Posts by Chris Duncan

Quote from keem85

Yep kemper was stable for good 24 hours now when remote was disconnected.. Gonna put the remote back in now when I go to bed.. Chris Duncan I'm just thinking out loud here: does the kpa require significant more power when remote is plugged in? So much so that the shared power outlet could not deliver? Guess I'm gonna see tomorrow.

Edit: there was also looper material in the memory during idle crash. Maybe having materials in the looper memory of the remote makes the kpa crash, even though its not used. Just food for thought

I don't know anything about the specs for power and the remote.

The looper sounds like another thing to test, but I'd confirm / eliminate the remote as a potential culprit before moving on to the next thing.

Quote from Wheresthedug

Putting a Transpose effect in either Stomp C or D. Running parallel path with a compression in Stomp A and maybe even a tiny hint of a distortion or Shaper in B to add a little grit and attack. Run the Parallel mix pretty low though. You only want it to give a little hint of a note because it's an octave up but it makes all the difference in my opinion because it tricks the listener into thinking there isn't any latency.

Thanks, man. I'm going to have to play with that in my application as well, might give me better results than including the DI.

As an aside, I've been playing with octaves this week for some Deep Purple stuff (Lay down, stay down). It's there in general but still trying to get it dialed in. To my ear all of the pitch / transpose stuff imparts a different tonal quality that I'm still getting used to.

Wow, great stuff, man. Enjoyed both the song itself and also the sound you're getting.

Pedal steel is often very bright and twangy, and while that's appropriate at times (grew up in Texas with my parents listening to 60s era country), for this song the warm and full sound you get fits perfectly in the mix. Also very tasteful playing. But then, my rock pedigree notwithstanding, I've always been a sucker for good pedal steel.

Look forward to hearing more of your work!

I'm my studio stuff, I generate the bass with a very simple, free vst plugin called 4 Front bass, which emulates a Fender Jazz. The main difference to Harry's scenario is that the pitch shifter isn't required as it's designed to properly emulate the lower pitches. I then reamp the signal through the Kemper's factory bass profiles.

I was previously just doing the "EQ / compress the DI" thing with the 4 Front and was never all that happy with the sound. The first time I brought in a Kemper bass track it made a huge difference in the quality of the mix.

Quote from Wheresthedug

I would also try mixing in just a little of the normal guitar signal for some attack. It was a common technique back in the Motown era to have a guitar doubling the bass line to help it cut through.

Cool, never knew that.

I'm going to experiment with including some of the DI along with the Kemper, perhaps EQed a bit to emphasize the higher end. I assume Harry's focusing on live applications so he won't have to fight this battle, but one of the challenges of modern mixing is that it's very common for people to listen on their cell phones or pads.

Without earbuds, the bass can disappear almost completely, so the Motown trick can help keep the bass line from vaporizing. With earbuds (at least Apple's), the sub frequencies are massively hyped. So, to keep the bass from washing out the entire song, I find I have to do some high pass filtering that again can diminish the bass. Either way, whether it's my DI or Harry's Strat, having a bit of extra bite on the top end will probably make for much better definition of the bass lines.

While tuning probably indicates metal, if you offer a bit about the style of music you're playing it would help people make recommendations.

Like guitar amps / settings themselves, some shine brightly in one genre but not so much in another.

Quote from keem85

Chris Duncan morning here now. Kemper is still going strong. I now suspect it's the remote that I disconnected yesterday (that was previously always connected). That's the only logical explanation at this point. Gonna continue to test the kemper without the remote throughout this weekend and see.

It sounds like in this amount of time previously you would have already encountered the random problem. What I would do now is reconnect the remote ("one change only") and go at it for a while. If it doesn't reproduce, perhaps even doing the overnight test again, this time with the remote plugged in.

If you can get it to happen with the remote, and then get it to stop stop without it, that's a pretty decent data point to offer the Kemper folks.

Should this theory pan out, while the remote may or may not be the actual cause of the problem, it would at least be a trigger. Either way, it's useful stuff.

Okay, I got it figured out. Many thanks to Robrecht for his highly useful thread,

Kemper midi automation thread

In the CC50 - 54 events, I had the LSB set to the default of 0. As he points out, you need to include a value of 1 in keeping with other things that want 1 / 0 for on / off. I set LSB to 1 and it now works as expected.

I went back over that section of the manual and I couldn't see any mention of the need for this data. Perhaps I'm staring right at it and missing it just the same. If not, perhaps this could be an update to the manual whenever the next revision is released.

Quote from mollydyer

Hey- I'm doing this today. I don't use PCs at all - it's all control changes. CC#47+value of performance for the selection, and then 50-54 for the slot selection. It's much 'cleaner' -I don't need to remember what PC+Bank is for what. Much easier.

I'm having difficulty getting this to work.

Sending CC 47 with (performance - 1) in the data does change to the desired performance. However, CC 50 - 54 only preloads the slot. The Load soft button and Exit button then flash, waiting for load confirmation. If I press the button, the slot loads.

I've tried sending two CC 50s in a row, and spacing out 47 and 50 by a full measure to give it time to process 47 before sending 50. The flashing load button is the only result I get.

The manual has this to say about CC 47:

Values 0-124 preload Performance 1-125, if “Performance Load” is set to “Pending”. One of the CCs #50-54 then loads one of the Slots, if this Slot is enabled

I've verified that Performance Load is in fact set to Pending in System.

So, what am I missing to get the slot actually loaded when firing CC 50 - 54 without pressing the button?

Quote from keem85

RE hum, no that wasn't me AFAIK

Oops. My bad.

The other person had noise problems that we ultimately chased to bad power sharing stuff.

That said, that alone wouldn't be likely to cause DSP errors. If you had a bad power spike that scrambled the unit, like what happened to me, that's a different story. But if that happened, there would probably be more gizmos showing symptoms than just the Kemper.

Quote from keem85

Wow yes, I run it through shared power outlet! And that power outlet is remote controlled also.. Thanks for pointing that out.. I will follow the one-change-only rule to Chris, and then try it directly to the wall outlet afterwards.

But again, someone mentioned earlier that power inconsistency should not be an issue, as he was using something in between himself.

Keem, wasn't it you who was having a hum / noise problem that we chased for a few days?

That's a good point since he was having trouble with that. And if that's the case, there could certainly be damage to the unit.

I live up around the horses and cows (and the occasional coyote) north of Atlanta, and the power company here has a very casual relationship with quality. Last year a power spike took out my $3500 mixer and a couple of other items. There's only so much juice you can pump into a gizmo before it gets snippy about it.

Welcome to the rabbit hole. Hope you brought your wallet.

And carrots. We're big on carrots.

Quote from keem85

Yeah! When you mention taking steps to reproduce Chris Duncan I have now disassembled the KPA Remote so that the KPA is alone. Nothing to "trigger" it if that makes sense. And since the crashes did not occur during any activity, I will leave the amp on when I go to bed now. We'll see if it crashes or not during the night.

EDIT: And to answer your question about residue, yes it wipes everything. Presets and all that.. Like wiping a phone dead clean :).

Yes! That's the kind of thinking I was talking about. The more you can simplify the test, the more possibilities it eliminates. Presumably you're leaving your guitar plugged in and everything exactly the way it was when it crashed except for disconnecting the remote.

Rule #1 of debugging: Always change one, and only one, thing at a time. Otherwise, you'll never know what it was that caused the problem / solution.

Quote from keem85

It's no residue of the beta now, since I've wiped clean everything and flashed the new OS with factory settings.

I don't have any experience with doing a factory reset. When this is done, does it wipe out all of your profiles / presets / effects / etc?

If it doesn't, and you have any remaining stuff that was created / updated while you were running the beta, that data could still be a source of trouble.

Quote from keem85

The latest you quoted is actually very interesting that nothing was done at the time where it lost contact.

Random stuff is the absolute worst to try and figure out. I don't doubt that it happened when you were doing nothing, but that doesn't help you find a solution. The trick is, can you find a reliable way to make it happen? That's the fooling around part I was talking about. If you experiment a bit until you encounter the problem, then follow a couple of hunches, you might be able to find a way to make it reliably happen, over and over again.

Even though it can clearly happen in a random fashion, if you can also find a way to reproduce it, the Kemper guys might be able to take that information and come to some conclusions. If all they have to go on is a completely random, unpredictable event, it's really hard to find a solution.

Just trying to find ways to help you get it sorted.

For small setups, I've had good experiences with the Steinberg UR-22 ($150). It's a two channel USB audio interface with good quality preamps, and it comes with a free version of Cubase that will probably meet your needs for quite some time to come.

For that you'd just need mic cables. You can take your monitor out of your Kemper to your FRFR, and your L/R if you're using stereo effects into the UR-22. Alternatively, you can run mono out of the Kemper and also record the DI from the Kemper. Reamping is extremely easy.

Of course, in addition to the audio interface and cables, you'll also need studio reference monitors. Inexpensive options abound, but as an example, Mackie MR524 5" Powered Studio Monitors are $300 for a pair.

If you think you had GAS with guitars, recording is quite the rabbit hole. The options I've mentioned are just one of very, very many choices. There's a lot of great, inexpensive stuff out there.

Quote from keem85

Hmmm. It seems that I have a hardware issue after all.

That's an assumption. What you have is an issue, to be sure. It remains to be seen exactly what kind of issue.

Quote from keem85

Right now I did nothing. I was leaning towards my Mac to browse some stuff, and when leaned back to play, no sound.. After two minutes the DSP error message came up. And they occur randomly. No spesific tasks. Twice an hour, or once a day, no spesific timeframe.

When contacting support (or just posting problems here for that matter), the single most important thing you can provide is what's known in the trade as "steps to reproduce."

A professional software QA person's routine is typically a) encounter a bug, b) fool around with the system until s/he can reproduce it each time from a well known starting point and a specific series of steps, and then c) report the bug, including the steps.

I can tell you from three decades in the biz that people who are able to give me that kind of feedback are my personal heroes. It makes it so much easier to find and reproduce the problem. If I can't do that, then I can't reproduce it in the debugger to figure it out. Equally important, once I (alledgedly) fix it, if I don't know for sure how to make the bug happen, I don't know if I really fixed it or not.

All of this is to encourage you to think like a professional tester when you run into trouble. It may be that you have a faulty unit, but it's also possible these are residual effects from having a beta installed on your system. If you can figure out how to reproduce it (which may take a little work on your part), then when you contact support either they'll be able to walk you through a solution or know for sure if it's hardware. And when it's related to a beta (even if it's no longer installed), you give the devs a fighting chance to find and fix the bug, which they very much want to do.

If you approach things in this manner, it helps people in their efforts to help you.

Quote from Wheresthedug

The “issue” is a key part of the Mrashall and Fender sound.

Quote from keem85

Haha. Yeah I guess some of it is down to personal preference also

Overheard in a Chevrolet dealership parking lot...

Customer: "I really just don't like the way Chevys handle!"

Salesman: "You do realize there's a Ford dealership right across the street, don't you?"

Customer: "Oh."

To expand on that, beta is a software development term used when testing a new release.

It stands for Bugs Expected To Appear.

Quote from Wheresthedug

I’m still looking forward to hearing the F12-X200 though: it might just be the best of both worlds.

Yeah, I think the only way to really give it a fair shot is to stand in front of one in your local music store.

Quote from JohnNT

technique, pick choice (and pick angle, pick position along the string, picking velocity etc.) and perhaps guitar setup too.

Couldn't agree more. This is something that I struggle with from time to time, depending on what I'm doing. I use medium celluloid picks (i.e. what Fender Mediums used to be) because stylistically I prefer a lot of bite, bark and snap. Probably because I was raised by wolves.

However, even though I like what that gives me, there are times when it's just not appropriate for the sound I'm looking for. In those moments I can try to compensate with technology, like the pick and details params on the Kemper, but in reality that's trying to solve a problem in the amp that's originating in my fingers. At such times I fully expect the Kemper LCD to display, "Hey, man - not my fault!"

And yeah, trying to do the really light, soft, consistently even thing is extremely challenging. While I don't personally enjoy metal as a genre, these guys have incredible technique and control in their playing. After listening to some of that stuff I'm tempted to just sell every guitar I own and take up knitting instead.

Or, you know, practice more.