The Kone thing ya'll mentioned. Here's an idea. I don't use a Kone so perhaps I'm off a bit. There's like 16 kone types or whatever right? Perhaps someone could start a thread where they list factory cabs or even commercial ones they have found that get pretty close to the sound of the kone. Perhaps ones they've tried in multiple PA systems?
Posts by Grooguit
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And like you, I use my Helix LT for effects, running dual IRs, etc with my Kemper. I don't see them as competing but augmenting each other.
One weird thing I found with the Helix is the reverbs. When I researched buying the Kemper most reviews said the Helix had better effects. But to my ear the Kemper reverbs are much better. Of course they may have been updated since the reviews I saw. But it was a pleasant surprise to hear how full and rich the verbs were. It is such a great investment to own because it constantly gets better.
* I could use the pod go to supplement, but don’t as the kemper effects do everything I’m looking for. Unless it’s a light spring or similar, I run about 1.0 of ducking on wet effects. Let’s me have all the sustain and ambience I want and hides the wet a bit when I strum a fuller pattern. Keeps me from needing to toggle. In most cases I can just leave on whatever wet effects I’m using on and let the duck handle it. But if you like this generation of line 6 effects, they are good, to complement the KpA, the pod go is a good way to go from a price point.
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As others have pointed out, they learned the hard way about letting out their plans for a release in advance. Since then, they've slowly and steadily released various updates after a decent period of silence. Each one has been worth the wait. Honestly, being with the KPA since 2013, I haven't been disappointed in a firmware update yet.; pitch effects, performance mode, delay updates, morphing, reverb updates, the editor, the kemper drive, the kemper fuzz, and may others were all home runs and prioritized active guitar players over feature junkies that enjoy pontificating over possibilities over playing. And the KPA has been, in my opinion, the best thing on the market at any point in time over its life. There's things they got right from day one; things that still no one else does (automatic volume compensations and a ducking parameter on most effect types, for example.) I've found that one characteristic of KPA updates is that they sacrifice "wouldn't it be cool if" for "this would be a very musical tool that musicians will love even if it doesn't sound splashy". For example the kemper drive vs, a dozen disconnected very similar models of almost the same overdrive circuit.
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But does that make sense....assume recession lasts 1 year
Oprtion 1 release now - you release product. Year 1 you sell 50% less than if there wasn't a recession, year 2 you sell 100%
Option 2 - you sell nothing in year 1. You sell 100% in year 2 and some of the 50% that you would have had from year 1but.....you only get the revenue 12 months later and some may have gone elsewhere. So it's always going to be less...
It made sense in my head
I'd say if you've had a product in development, you release it whenever it's ready. the R&D is a big part of the cost of bringing a product to market, so if it's ready for market, you can't recoup those costs until you start selling. Musicians aren't immune to pressures from the economy, but they're also the type to throw the piece of must-have gear on a Sweetwater no interest payment plan and call it a day. When you're talking recession, obviously it can vary from product to product, but you're probably not talking in a 50% cut back in sales, even if substantial. But the break even point that even a small cut back can bring isn't recouped by waiting; if they aren't buying your new shiny product in a recession, they ain't buying your old one either.
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I got one of these for my church for other musicians to use, using the KPA Stage exclusively myself. I was leading for a student retreat this past weekend and only playing acoustic, so I brought this along and left my Stage home, and it did that acoustic job just fine. Prior to going, I finally put the Pod Go through its paces making the best electric preset I could come up with and the best acoustic preset I could create; I had done the same for bass a while back. .
Pros: Software editor was easy to figure out. I was able to get enough effects going at the same time for most situations. The amps cabs and effects are identical to the Helix, but with a much more limited routing and number of effects capabilities of course. For the electric, I was able to find a amp/cab pair that I liked a lot, just using the built in models. Nothing that came close to rivaling the 3-d quality, warmth, and touch of good Kemper rigs mind you, but sounds I'd be fine using in a pinch. I was perfectly whelmed, nothing more or less. I was able to dial in some effects and snapshots to get a lot out of that Preset that sounded great. Then I duplicated it and made some adjustments to that for more variety.
The effects in it are quite good, lots of variety. Using one of the made for DI amp models, I was able to get a great acoustic sound in combo with a compressor model, EQ and reverb. Not better than my favorite Kemper acoustic rigs, but good enough for a good acoustic sound. Similar thoughts about using for bass guitar.
I wanna say it switches presets faster than the Helix if I remember from the brief time I owned one. Still no spillover between presets, but fast enough that it would be good enough in a lot of situations mid song. (helix can do spillover now if you forgo literally half its processing power!)
Cons: When trying to set up snapshots, you have to do this silly step of assigning each parameter a number that you want to altar per snapshot. Why wouldn't it just be auto when you select a second snapshot and start twiddling knobs? Kind of a nuisance.
I forgot how much I hate having to manually compensate volume on a digital all-in-one. In each snapshot, I wanted to tweak the amp gain and the overdrive model gain, so I was back to the good old days of going back and forth and compensating the volume cuts and spikes after each minor adjustment.
(As a side note, this one unheralded feature of the KPA, its volume compensation, has been a huge time saver since it's inception, and STILL is not found in ANY other all-in-one ever created.)
The effects, though good and numerous lacked many of my favorite things about the almost all kpa effects. I missed being able to use the ducking feature on any of my post amp effects like I can on my kpa. (The Pod go's dedicated ducking delay was quite limited otherwise.) I missed being able to mix in a touch of reverse delay in any delay types to soften the attack of the repeats. I missed having similar controls for filtering the high or low end on all the delays and reverbs.
Finally, I found the process of tweaking snapshots a nuisance. Would have been so much easier to have made a copy preset, tweaked that, make another etc. You can do that, but snapshots are a must when a unit doesn't have spillover between presets like the KPA has.
In summary: for $500 (mine was a B stock so even less) you can't go wrong. If you like the Helix effects, there isn't a cheaper way to use several of them at a time with your Kemper, don't think you have midi capabilities though, so perhaps the next model up, the XL stomp would suffice, minus the built in expression pedal. Since it is also an excellent backup rig with enough foot switches and an expression pedal, I'd highly recommend the Pod Go as a backup rig for KPA owners, or a rig for use in sketchy places.
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Check to see if the pre post settings within the delay and reverb blocks, (also remembering that only those two effect blocks allow spillover.) Not at my KpA at moment but one of the other, pre or post settings, allows spillover the other by nature doesn’t.
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A way to assign more than one thing to buttons. It would be nice to just have assignable buttons that could each turn on/off specific groups of effects. Pretty much like multiple morphs, but that could be assigned to buttons. Rather than click one to turn on a boost, another to turn off delay, another to turn on a chorus, etc. when I just wanted that new combination. And yes, I know I could have whole rigs set up for each, but then you get into all the more rigs and performances to maintain. The way I think of it would be a named preset that has all the options set that I'd want. Then just one click to toggle everything from that preset on or off as it was defined. I guess that would be scenes in other devices.
You can do that now and have been able to do so since the Remote was released like 6 years ago. Simply hold down effect button (A, B, C, D, X, Mod, Del, or Rev) and press one of the four back row footswitch on the remote or stage that you'd like to assign it to. Repeat for each effect block you'd like to be affected by that foot switch. If you want the on off status of each effect to be different: press the effect button so that the effect you want to be on is lit up and make sure the other effect block is off. Then press save. After you recall that rig, the one effect will be on and the other off. The assigned footswitch will then turn off the one effect block that was on, while simultaneously turning on the one that was off. I believe you can toggle up to four effects this way with a single footswitch. Even better, there's four color coded lights surrounding each of the four footswitches so you can see what type of effects you have assigned to that footswitch.
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I think it will become a common place to see them in future flagship multi effect units. People will want the units to have them even if they don’t use them personally much, kind of like the Steve Vai-esque wild pitch shifting stuff that’s been common in pricey all ones the last decade aren’t used regularly by the majority of guitarists.
The guitar will always be a popular instrument because of the things that it does uniquely well. But if one is looking to push the boundaries of non guitar sounds, a midi keyboard will always be a superior choice. This is due to the inherent limitations of the guitar: only six strings that can be played by four fingers in whatever combinations are physically possible given the limited stretch of a single human hand. (apologies to right hand tapping possibilities that advanced musicians can do) but the keyboard is superior note for note because one of your hands doesn’t need to be reserved for plucking the notes that you’re holding down with your other hand. You have 10 fingers on two hands and those two hands can be stretched 5 or more feet apart. It’s why you can teach a five-year-old to play single note melodies on a keyboard in a relatively short amount of time. Play the same thing verbatim on a guitar would take vastly more developed skill. Same goes with chords. You can show a person with no experience how to hold down GBD to play a G chord in 30 seconds and watch the same person struggle for weeks to learn how to play the first G chord without it buzzing. -
Black and white thinking. Of course NAMM isn't the only way for companies to advertise and make connections. But it is one way. And for many companies a worthwhile investment of time and money to participate in. For others a work related activity that persists irrespective of its value.
Ever have a job in which you get a certain budget for pro development? Get to fly/drive somewhere, stay in a hotel, go out for some meals with some friends or colleagues, attend a conference for a couple days, get out of the office and daily routine. You sit through some workshops, get some swag, hear a bunch of presentations that tell you stuff you've mostly heard before. You go home, not much changes as a result of info you probably could have gotten had you ordered a book on Amazon. But you keep going each year. Why? Because doing something out of the ordinary, even if expensive is fun. Same reason people spend enormous amounts of time and money planning to go on far away vacations to sit around and do the same things they could do within an hour of where they live.
For the big dogs, like Gibson, it's understandable for them to skip. As they have that rare iconic branding that ensures they will always have market share and significance even if less known companies can put out products that surpass theirs in quality for less cost.
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I have been trying to get a midi message out of my Kemper to my H9, so far no luck. I am in performance mode and I go into system settings, I can see where it has midi adjustment and have messed around with them .. but so far I can’t seem to figure it out …I am on channel 1 in the Kemper and the H9 is set to Omni ….But I don’t seem to be getting anything …If you got any advice I sure could use it
on the h9 set it to channel one to match the midi out on the Kemper also set to one. (Or set them both to 2 or 3 or 4 or whatever). Then within a rig within a performance the soft button slot setting or something like that you can set a midi message PC 1 up to PC 127. You match that number with whatever H9 preset you want it to trigger. It’s also important that one effect block on the KpA has the H9 in it and it’s turned on of course. Then save the performance. When each time you go to that rig it will trigger that preset. Do the same for every rig in a performance you want it to trigger a preset on the H9.
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People buying Kemper in 2022 isn’t buying because of 2012 merits. It’s because software makes it up to date. No need for new hardware, as long as they «sit around all day and design updates» the Kemper will be as potent as it ever was, and steady income is guaranteed.
I absolutely adore Kemper for it. Longevity. It’s refreshing!
I won’t dispute it. But people like shiny new things. I bet half the people that have and still use the current KPA would buy a new version if they sold one. Musicians see a new product in a catalogue and they have to have it.
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I could see a new product coming; I could see the continued slow and steady release of new updates for a few more years. I wouldn't even be surprised to see minor updates coming out for years after a next gen kpa is released. If I had to guess, we'll see minor updates and some more effect types coming out. In particular, since this unit can handle multiple delays and reverbs, even used in other effect slots, so it should have dsp to handle some more complex modulation effects, perhaps other advanced effects; seems a logical next step.
There's likely many possibilities that could be conceivably done with this hardware; for example some sort of Scene feature like the helix; maybe even dual amps; a couple extra effect blocks? The problem, though is that what may be possible from a firmware and DSP standpoint still has to be logical from a hardware standpoint; on units that don't have dedicated buttons for new features. Keep in mind that they now have an editor and IOS software that need to be updated to accommodate any new features they roll out.
Hard to speculate when, but there's a certain point at which it is no longer logical to expand firmware beyond what the original hardware was logically laid out for, vs. designing hardware around all the features you'd like to add. There's also the financial reality that a company needs a steady income of new sales to pay people to sit around all day and design updates.
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Would be great if Kemper could also send midi change control commands to Eventide as you change profiles (for all I know this may be possible already, but would require additional midi cabling which I haven't gotten around to experimenting with just yet... now if they could do midi change control via bluetooth....that would be something!).
you can in perf mode. You can send pc messages when switching rigs. I used this set up before the delay and reverb updates. The downside: any time the H9 receives the same command as the preset it’s already on, it resets the preset and cuts off the delay trail. If you want preset 9 (say a go to delay) to be on when using say just rigs 1,2 and 5 of the performance; you may have other reason for going from rig 1 to rig 2 or 5, such as gain stages. But you don’t want the delay trail to reset. It won’t, if you only programmed the first rig to send the midi message of preset 9. Suppose in rigs 3 and 4 you want a different H9 preset or just turn the H9 off with trails in tact? If you want it jump from one of them to rig 5, you’ll need rig 5 to send the midi message PC 9 to so that the H9 switches. But that means you can never seemlessly go from 1 to 2 or 5 without the H9 resetting. So the H9 in my opinion, for life purposes anyway is best used as a Swiss Army knife for a few occasional high end effects of which the kpa’s are inferior (not many) or if you don’t mind manually controlling it or don’t need it for effects with trails.
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Both Durans use kempers?
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I believe you can still download reaper for free and use it. It’s full-featured even in that demo mode which is just annoying more than anything. It’s the most CPU friendly
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The cheaper option is reaper. It’s like 80 bucks it can hold its own against the $500 programs. granted some of them come with a bigger package of plug-ins, but the reaper plug-ins aren’t bad either. Super easy to use very intuitive and they have great organized tutorials for everything on their website
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I’d recommend putting the real amp in another room, micing, and isolating as much as possible, hearing what it sounds like in the same monitoring system you will be evaluating your profiles with. Otherwise the comparison is apples and oranges between your real amp and the subsequent profile. You need to know what your amp sounds like through your monitoring system mic’d up. If you don’t like that sound, you won’t like the sound of the profile.
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I think If they were going for a different model, it would be the amp/cab sim small pedal sizes thing, maybe three foot switches, tbe size of the line 6 pedal. Where it’s key use would be to plop on a traditional pedal board, for players who want a KpA solely for its amp and cabs.
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Might I suggest some Saran Wrap in the meantime? In 15 seconds you throw a couple layers on top of the most vulnerable areas after set up. It would least protect against spills. Certainly not waterproof. But the vast majority of any liquid spill would make its way harmlessly to the floor am not into open jacks or spacing around buttons.
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Sure. Or just record two mono tracks to begin with.
you could always record a stereo track for simplicity and editing and split the stereo track to two mono tracks during mixing as needed. But If you recorded then in two mono tracks, you’d want to group the tracks for editing so you don’t move or cut one without moving the other with it.
