It's easy to forget that at the end of the day the Kemper is also an extremely capable preamp.
Cool!
Posts by mikeSFO
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In my music room, I have both rigs stacked and can reconfigure to switch between FRFR and guitar cab fairly easy.
If you've been dialing and tweaking but aren't 100% loving your FRFR sound, never forget the Kemper works beautifully as a pre-amp too.
I definitely prefer running from the Kemper into my stereo tube poweramp then into guitar speakers. This is pure AITR and kicks you in the chest when cranked!
To each their own. Good luck.
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I too really like the widener, running to the dry L & R outs of my W/D/D/W at home rig. With this setup, all post-amp modulation and widening are part of the stereo DRY routing, kept completely separate from delay effects which are run to separate L & R speakers.
Hard to explain but in addition to the stereo soundstaging of the delay effects, the dry amp is also running in stereo thanks to the stereo widener.
The effect is hard to describe and really thrilling.
old thread: W/D/D/W For Ultimate Wet/Dry Stereo Immersion!
Here's how I described it:
"What a difference this made! The sounds are huge and crisp. Now, I am able to enjoy the natural phase-widening of true stereo chorus and all mod effects, AND the REV and DEL are completely separate in the sonic space. This improves the sound of both clean rigs and overdriven rigs alike. Kemper also has a useful STEREO WIDENER, which further enhances the phase separation of the modulation stomps. This feature works even better when it is not blended with reverb, as in this application.The resulting set-up must be experienced to appreciate, but if you are considering W/D separation and want to go a bit further for an ultimate stereo immersion, try it!"
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I definitely ride my vol knob and really find the Kemper to be amazingly responsive for edge of breakup subtleties.
I think they(GnR) did not have time to properly sit down and find their way with it.
It's OK.
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Great tip. I did not know about this one, but I recently added a pair of 44 Magnums to my rig to run my wet effects separately.
I'm so far very impressed with the clean power and form factor of these mini amps.
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Hi, mikeSFO,
Thanks for telling us more about your room....
Good reminiscing with you.
Cheers,
ST
ST,
Enjoyed reading your post. Thank you very much and cheers.
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Hi, MikeSFO.
Whew, you've got a lot going on there. Thank you for documenting what you're doing. The pictures are great.
Do you think you're getting any strange effects from setting up in a corner?
How are you using the Carvin Quad-X amp? I still have one kicking around here someplace. I never imagined using it in conjunction with the Kemper Profiler.
ST
Hi ST - thanks!
I've been running just the bottom 2x12 in that room for about 7 years now and kind of fell into that position as being fairly favorable for the room acoustics. That corner also provides a long dimension of 18 ft to a 1/2 wall, and a full 26 ft to the back wall. I presently do not have an issue with standing waves, however, I no longer play loud, and I sit within arms reach of the Kemper knobs, so my listening distance is overwhelmed by direct signal from the front of the stack. I did also decide to open the back of the guitar cab to further fill up that corner - at my volumes, I have not detected any issues with bass reflections, nor 1/4 wave cancellations, etc. On top of that, we are in earthquake country, so I need to figure out a solution to anchor all this to a wall, so i will be exploring that a bit soon.
The Quad-X was my favorite gigging pre- and I've owned 4 through the years (since early 90's). This is the last and I still love Ch1 and Ch4 and all the effects loops. At the moment I have it connected by XLR to the Kemper and I can use it as a pre- taking advantage of all the Kemper stomps.
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Great Rig
thanks Muddy...had a bit of luck selling a very collectable single overdrive pedal that funded the Kemper, footswitch, mission pedal, mini amps, several paid profiles...so it was a win!
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[This builds on a thread by Eric86 from Nov 11, 2020: Wet/Dry/Wet using cab and monitors? ]
Hi. In my practice room/studio, I've been running my Kemper Rack through a guitar cab for AITR sound. I use a separate tube stereo power amp which has allowed me to run L/R stereo.
However, I've always preferred the sound of W/D/W, and last year added 2 "broadband"-range1 speakers in a cab and a tiny pedal-sized micro amp to power one side of the wet feed. This has allowed very clean separation of the reverb and delays from the "STACK" feed, BUT does not permit stereo rendering of any of the mod effects, since they are not included in he kill-dry wet channels. The workaround to hearing any Chorus/Flange/Phase, etc is to select "MOD L" for the guitar cab, BUT that is MONO only.
[Power amp is a Mesa 20/20. Top cab is generic cab w/ pair of Celestion 12H-200TC. Bottom cab is a custom Jenkins 2x12 with Webers]
Next, I invested in a second micro amp and have set up a W/D/D/W configuration, employing both cabs in stereo. This results in MOD L and MOD R to each speaker of the guitar cab, plus WET L and WET R are still routed separately to the "broadband" cab. Here are the pair of electro-harmonix 44 Magnum power amps:
The output settings in the Kemper look like this:
What a difference this made! The sounds are huge and crisp. Now, I am able to enjoy the natural phase-widening of true stereo chorus and all mod effects, AND the REV and DEL are completely separate in the sonic space. This improves the sound of both clean rigs and overdriven rigs alike. Kemper also has a useful STEREO WIDENER, which further enhances the phase separation of the modulation stomps. This feature works even better when it is not blended with reverb, as in this application.
The resulting set-up must be experienced to appreciate, but if you are considering W/D separation and want to go a bit further for an ultimate stereo immersion, try it!
Lastly, running any WET-only(kill dry) output apparently prevents the Looper from being able to run in OUTPUT position (which is the only good way to use a looper, IMO), so there may be a trade-off if you are a looper power user. The looper only works in INPUT position, OR, you need to blend dry to your broadband cabs.
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God I used to hate that song.
Now I love that song!
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Bumping this older discussion to provide an update:
I added a fourth power amp and speaker to my W/D/W rig. That's right, I'm running W/D/D/W! The goal was to be able to achieve a true stereo chorus, since this is apparently summed in WDW routing.
I'm still testing and tweaking, but I'm not yet sure I am able to achieve true stereo imaging for chorus, flanger, and phaser. I thought I remembered the modulation effects having a STEREO parameter, but I no longer see that anywhere. It sounds wider, but that may be the physical separation of the speakers, and slight latency.
Stay tuned.
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Running MOD L and MOD R in stereo, in addition to the Del/Rev L&R (4 amps total), would get ya there, but who has 4 power amps and 4 separate speakers for this?
There should be a way to route all the MOD effects to the kill-dry WET outputs to allow for true W/D/W to include Chorus, Fla, Pha, etc...
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I have tried this. Ended using full signal in the monitors and dry in the cab. If I only ran the wet signal in the monitors I found it hard to balance the effect level. It was all over the place.
i sure do like using the built in looper, so i may forego "true W/D/W" and go that route too. I'll play with it more tonight.
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I haven't tried the looper in WDW... good question. Perhaps somebody else can chime in?
Isn't MOD LEFT specifically built in for that exact purpose? So stack plus modulation effects? I guess it should work fine like that!
I played with this more last night. So, moving stereo MOD effects to a "REV" or "DELAY" stomp location, does not do anything as far as allowing those to hit the WET outputs. Also, pitch transposer, chorus, flanger, phaser, are all in the MOD category, and cannot be used in stereo under W/D/W...as far as I can tell.
For now, I'll stick with MOD LEFT as my guitar cab output. The only thing I'm really missing here is a true stereo chorus. The clean stereo delay effects routed to their own wide-ish range speakers are so worth it.
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I do this pretty regularly! I have the dry signal through the Kabinet in the middle and two active studio monitors on left and right with effects. Sounds massive! Just set the Main Output to "Delay/Reverb wet", connect your monitors to those, and set the the Monitor Output to "Stack". Try it, you won't be disappointed! I even considered bringing small monitors to the stage for using this setup live, but hasn't happened yet since Covid etc.
I really struggled with dialing this in because if you choose STACK, then you'll be missing flanger and phaser...UNLESS, if you place all those in one of the delay/reverb stomps, does it route correctly?
As a stopgap, I changed STACK to MOD LEFT and now I get Stack plus mono MOD effects coming thru my guitar cab. Do let me know if you have discovered a workaround.
Also, running this W/D/W setup apparently prevents the Looper from being able to run in OUTPUT position (which is the only good way to use a looper, IMO), so if i want looper, i need to reroute MONO wet to my stack...which defeats WDW, obviously.
Anybody find a way to fix the looper limitation with this??
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If i'm reading you right, yes, that is what I'm running too.
I have 3 power amps and run "MOD LEFT" (stack + mono modulated effects) to a custom 2x12 guitar cab. Then I run "WET L/R" (kill dry delay effects) to a PA cab.
This gives all the amp in room gut punch I ever want to hear(Mesa 20/20 EL-84 tubes power stage), plus crystal clear echo effects.
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Regarding front loading vs rear loading speakers in cabs, I am no expert, but have done this experiment with every cab i've owned and have personally observed:
1) a great sounding guitar cab sounds best with speakers rear loaded. The cab imparts more of its character to the sound.
2) front loading speakers results in less cab color, more true speaker tone
As such, I've front loaded my FRFR 2x12 cab for this reason and would suspect this will achieve a less colored speaker response. FWIW.
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The day this was announced, I saw the email notification on my phone and immediately ordered the 2020 pack with the homealone discount(sweet!).
I've had a few days to go through the profiles, and IMO, the quality of Michael's work just keep getting better. For a first timer, I'd highly recommend you start with this pack as a springboard and add from there.
Great work, MBritt!
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Hey, Mike.
Out of curiosity, have you tried Ctrl-F5 to force a refresh after you get the error?
He'd mentioned that in the past he had security issues that have since been sorted. If you hard refresh and suddenly it works, it would be an indication that you're hitting an old cached version instead of the current site. Should that be the case you'd need to clear your browser's cache.
Thanks, i'll try it!
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It works. I guess it's your virusblocker or your firewall settings.
I do not doubt that the site is working, Michael said so himself. But, I cannot access it. I've tweaked my security settings but not having any luck. Just strange that I have not encountered any other websites with this issue on my browsers.
