Hello from Skinny Puppy and London After Midnight

Okay, it's been a couple weeks now. I've recorded with this thing and had several several rehearsals with it. Still "happy as a clam" =)

I've programmed 3 sets of music with 3 different bands in PERFORM mode. That's 35 songs all with changes in the slots. And that doesn't even come close to filling this thing up.... clearly I need to be in more bands =P

I'm still tweaking the sounds for the SP set, when I'm done with those I'll post the profiles. HOWEVER- I cannot label them with the song titles. As that would let the "cat out of the bag" and Matthew could potentially get his nuts cut off..... not good. More to come on that.

Hope everyone is well, more late night ramblings from Matthew!

Tomorrow is my first live show with the Kemper =) Time to take the new car to the track. It's an underground show my friend and I are producing, it's called "LA Dark United Underground". We had a write up in the LA Weekly, give it a quick read if you're interested.

Admittedly I'm hard to keep track of, I have 4 music projects (Skinny Puppy, London After Midnight, Timur and the Dime Museum, and Indradevi). The latter is playing tomorrow, it's electronic meets SE Asia with guitars. I'll put my video link at the bottom. I automated the Kemper to all of the backing tracks via MIDI. No more tap dancing for this guy!! Once I got my head around it, it was quite easy to program. I just send out program changes on a selected MIDI channel. I'm using Ableton Live, I made MIDI regions in the arrange window. The MIDI region sends out a program change. It's visual, I can easily line up the changes with the click track. I needed over 128 slots, you just have to change the bank number. From there you start over and go up to 127. Easy peasy. The longest part was dialing up guitar tones.... also the best part! Hard to keep focused, I kept playing for 2 hours instead of programming the changes. Meh, makes for another good/sleepless night =)

I must say, computers and technology have come a long way. No more synch issues, just set it up (keeping CPU efficiency in mind) and BAM! It's really a good plug and play system. Especially with Indradevi, I'm running

-6 backing tracks
-automating 2 MIDI keyboards with multiple instruments (Including the monstrous Kontakt)
-automating the Kemper via MIDI
-video playback for all songs.

It's a 5 year old MacBook Pro with a solid state drive, and I'm running around 35% CPU. Gentlemen (and distinguished ladies) to sum it up in a single word.... SEXY.

Okay, I'm done with my rant. I'm getting lots of music production done over here, it helps me to puke it all out. So..... sorry to puke on everyone =D

Hope everyone is doing well, and as promised:
INDRADEVI "Step Away"

Aaaaand the Kemper did GREAT =)

Had some technical difficulties with the house sound, that's to be expected in a warehouse gig. My set up was golden =)

Feeling good about this thing.... real good

@ project_grudge I'm using the good old school wedges for now... That's in the process of change. I need to get an in ear monitoring system, like today. Any suggestions? I'm thinking about running the click into the Kemper alternative input and mixing that to the headphone out. I'll plug my in ears straight into the Kemper, that way I hear the click track and my guitar without touching the playback system.

@ acrobats No floor pedals right now, the MIDI program changes are being sent through Ableton (in arrange view) over a MIDI cable from my 828 into the Kemper. Hands free tasty goodness. For Skinny Puppy I'll be using a pedal, because I'm not running the backing tracks. I'd rather not tether into cEvin's system, just to make things easy as possible. This festival gig is coming up in June (and for those of you that have done festivals you know..... it's always a cluster****). So I'm going to use my KMI soft step via MIDI to control the Kemper. Same basic control- program changes in Performance mode, just coming from another source. If you're unfamiliar with Keith McMillan Instruments I would check them out, there's nothing like them right now.

Things are looking good in guitar land. What I'm trying to figure out right now is connecting 2 audio interfaces together either ADAT or firewire. It's actually RAINING in LA right now. Good day to stay in and work on music =)

Check out this SEXY picture =)