Posts by Pier75
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Villages and wives are so misguided sometimes.
I agree with Don. Using the KPA as an FX board for a valve amp is a bit of a waste of both. Just profile the Fender and keep it all ‘in the box” or just go old school and “to hell with the consequences 🤣 🤘🤘🤘
I think the quad reverb is all tubes, so who knows, maybe some good will come from this experiment. Nirvana in utero was recorded on a quad reverb I believe… if not…. To hell with the consequences!!! 😂😂😂
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it does, but just watch your levels, start with a low volume on the amp and a low volume on the PROFILER and carefully and slowly increase to what you are looking for. worst case scenario is that you'll overdrive the input stage of the amp, which is what Booster pedals do.
tbh. this combination isn't really of much practical value - it might be fun to mess around with the PROFILER's stomps and effects through the amp, but that's it really.
to me, the fun of an old tube amp is to connect the guitar directly, no pedals and see what you can do. It should have a lovely reverb and tremolo, which Fenders calls 'Vibrato' for some reason. Playing such a bare bones setup can make you a better player since there is very little to hide behind (you can't crank the gain, add compression, chorus, delay and reverb). except the reverb part of course, but that is 'only' a spring reverb and will always sound like one no matter what
have funThanks Don,
You are right about the amp sounding great without any pedals. However, even with the pre volume at max, there is no distortion at all. It will give a bit of distortion if I also turn the master volume up to eight, but that sound level is frowned upon in my village 😉 Also, running to the store and purchasing a bunch of pedals (I only have 1 pedal, a freqout), is frowned upon by my wife. So now at least I can play with all kinds of effects and hide my playing mistakes, and stay friendly with the wife and villagers. And last but not least, I also wanted to experiment what sound I would get if I use a Marshall amp on the Kemper and play it through the Quad Reverb. So lots of stuff to play and experiment with. With the new knowledge I can start experimenting, thanks again for your input!
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Thank you!
Just to verify, currently:
The main out of the Kemper Stage is connected to the line in on my Motu Ultralite (backpanel, which I believe is line in).
The gain for the line in in the Motu is 0dB.
The main output on the Kemper is set to master mono, -12dB padding is not enabled, the volume is set to 0dB.
I'm assuming the Fender Quad Reverb's guitar input expects an instrument level signal and line level may be too 'hot'.
Should I change any settings on the Kemper's main out to get it to output 'instrument level'?To my understanding, there are three types of 'output levels' besides the speaker out: mic level, instrument level and line level, and they are in order of weak (mic) to strong (line). I have a limited understanding of audio signals so please forgive me if I'm not making sense. It can be quite difficult to get this information from the manuals, as they seem to assume that the reader already knows what type of output level comes out of a device so often it's not mentioned at all. When googling about reducing line output to instrument level, I see posts about DI boxes, reamping and Signal to Noise so it quickly gets confusing for a noob like me
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Hi rigbusters,
Recently I got my hands on a '74 Fender Quad Reverb. It sounds awesome. Now, this amp does not have any other input than a guitar input. Now, I was wondering, since I have a Kemper Stage (with a Mission expression pedal), would it be possible to use the Kemper as a pedalboard with this amp? There is a send output on the Kemper, I have no idea how this send and return works. Could you for example taka a profile, disable the amp an cab, and direct the output to the 'send' channel? And will this be the correct level to feed into the guitar input of a real amp?
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Did you tried to increase the compression in the amp stack? There are a lot of options to change the amp sound
Thanks, will try that too, though I believe this won't be the same as the compression that occurs in the power amp stage of an amp that occurs if the volume is set to a very high level. At least that's what I read when researching Google. Then again, it may just work too, so I will try this also.
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It sounds like you are talking about SAG. That setting is in the AMP section. On lower gain profiles it really helps to get that sweeter overdrive feel and sound.
Sag is when the amp is being pushed to the point the power supply cant maintain a constant voltage. Its voltage begins to sag (or drop). People also would try to do this by using a transformer, at the amps power in, to reduce the voltage/power going into the amp.
Thanks for the tip, the manual covers this with some technical language I don't fully understand, it even says: The realms of clean and distorted sounds move closer together, causing the velocity and energy of the crunch sounds to grow. The amp doesn’t just distort everything mercilessly - all the nuances are represented faithfully. The overall sound becomes much more alive, with more punch and juice. It almost sounds as if a compressor has been switched off, thereby allowing the guitar to establish itself more easily among the other instruments on stage, such as the drums or bass.
So I figured this is not it, but the rest of the text seems to support your tip, I'll be trying it out, thanks again!
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Hi folks,
What I heard a couple of times, is that some of the 'sweetness' of tube amplifiers, is that if you crank the volume up to really loud levels, the power amp compresses the signal somehow, which in some cases can create a nice tone. So if someone creates a profile of an amp, and doesn't put the volume on level 9, but say level 4, and I load this profile in my Kemper, it will sound just like an amp at level 4. Would it be possible to make it sound like it would when it's volume is at level 9? If you turn the gain down and the amp volume up, does the Kemper 'simulate' the power amp stage compression that I heard happens if the volume of a tube amp is set to a high level? I can imagine that being a very difficult thing to simulate, since the profiler 'measured' the amp's response on level 4, it can't know how the amp responds if the volume were at level 9. But maybe with the new 'liquid' thing, which I think maybe 'simulates' some part (more mathmatically?) of the amp instead of applying a 'profile'. Not sure if I understand the deeper workings of the liquid thing, so forgive me if I'm completely wrong here. Would be nice though if it were possible to simulate this power amp stage compression, so if you have any info on if that is or isn't possible, I'd love to hear it. So please share!
Cheers!
Pier
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Ok I executed the experiment:
Set the S/PDIF output on the Kemper Stage to 'Git / Stack' so the left channel has the unprocessed guitar signal.
Using Performer Lite, setup a mono audio track to record the left channel.
The neck pickup height was about 2.4mm for the low e and 2.0 for the high e. I used 6 full turns on each side to lower it.
Record the signal while playing soft to hard on the open low e string, then soft to hard on the 5th fret, then 12th fret, then 19th fret.
Raise the pickup adjusting the screw 1 full turn, record again.
Repeat.
As the amplitude of the signal was getting louder as the pickup was raised, there didn't seem to be a spot where raising it didn't increase the amplitude of the signal. So I did not find a spot where this 'magnetic saturation' occurred. I raised it until the pickup hit the string when fretted on the 19th fret.
Same result for the high e string and same experiment on the bridge pickup.
It seems that it is non-scientifically proven that on my Gibson Les Paul 50's, which has a Burstbucker 1 and Burstbucker 2 pickup, a sweet spot does not exist for the pickup height where you get a maximum dynamic range, due to this 'magnetic saturation'. My hope was this spot existed and would make it the best spot for the pickups to be in and it would be the 'best spot' for them to be in. Also, from judging the waveform of the signal, there is no clipping of the amplitude. So I guess the height only changes the amplitude of the signal, and maybe the (diustribution of) harmonics.
I also noticed that the difference in amplitude is pretty big. So higher or lower pickups using the exact same amp may have drastic effects on the tone, one might not get the amp to distort and the other might distort it too much. Is there a gain setting for the input signal?
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Some of us do not have great ears. Playing a sound then tweaking pickups and playing again later would not be clear. At a minimum we need to record it so we can compare side by side. And since you are going to record it anyway, you may as well check the data visually.
And the tone changes may be very small and will react differently with different profiles. So doing it visually may get you closer over a broad range of profiles.
Your logic is correct, tuning by ear is fine for most people. But not for everyone.
Hear hear! Also I believe your ear 'memory' is in a range of seconds so that can make it difficult to compare sounds if the time between the sounds is too long...
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in the end, it's all about how it sounds.
(good) ears will beat any measurement at any time.
even if the measuremnts taken are accurate, it is quite hard to determine what that actually means, due to the way our hearing and the interpretation of what we are hearing works.
I've been posting foe years, that adjusting the pickup height and angle is one of the most powerful things you can do to fine-tune your sound.
It only takes a screw driver, ears and a bit of time.Very true! We'll see what my ears make of this little experiment. Maybe it will sound awful, who knows...
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If you plug your guitar straight into your audio interface and record, that should show you the pickup output.
The problem will be picking the string/strings the same for each test. And if you start strumming loud chords you may get frequency adding / subtracting that may cloud what you are trying to see?
But in theory your guitar pickups put out a voltage. And recording your guitar straight is measuring that voltage.
It may help if you could measure the RMS value of the recording. If you were getting some compression it may show a higher RMS value if the signal was normalized (maxed out).
Normalizing is the standard term. It could be called maximized. It means add gain to the signal so that its loudest sample is full blast. Most audio is changed from its normal value to a value between -1.0 and 1.0. So normalizing a reading of .6 max would change everything so your max reading is 1.0.
I AM NOT AFFILIATED
I always use Goldwave for my audio work. I think it is PC only (no mac) but the author will let you run it free for a while. In GW you can record, normalize, and then zoom in to the sample level, etc. It used to show an RMS value in the maximize (normalize) section but it was removed sadly. It is one app I run every day if I am playing guitar or not.
1) So I would get GW.
2) Set pickup low and record myself playing very loud.
3) Selecting the MAXIMIZE (speaker with ! next to it) button will show you your loudest reading.
4) Repeat steps 2+3 with new pickup heights.
Like I said you will see a lot of weird peaks and transients when picking and strumming hard. So it may be tough to get a grasp on how much the pickup height is working. Or it may be crystal clear, who knows
Thanks for the info. I think I would test it on 1 string only to avoid adding or substracting output signals from the other strings. If the theory is correct, then the peak volume (not RMS) will hit a ceiling when this magnetic saturation is reached. I found that you can get a dry signal as output on the Kemper so I will use that. Since the pickups and some part of what you are plugging into form a single circuit that influence each other, that would probably be safest. I will report my findings here
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That does imply that there is some sort of clipping happening somewhere in the signal chain and I honestly don't know what could be the 'literally' limiting factor in this scenario.
If I am not mistaken, it has something to do with the magnetic field, where at a certain distance the generated signal will not increase when the string vibrates. It is called magnetic saturation according to jefrs in this post: https://www.tdpri.com/threads/does-l…02/post-2612876
My goal is just to find the pickup height just to the point where max output is only reached when attacking the string very hard. When this is found, the next step will be to determine if I personally like the sound or not. Hope it makes sense...
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Hi folks,
There is a theory that I would like to test. The output of a pickup will increase ifit is closer to the string. My theory is that at some point, raising the pickup does not increase the output anymore. Raising it beyond this point may have the effect that if you play 'half loud', the output is maxed already. If that is the case there is less dynamic range. I am referring to the output signal on the guitar cable where it enters the amp. To test this theory, I wanted to lower my pickup, play 'loud' then measure the max output. Then increase the height a bit and repeat until the max output doesn't increase anymore. Then in theory it should have the maximum dynamic range. Of course it doesn't mean it will also sound good but that is not the point here.
I have a Kemper Stage connected through S/PDIF to an audio interface. If choose a rig and turn the amp, cab and all effects off, I think I have a clean signal.
The question is now, does anyone have an idea on how to record the signal on Windows in a meaningful way? The signal has a very low output. I have a DAW Performer Lite which I can maybe use to record the signal and review it. As said though, the output signal is very low and not sure if it will work correctly if I try to boost it.
I hope I can get some tips and then I will report my findings here
Thanks in advance.
