Hey guys. Had my kemper for about a year, loving it completely. Sold all my amps, cabs, and mics.
However I feel like I'm not using it to its full ability because I run my traditional pedalboard right into the front of it, which limits me to mostly cleanish profiles, and since I'm not using midi to control the kemper's fx, I have to duplicate a lot of the kemper's features on my pedal board (pitch fx, tremolo, phaser, volume, etc). On profiles with any amount of gain above a slight breakup, any amount of delay and reverb above a very light slapback / small room verb starts sounding really bad quickly, since I'm running reverb into distortion which doesn't make sense.
So I want to start running my wet effects in the kemper's loop and using midi to control them. The problem is that even though I'm 20+ years into this thing, the extent of my midi experience is sending midi clock data from the SMARTclock to my timefactor a couple years back.
Here is my current pedalboard:
[Blocked Image: https://i.imgur.com/7U5v3uN.jpg]
So here is how I am envisioning my future setup:
1) Pedalboard: midi controller & expression pedal controlling volume on kemper via midi, plus my wireless receiver, compressor, and drives going into the front of the kemper.
2) timefactor and big sky in the kemper's loop in a rack drawer.
First a couple questions:
1) I know I would have to program the particular stomps I want on every rig I use. Can I use the copy/paste feature to copy (for example) a tremolo setting from one rig to another?
2) I pretty much use a few different AC30 style profiles all the time, and want to possibly start eliminating some of my drives by using rigs with different amounts of gain controlled by midi. But once the midi controller is programmed, would (for example) hitting button 1 still turn on slot X on whatever rig might be active at the time?
What I need from a midi controller:
1) I would need the midi controller to turn on and off stomp and fx slots on the kemper, regardless of what rig is active at the time.
2) must accept an expression input or two for post preamp volume control
3) preferably lightweight
4) most importantly: must be able to activate at least 3 reverb presets and 12ish delay presets from the timefactor and bigsky independently at any time. I'm ok with banking up and down a couple times to get to different delay presets since that's what I do now on the timefactor.
5) must be able to somehow get tap tempo input and send that via midi to the timefactor and the kemper (for tempo-synced choppy tremolos). Not sure if the kemper can turn tap tempos into midi clock data, or if that would be done at the midi controller. If not, I own the disaster area smartclock so that could solve that problem if absolutely necessary.
6) it would be nice if I could hit one button and have it switch to a clean profile on the kemper, a particular reverb on the big sky, and a particular delay on the timefactor. This is a sound I use all the time so it would be nice if it were always one tap away.
All of this would allow me to get rid of my volume pedal, pitch fork, obscura delay, and zoom ms-50g, and have way more flexibility with the kemper profiles. The only disadvantage would be that during setup I'd have to run a midi cable on the stage in addition to power and 1 audio cable. I can live with that since in the future I might end up being able to eliminate my drives completely by using a combination of different rigs and kemper stomps.
So do you guys have any recommendations for me??
So far I'm looking at:
Disaster area DMC-8D.
Rocktron midi raider
Voodoo Labs ground control pro