Help me get rid of my pedal board

    Ok people, I have been thinking about this for awhile and I can't figure it out. I want to go 100% kemper and get rid of my delay and reverb pedals once 4.0 comes out with the new delays. Probably going to have to keep my overdrive pedals and compressor because I sold my amps before profiling the overdrives into the kemper. Oops. I'll deal with that later on.


    Anyway, let me explain how I use my kemper in conjunction with my delays and reverbs.


    1) I always use a basically clean profile. I switch up which profile I use from day to day or show to show, depending on how I feel, but the gain is always relatively low, never more than 3 LEDs.


    2) I run my entire pedalboard into the front of the kemper.


    3) Delays: I use the eventide timefactor. How I have it set up is: 99% of the time I use the same 4-5 delay presets, and just tap in the tempo of the particular song. These presets are: Quarter light, Quarter Heavy, Dotted eighth light, Dotted eighth medium, Dotted eighth digital U2, slapback (16th note low repeats), heavy tape ambience for swells. For solos I usually just use the quarter light preset or slapback if it's country. ALL DELAYS MUST HAVE TAILS, meaning the trails die out naturally after switching the effect off OR switching presets. Abrupt changes drive me nuts.


    4) Reverbs: Strymon bigsky: presets are small, medium, and large, that's it. I'm not married to the bigsky, I just have it for the quick access to the presets so I don't have to turn knobs. Fine with using the internal kemper sounds for these. Again, ALL REVERBS MUST HAVE TAILS.


    5) Modulation effects: Sometimes I use vibrato, less often I use tremolo, that's about it. Need to be able to turn these on and off independently at any time. Again, fine with using the built in kemper sounds for these, and almost always use the same settings.


    6) Volume pedal. Planning on getting the Mission EP1-KP for this function, but I'm not sure I need that extra toe switch since the kemper remote already has the 4 switches built in. It would really be nice to turn on and off my "swell delay" preset using that toe switch though!


    I need to be able to switch all of these independently as I play 3-4 shows weekly with different sets and prefer switching my delays and reverbs on the fly, per song, rather than programming everything in advance.


    So, is it possible to set all this up internally in the kemper and use the remote or another midi controller to turn stuff on and off? Or would I have to use the timefactor & big sky in an always-on kemper fx loop and control them via midi to call up the presets? If this is the case I'd rather just keep them on my board, otherwise midi doesn't help me simplify and lower the weight of my rig.


    Is any of this possible or is the kemper restricted to 1 reverb sound, 1 delay sound per rig?

    As far as spillover trails, using Kemper delays and reverbs do this just fine even when changing rigs. The difficulty you might face is that you'll need to create several rigs in order to have different combinations. At the moment, you can have one modulation effect, one delay effect, and one reverb effect in one rig. You can save their on off status and assign a footswitch to turn each one independently on and off. The Kemper remote, or any midi board that can send CC as well as PC messages can accomplish this. Though supposedly 4.0 will let you put delays other places, but even if so, your basically limited to the ability to switch no more than 4 effects on and off with most midi options and the Remote.


    Where you might have difficulty is in the various combinations of those mod, delay, and verb settings that you like to use together at the same time. And then figuring out how many of those combinations you'll need quick access to, since you your limited to 5 per bank. So first step is to determine how many combinations of effects you use. If it's quite a list, using the Kemper this way can be a hassle. This is because you'll need to create many duplicate rigs that contain the same exact amp just so you can have quick access to the various combinations of effects you use. So if you then decide that this amp sound needs an adjustment, or want to swap it for a different amp, you'll need to lock it, then you have to go through all the rigs that you use and hit "save save save".


    I have the eventide H9, which I use in the loop. What I love about it is that I can have as many rigs as I like in the Kemper, and can even control it with the Kemper if I want, but also can quickly dial up any of my H9 presets anytime I want, with any rig I'm using.


    As far as saving space, the Remote or any midi controller that gives you the ability to switch on and off effects will take up as much space on your pedal board or more as your eventide and strymon. As far as cable runs go, you'll avoid running cables for your eventide and strymon (assuming you put them in the loop now) but you'll add either a cat5e cable from the Kemper to your pedal board or midi cables.


    Thus the benefit is that you can quickly go from various combinations of effects with a single press. This come at the expense of needing to create multiple rigs with the same amp so that you can quickly go from sound to sound, making the editing of that amp a hassle.

    Thank you, this was very helpful. Looks like there's no way for me to get my current setup any lighter, though I can't complain too much since my entire rig is just my pedaltrain 2 with hard case and a 3 space rack unit!


    Maybe when 4.0 comes out I can store reverb presets in 3 of the FX slots, and use a 4 button aux switch with 2 TRS jacks to turn them on and off, thus saving me $500 on the bigsky =)

    Quote from strabes

    Maybe when 4.0 comes out I can store reverb presets in 3 of the FX slots, and use a 4 button aux switch with 2 TRS jacks to turn them on and off, thus saving me $500 on the bigsky =)


    4.0 has been advertised to contain Morphing. The new delays and reverbs are supposed to be released later.


    BUT - with 4.0, you will not NEED more than one Reverb Slot for Small, Medium and Large Reverb. You can set up Morph to give you Small Reverb with the Pedal at the heel, Large Reverb with the Pedal at toe, and with other pedal positions, all the sizes in between.


    Yes, the Kemper is restricted to 1 delay and reverb sound per rig, but if you use performance mode, you can have 5 slots each with a different delay or reverb and all using the same other effects/stomps.


    You can absolutely use the Kemper to get rid of your pedalboard. I use the remote. I have a performance set up per song with the tempo preset for each. I play at church and need to cover a lot of ground and find it easiest to preprogram my set list and just step through them as I go. Otherwise I can get lost, ha ha! But you can set it up to have a standard setup per slot as well. I was just recently experimenting with this concept, which is just what you would probably want to do. What I did was set up a performance with a different type of delay for each slot:


    Using the delay types from your example:


    Performance 1:
    Slot 1: Quarter light
    Slot 2: Quarter Heavy
    Slot 3: Dotted eighth light
    Slot 4: Dotted eighth medium
    Slot 5: Dotted eighth U2


    Performance 2:
    Slot 1: Slapback
    Slot 2: Heavy Tape Ambience for swells
    Slot 3:
    Slot 4:
    Slot 5:


    This type of setup would work if you use a specific reverb each time you use a specific delay (say you use the heavy hall reverb with the heavy quarter note delay every time)
    If not, a better way to approach it might be below:


    Alternatively, you could just set up a performance (or rig if you don't want to use performance mode) for each delay type, then have a slot for Intro, verse, chorus, bridge, solo each with different reverbs. (This is basically what I do except that I save it with the song name and tempo.)


    In that case performance 1 would be Quarter Note heavy, performance 2 would be Quarter note light, etc.


    Not sure if you would want to use the remote, but it works pretty well for this with performance mode. But, it doesn't replace a pedalboard in the sense that you would have to change the way you think about the way you approach it. It isn't a big grid like a pedalboard concept where you just turn on and off whatever effects you want per song. I came from a pedalboard probably similar to yours and went to using the Kemper and remote for all my effects and it works pretty great. With the new delays and hopefully more reverbs to come, we should be in even better shape than we are now. I don't really miss my pedalboard at all at this point, this is just so much easier. Setting up a preset per song only happens once, and then every time I play that song, I just rearrange my set list. It is pretty nice.