Posts by Per

Contrary to the suggestion that refining is not necessary I find that with some difficult amps (such as my Mark 5:25) you may need an extended refining time to get things to settle down correctly, but the Kemper does eventually get there. With these amps a short amount of refining as shown in the demo videos is not enough, in fact it can make things seem worse. By extended I mean 5 to 10 minutes of just jamming out on the thing in case you were wondering.

Personally I feel that the Kemper still has some wiggle room to improve on it's profiling process, it's amazing what it can do right now, but there are still those 5% of amps that can't be profiled. I'd love to see it solve the poweramp problem and inbuilt noise gates and sag/bloom/compression modeling too (which would also be cool because then you could profile classic compressors as well which would be epic).

Obviously the one missing piece to the Kemper. You know you want it, complete with cassette loading sounds of course. The strobe tuner going nuts just isn't enough...

You can't please everyone all of the time.

As an individual you can really only focus on getting one maybe two things done at once right? In development it's the same deal. Every user out there has their own priorities. The trouble is that it takes quite a lot of time to develop new things and there are far fewer developers working on a project than there are users.

So to get anything done at all the devs really have to split the difference to figure out what's best to work on next. Sometimes that means figuring out the number one request, other times that's going to mean pushing through till a single feature is "complete" while there is momentum there, yet other times it's going after the low hanging fruit.

For you delays are not that important but for plenty of other users it's a big deal. The opposite is also true, later on Kemper will be working on features that are important to you, but other people will be grumbling about how Kemper doesn't want to pay attention to what is clearly the biggest gap in it's feature list. Hopefully though people will grasp the nature of development as otherwise Kemper can't really win and that's not fair to them because they're working hard to bring us these great features for free.

For me personally new delays aren't as high a priority as maybe reverbs, or some form of room convolution verb IR creation during profiling, or more tremelo LFO shapes, or an editor, or well half a dozen other new features. But I get why Kemper have continued focus on delays, and what a big deal these are to many other folk, I also get that all of this stuff is just gravy on top of an already great dish. I don't *need* anything extra, to make good music, the Kemper does what it sets out to do and then some.

So be patient. The Kemper is already massively different from when it was originally launched, eventually whatever it is that's most critical to you will get it's day in the sun.

Quote from Monkey_Man

You're a freakin' streaming service, Per.

LOL! Well these only take an hour or two to churn out, so be grateful that I have a job and get burnt out, because otherwise techincally I could knock out quite a few more of these (although in the process I would most likely get quite a bit better). Sadly for me and joyfully for you and everyone else, real life

Of course my idols are pretty much the same as everyone else, namely those old school session musicians who would think nothing of churning out a couple of albums per day (or more!). Wrecking Crew (east and west coast), Swampers, Funk Brothers, those boys in Nashville too, and their equivalents elsewhere in the world. Now that's speedy production!

Well... it's a wall of noise, seemed like a topical fit for a name. The fun you can have with a les paul and some super high gain profiles :D.

Thanks for listening Zapman!

Hey guys, thanks for listening.

I actually had to go and find that Vai track as I'd not heard it before, cool sound. I do love Vai, but honestly I don't really know his music, it's more that he's an inspiration in his total passion for music to the point of being a completely relatable nerd (though never let him know I said that). I'll take it as huge compliment that you're seeing Vai influence in one of my noodles, he is one of the shred gods, even if I'm sure it's more the use of divebombs and that brutal hard shaper distortion stomp than technique or musicality which is bringing him to mind.

Some more unlistenable nonsense. This time I decided to dig out the old Strat and give it a bit of an airing while exploring some dirty ass tones to be found among the FX section of the Kemper.

I think there wont be a solution. It's possible there's something wrong with the monitoring signal chain but I'd assume the OP has tried different options there to eliminate that problem.

Just in case the three main ones are :

1) Studio Monitors - Signal chain Kemper->Convertor->Monitors
2) Headphones -> Signal chain Kemper->Heaphones (obviously you wouldn't want to use the headphone outs on your convertor when testing in case it's the convertors DAC that's at fault, so pick the headphone out on the front of the Kemper itself)
3) Cab - Signal chain Kemper->Power Amp->Cab, if the Kemper is powered you can just plug right in to a cab with a speaker cable, if not you can always shove the kemper into the loop of your guitar amp, basically using it like a pre-amp. No matter how you do this just remember to disable the cab emulation on the output.

Honestly though, the Kemper really does sound exactly like the source amp 99% of the time. Most guitarists even those that think they really know how amps sound mic'd up tend to bias themselves and imagine that they're more magical than they really are, so cognitive biases kick in.

A couple of things are not captured by the Kemper. One is room reflections. It'll get the frequency response of the room as part of the sound, but not the reverberations or any background noise. You can try to compensate for this a little either with the onboard reverb, or just by dialing up the "space" parameter in the output section. Personally I find the space thing sounds more like recording in a toilet than real room verb, but it's one area where a good Convolution Reverb in your DAW after the event with a nice room's IR can complete the sound.

Another thing it doesn't capture or rather doesn't separate is the microphone. The "Pure Cab" setting (also in the output as well as in each cabinet's settings) is an algorithm designed to reduce the effect of a mic and give you a sound more similar to direct out when using FRFR studio monitors or headphones. It's effectiveness is really governed by which mic was used on the profile, with some profiles it's amazing, with others it can introduce flub.

Then there's the fact that it doesn't capture different settings of the amp, e.g. it would be great if you could take two different profiles, set the Kemper up to know what the settings were on each and then have it extrapolate the inbetween values. Even if it were only changes in the gain dial. As it is instead it captures a single snapshot, and the further you adjust values on the front the further you get from the original amp. It still can sound good, but at the same time it doesn't quite sound or feel right.

And of course if you want perfect separation between amp and cab you will need to do a full separated profile using a DI load box.

Basically the Kemper is truly awesome, yes it actually does sound like the real amps and respond like them too, it remains after 5 years still the pinnacle of amp simulation at this time. But it comes with a bunch of caveats. It's not the end of the line for amp modeling, just another step along the way, a huge step, but still, it's not perfect. It may just not be right for you. You may need to wait till either Kemper or a competitor comes along and overcomes these hurdles.

Yes, something is very wrong, definitely contact support. I also get the same result as sinmix and the others when reamping, the difference is so great that i wouldn't have even guessed it was the same profile.

...or that there's nothing new to be leaked.

NAMM is a week away, gotta be patient. Though the delays were released only a couple of months ago, I'd be very surprised if they were showing anything substantially new in that timeframe (unless they've got staggered projects, but I don't get the feeling that's how they work), just remember how long it took to go from announcing the delays with an actual working demo to them being released. Development of such big features can't be quick.

Oh and of course it's not going to capture the room, so forget distant micing and turn it up.

Don't play through both without someone else doing the switching, otherwise cognitive bias will kick in. Compare the sound in a sterile way, record a dry track to reamp and use that to compare. Record both re-amps, share them here.

Great job, really fun track!

Great playing, UI looks very clean, the tones do not sound good to me though in that video, very muffled very compressed, very digital drenched in room verb (maybe a bad IR?) rather than real amp in a room sounding to my ears

To me it sounds like a basic no repeat single 1/2 beat delay, you can use either the single delay or legacy delay for this using the bridge pickup and of course you need to be fairly tight with the galloping riff itself but it's not that complex (just to be clear here the bass note open A string pattern is not the result of delay but playing that actual pattern, two stop chord, rest, A, A, chord, rest, A, A, chord, rest, A, A, etc).

Looks very Helix like. Same guys that did 11r but it's not clear if this is an Avid offshoot company or if they're ex Avid employees. Either way right now there's not a lot to go on, it just looks like an early render and some generic marketing fluff, the clean design is appealing though, lets see how it sounds when it lands.

I could have sworn Kemper had some KPA logo adorned cabs at their booths in years past too though. Just branded stuff though for the display, not products.

Well they only just released the delays, so my money is on just a more straighhtforward display of "this is what we've got now" rather than showing anything new. If they do though, reverbs seems the most likely to me. I'd be super surprised if they'd made an editor, there's been no mention.

What I'd like to see still is the loop compare mode during profiling, so the idea is during profiling you could record a loop of not just the Kempers output but also the amps, then hitting a/b would silence the amp and switch between the two recordings, to help you really compare (without manually reamping and comparing that way).

Another gadget I'd like to see is maybe an output reamp box. You're thinking "What? Why? It already reamps" Think of it the way, plug your guitar directly into your amp, play it, now plug your guitar into your Kemper, and the Kemper into your amp for profiling mode, play, notice the difference in sound? Now I hope that this is due to something other than any loss of dynamic range (specifically peaks) due to conversion and my gut feeling is simply that the DAC cannot offer the same output voltage and impedance as the guitar, a little booster on the out could probably sort this out without lots of stabbing in the dark, plugging and unplugging etc. I think the original outs were aimed to be mic level as they would primarily output to boards and profiling would be something you don't have to do as often.

Hey guys, thanks for listening. I've actually updated the track slightly with a piano and acoustic guitar section as well at the beginning and a little mix adjustment.

@Zapman - Oh yes indeed :D, totally lifts the piece.

@Monkey_Man - Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.

@Sharry - Yeah I love that era of Jazz too, gotta work on my bass side though, right now it's just "Jazz-ish" but hopefully I'm somewhere in the ballpark of the overall vibe.

@waraba - No worries. Thank you for listening!