A question to the 'KPA pros' on this board...

Send Andy Innes (Andy_i) a Private Message.

He's just come off a 3 month tour of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France and Monaco...not one problem with his KPA during the entire tour.
He's been touring the world for 20 years with the Johnny Clegg band.
He says it's the best live tones he's ever had, and every sound engineer they used throughout the tour agreed.

Andy would love to talk to you as well.

Everyone’s a fan of Mr Diamond, and HH.

I was one of those who had many problems with the KPA. Reboots/freezes when using MIDI etc. - got the KPA for ~ a year now (pioneer unit)

I didn't have any issue in the last 5-6 months!

Always nice to hear of heavyweights considering the Kemper for touring. Here's my 2c worth:

For our 2012 US/Canada/Euro tour (bus and fly dates) I decided to jettison my heads, cabs and G-System in favour of the KPA. My main concerns (being as I was already 100% happy with the sounds) were OS stability, power, patch controls via midi and fail safe redundancy (i.e. if the thing crashed, was there a solution that would let me keep playing).

After a considerable amount of testing, I settled on the following (there may be far better software versions out now, but this was true for June of this year):

Firstly, I ran two KPA units next to one another, both feeding the FOH simultaneously, cloned via USB stick (so identical patches and settings), switching via midi thru so that the signal from my foot controller changed both units simultaneously, monitor out for the IEM return was rigged to a Lehle a/b, so if my main KPA fell over, one tap on the A/B and my sound would be back in ears.

To get the guitar sound to both units, I had a Lehle P-Split at the end of my chain that popped signal out to each one.

OS - I froze the OS I was using at 1.04. This seemed to be stable, had the least reported issues and deficiencies at the time, and gave me access to all the tones and FX that I require.

Power: I had a racked 1Kva UPS unit powering both Kempers. In the event of stage power going down, which only happened once during the whole tour, on a soundcheck, the KPA was the only thing on stage unaffected.

Controller: I was using a Midi Moose for patch changes and a FS-6 for stomps (you could use two, but I only needed the one). I expect the bespoke unit that Cristoph is building will be more elegant. The key element of that for me was the midi thru.

I can't speak to the reliability of the continuous control volume messages, as I use the master vols on my guitars for swells and the like. I have been considering putting a volume pedal on the board, but that would be a real volume pedal affecting the levels pre the KPA.

Note: I use a Fulltone Clyde wah ( too hot for Kemper, apparently). I had to jettison that in flavour of a slightly less hot Cry Baby. I couldn't get the wah tone I was looking for out of the KPA, but that could be operator error

For soloing, rather than use an internal stomp boost, I opted for an actual volume change, so I saved a new version of the sounds I needed for solos under a different name (e.g. "Mesa Rdstr Vintage B SOLO") to get the 5 or 6 db kick I needed. This ended up working just as well as the EP boost I had been using before.

I had one unit in a Thomann road case that I imported from Germany and one (the backline rental unit) in a Pelican. The KPA in the Thomann case remains in showroom condition after about twenty flights and daily truck trailer load-outs. The case, of course, looks like a war horse now. The Pelican was slightly less suitable for the job - was not quite the right size and had foam inserts to pad the unit. Heres the Thomann case: http://www.thomann.de/de/thon_…_kemper_profiling_amp.htm

There's a bit more info and some pics here: http://andyinnes.com/wordpress/?p=58#more-58

Let me know if you need to know anything else about my experience. One thing I can tell you is that the post-gig geek-flies-to-poop attention-grabbing factor of the green German radio toasters is exceptional. I had a little crowd of techs examining the glowing units either at soundcheck or after the gig on every date, oohing and aahing. When quizzed on exactly what they were, I delivered my usual post-show punchline in my best William Shatner voice: "that, my friends, is the future of live guitar sound!"

Quote from Radley

Are you using extensive midi functions successfully now, such as what I described, or more?

yup. No problems so far. Even made a computer based editor with NRPN controls etc and didn't have any issue

I use KPA live 8 months now ( not all the time,but more than 40-50 gigs maybe). So far, I haven't experienced any major issue freeze, reboot,or whatever, but only I had sometimes volume instability, using an expression pedal via my MFC. In this case I plug straightly to the exp volume input on the back of the KPA.

To be honest, the first 3 months I felt insecure to use KPA live, reading all these issues that people encountered to this board, so I had my Axe 2 as back up, connected thru a Lehle AB box, but never needed it..
Regarding the last firmware I can't say that's more stable than the others, because I never encountered any issue!! Weird!

Quote from Radley

mDan - Thanks for your input also! Which OS version are you running?

Always the newest from the beta group.
Regarding CC #7 - it works also when switching rigs

I second the CC#7 maintaining correct relative overall volume between patches. So far, no volumes issues since I started using MIDI controls.

bd

I control everything in the KPA with MIDI (volume, wha, patches, stomps) and I have no problem at all.
I'm using a cheap Behringer with Uno chip waiting for a serious official foot controller.

Hey I saw Radley on TV last night. It was on Later... with Jools.

Mr. Diamond and the band sounded great.

Quote from Radley

Obviously a replay. Was that the show we did with Paul McCartney & Band? It was a career highlight for me to hear and talk to Paul that night!

Yep that's the one. How old was it? That was the first time I saw it. I love that that show. So many different artists. Neil sounded very good. And Paul also.

Anyway some good acoustic playing there Hadley.
Peace