtual port mapped to the physical one that multiple programs can talk to at the same time. However, that's pretty long in the tooth and apparently doesn't play nice with a 64 bit environment.


    Anyone know of a more recent midi mapping program that provides this functionality?

    You definitely need a studio eq post-amp, I'll be back home in a couple days and can share the settings I found work for my beyerdynamics dt880

    I'll second rabatavus about EQ to taste.


    I just tested on some Audio Technica ATH-M50s and as you might expect, it's not identical to what comes out of the reference monitors. In my particular environment the effect was subtle, akin to turning down the Presence knob by 1 and maybe a slight low mid boost, but of course that's really all about the headphones, not the profiles themselves.


    That said, you would have no problem doing a little tweaking so that they feel closer in your cans to what you'll get on the mixdown.

    Indeed, you only had my wholehearted endorsement as a bass player to go by, Chris, which admittedly counts for nothing. :D


    Seriously man, as I said earlier, IMHO the KPA totally rocks for bass. I wouldn't dream of buying anything else for it, which is such a blessing on my budget and was a very-pleasant surprise when I first bought the unit. Totally-awesome, man.

    Okay, smarty pants, so it turns out you're a bass player. Who knew? :P


    Need. More. Coffee.

    ADAT / Mackie CR-1604 and ROMPlers all going into a portable DAT machine

    We've clearly chewed some of the same turf. In a previous lifetime my world was guitars / JV-2080 -> 24 track ADAT -> Mackie 2408 -> Sony DAT. The dust cover for that mixer still serves today on the Yamaha, as it did on the D8B before it. Patchbays and outboard effects, twitchy gear (Alesis compressors!), ground loops, rewind buttons... I don't miss that stuff even a little.


    And to touch on AJ's comment about always including a DI track, at this point that's the only thing I'm recording. As long as the profile I'm playing through for monitoring has the gain / feel of what I'm going for I can just focus on the performance. When I'm done, I can reamp, drink coffee and scroll through Rig Manager until I find the exact tone I'm looking for, then just press record to render the actual audio. Reamping with this thing is a dream. I press Input, turn one knob and I'm done.

    How are these sounding through headphones? If these were made with humbuckers then I'd be interested in giving mbritt another go. In the past they were too dark for my headphone setup.

    I'll do some headphone tests today and report back.


    I have, however, used them with my IEMs, which are custom molds from Ultimate Ears, and they sound pretty much like they do coming out of the studio reference monitors. Obviously I don't expect ears to reproduce the degree of low end a speaker does, but other than that I've been very happy with how they're represented in that context.

    I've been experimenting with biamp setups for some of the crunchy classic rock stuff I'm working on, typically panned hard left / right with one a bit more saturated and the other with more definition on the attack.


    The first pairing was a Friedman / 5153 from Crank n Go. I also dropped in a Soldano in the middle for a bump on the chorus just to see how it would sound. The next song used the Boggy Sheba with a 69 Marshall from Crank n Go / 69 Marshall. The last of the night used the Boggy Helos from Modern and went back to the Friedman on the other side for a bit more bite.


    The way I approached it was to just track a single DI, then after auditioning, rendering the selected amps. If you bring them in too close you can get into some mild phasing / comb filtering but panned hard left / right it all works nicely. I actually experimented with double tracking but that produced slightly more phase issues than the single DI, so I went with the latter.


    Of course, this is just a night of fooling around to see what plays nice with what. Each one of these amps sounds great, all the way down to that subtle sizzle you get in the harmonics with cranked tube amps. Very responsive to the even slightest nuance of picking. My brain tells me that this is just a computer simulation, but my fingers and ears insist that it's the real thing.

    I have a clean rig (clean trichorus 5) but with the lightest touch it explodes in red on the mixing desk. I unchecked every fx within the but no improvement, I set the gain on the mixing desk to zero and still the VU-meters are clipping. My main output is set to -12 dB. Input sense and distortion sense are set to 00.

    I'm out of options. What do I miss here?

    Since we don't know each other I don't know what your technical skill set is, so apologies if any of this is too obvious.


    Desks typically have both the fader and an input / trim level. Your faders generally won't have any effect on the input signal, the input gain knob will. Turn that all the way counterclockwise, or as "down" as it'll go (zero is very often not "off" on a digital console). Then check the meters. Most likely you'll have no signal. Then you can start turning it up until you're at an acceptable level.


    If that doesn't do the trick, let me know what brand / model your mixing desk is and I'll take a look at the signal path. Main output from the Kemper of -12 sounds reasonable so it's probably a matter of getting your input levels set.


    Also, are you going straight from the main outs of the Kemper into your mixer, or are you first going into some kind of additional preamp, e.g. a Neve module or something like that? You'll need to check the input gain for each step you go through between the amp and the channel on your mixer.


    In general, when debugging this kind of thing, the best solution is to turn all of them (except the amp) all the way off, verify you have no signal, and then work your way back up from there.

    These look awesome...but is anyone else getting a "Site Not Secure" warning when they try to take a look?

    [edit]

    I just checked the site and they are in fact running SSL, so no clue why you're getting Site Not Secure. I even tried manually typing in http://, but it automatically redirected back to https as it should.


    I've deleted the commentary about SSL as it's no longer relevant.

    [/edit]

    The PROFILER does not run Linux.

    Actually, that makes me feel better. FOSS is great for a lot of things, but there's a vulnerability as well since by definition everyone has the source to your stuff.


    Whatever it is you guys use (or rolled on your own), it's very responsive.

    The entire signal chain, from guitar to what comes out of the speakers, will affect how much the harmonics leap out at you. I've found that the high gain profiles do a really good job of giving me what I would expect in that area.


    When I can hit the damned harmonics, that is.


    I played Strats for ages but a year or so ago got a PRS that's become my go to guitar. And because of the different scale, the thumb harmonics aren't where my hand is used to them being on a Strat. I can hit them, of course, but muscle memory still wants to drift back towards the bridge. Stupid fingers.

    :thumbdown:
    Linux can run on a realtime kernel mister.
    Linux is running inside more boxes than you may think.

    "Linux is only cheap if your time is worthless." Only true if you are dependent of a mouse ;)

    I haven't coded for *NIX since the early days when Xenix / BSD / etc. had PC versions, but my very first job was for QNX, which truly was a real time, interrupt driven architecture. You could request and reliably get an interrupt at exactly every x milliseconds, etc. They couldn't compete with MS and ended up targeting the embedded market, which is where I believe they still live.


    And that's about all I remember of that world before becoming a card carrying member of Microsoft's "API of the Week" club. But it pays the bills.


    My understanding of Linux, which is purely anecdotal, second hand information, is that it more closely resembles AT&T's System V, i.e. the typical round robin scheduling, etc., which would make me inclined to believe that it's not natively wired for realtime applications. Do factor this in with a very heavy dose of, "I really don't know what the hell I'm talking about," of course.


    That said, one of the cool things about Linux and open source stuff is the fact that, well, it's open source. I don't know how much work it would take, but I see no reason people wouldn't try to mod the kernel for realtime work, since it's used as an embedded OS in so many devices these days.


    Of course, embedded != realtime. They're different things that may or may not be present at the same time.