Posts by Grooguit

I think morph for the player may be its biggest game-changer.

Here's a tip for using morph that a lot of people might not realize: At least on the Stage, Remote and now presumably the Player, you can use it as an instantly accessible second "Scene" of a Rig. You can of course, morph any parameters, but you can also toggle effects on and off with morph. Virtually every effect in the Kemper has a Mix setting. Just morph the mix of any effect from zero to 100 or 100 to zero, and morph will effectively toggle it on and off. Just set the rise and fall times to zero and the change is instantaneous. Best part is that (at least the way the stage works) the same footswitch that selects a Rig can toggle its morph on and off instantly, along with providing a change in LED that indicates you are in morph mode.

Since the Player has only three footswitches, why waste one of them to toggle one of the effect slots on and off? Morph accomplishes the same thing without wasting a footswitch. (I'm assuming the Player's footswitches if programed to select a particular Rig can also be programed to activate morph on a second press; like the Stage and Remote; correct me if I'm wrong). Further, since morph can effectively toggle any effect from zero to 100, what I call "the morph toggle" can toggle different effect blocks in different rigs as needed.

Not cheap, but inline with some other such upgrades. Owning an Eventide H9 a decade ago they were charging around that amount to max out that unit. And there's been a lot of inflation in the last decade. You certainly get a lot of value with the level 2, getting all the effects. By the way with the new OS, Player owners are getting the extra amp and cab controls for free.

My biggest critique though is making rig spillover a level 3. I thought that was a feature that was included with the Player?

Quote from Dynochrome

That's because clean sense adjusts what the volume of the Rig does when you turn up/down the GAIN, not volume of the guitar.

Vtgearhead, adding to Dynochrome:

The guitar's volume knob, even when using a real amp will only be good at lowering perceived volume if the amplifier is set fairly clean. Push that amplifier into overdrive, and lowering your guitar's volume will mostly clean up the overdrive without lowering the actual volume much. The more gain you have, the less your guitar's volume knob will decrease the actual volume. This behavior is true with real tube amps as well. On the KPA, this behavior is irrespective of whether the clean sens is set correctly.

The clean sens adjustment is to make sure the PERCEIVED volume stays the same as you raise and lower the amp's gain. The clean sens has to be set higher for lower-output guitars like single coils, and set lower for higher-output guitars like humbuckers, especially if they are active pickups.

The only connection that clean sens has to your guitar's volume knob is that clean sens affects how loud your guitar is when the gain is set low on the amp. Presumably you adjust the clean sens by ear when your guitar volume knob is all the way up, by raising and lowering the amp's gain and seeing if the volume goes up or down when you lower the amp gain. Any reductions on your guitar's volume knob begin from that clean sens starting point, and only if the gain on the amp is low. But the extent to which those adjustments on your guitar knob CHANGE the perceived volume should be relatively the same, and entirely dependent on how the real amp would respond at a given gain level, AND whether you are also using a compressor effect or the compression setting in the KPA amp section.

If you want to maximize your guitar volume knob's effect on actual volume, do not use a compressor effect and set the amp section compression to ZERO.

I haven't played around with it, but the new Clean COMPENSATION setting (not the clean SENS) affects how much volume compensation occurs when you lower the amp gain. I don't believe this compensation compresses the signal, but bumps up the volume a certain number of tics when you turn down the gain setting is lowered. This would level out the volume between different gain settings, but not affect the dynamics of your playing, or your guitar knob's effect on volume at any given gain setting. but you could experiment with turning this off and seeing if you like it. Know that if you do so, you'll need to manually adjust the volume anytime you change the amp's gain. This makes it harder to keep different Rigs in balance with one another since you can easily forget how loud your amp was before you start monkeying around with the gain.

I'd love that. The only other thing I think it needs is a way to switch from browse to performance mode. Browse mode is where I search for rigs based on looking for the right profile. Performance mode is where I program all the other effects for specific situations. The most logical place to keep my Stage is under my desk and having to get on the floor just to switch modes is quite annoying. I get that head/rack owners have a physical knob that points at either, off, Browse, perform, profile, and tuner, (rather than a soft button like the stage) but to me Rig Manager should override it, at least making whether the knob is pointed at browse or perform superfluous and instead follow Rig Manager. I should be able to click on a Rig in performance mode, then one in browse mode without having to manually press a button. That's a greater nuisance than not having the tuner.

Quote from Dynochrome

I understand and agree with your view. Why don't you just turn down the clean rigs then so they don't overpower? (say with amp volume) Then you wouldn't need to use clean sense. That's the way I think anyway. I understand that clean (and less compressed) sounds will easily and deceptively dominate distorted ones, and if you have played live venues long enough you know this is true. I understand what you are trying to achieve with it. Up till now, I have just been lowering clean sounds to suit in slots/presets just as I have for decades with amps. Just wondering, Did you ever watch the video? You'll see that clean sense just "regulates" the volume when the gain raises/lowers, so if you are not manipulating the gain control I don't see the point in using clean sense, just switch rigs? I know you know what you are doing because I've found your advice to be some of the most accurate on this forum. It's interesting to see how others approach the Kemper and I still might learn something

I'd add to what Wheresthedug said. The ideal clean sens setting is pickup independent and should generally be the same regardless of rig or even the gain of the rig in question FOR THAT GUITAR. The goal is, as you raise and lower the amp's gain knob, the volume of the clean compared to dirty will stay consistent. But if you switch guitars (or it there is a BIG jump in output between pickups in the same guitar) you may need to adjust clean sens for that. (It's kind of like the same issue you'd have running a real distortion pedal into a real clean amp. Finding the right volume for the distortion pedal so the bypassed volume matched is pickup output dependent, and you will need to set its volume different for different output pickups.)

That's why for those who make a lot of rigs to only use with specific guitars, it may make sense to not lock the clean sens. For those that may use any of their rigs with their guitar of choice that day, locking the clean sens makes more sense. Then if you switch guitars you make one minor 5-second tweak to the clean sens globally and you're off and running. That said if all your regularly-used guitars have pickup outputs in a reasonably close range, you probably can just leave the clean sens the same for all.

When it comes to balancing the overall volume of Rigs, you want to do that AFTER you've identified the ideal clean sens setting. My advice there is (in performance mode) to balance your Rig volumes to the default "Crunch" Rig, since that Rig is always conveniently hanging out in any slots you haven't replaced. That way, as you create new performances full of new rigs over time, your volume across all your rigs will be fairly consistent, since you adjusted them all directly to the same default Rig, whose volume is always the same.

Another helpful trick is (again AFTER you've identified the clean sens setting for your guitar) is to turn up the compression setting in the amp section a bit. Try around 2.5-3.0, most profiles have this at zero by default. If you like to lower your guitar's volume knob to clean up some, the amp won't distort as much as you expected, but you won't lose as much clean volume as you would were the amp compression setting at zero. This lets you be a little more aggressive with how far you can lower your guitar's volume put to clean up further, while still retaining a consistent volume.

I don't know a ton about it, but I'd assume that either the Hex has a particular PC numbers that coorespond to the various combinations of certain loops being on and off, or you program it to leave certain loops on and others off when it receives a certain PC number. I'd guess the later.

But every Rig in every performance mode has it's own independent PC messages it can send. (It can send two of them, so that it could control two different devices.) So any time you create a new Rig, you'll need to tell it to send a specific PC message to the Hex when selected. Otherwise, whatever loops were last open or closed on the Hex will be unaffected by switching to that new Rig. So if in your new Rig you want all the loops in the Hex to be off, you need to program that Rig to send the PC message that cooresponds to all the loops being off in the Hex.

Quote from Steve5478

Kemper drives go farther than simple modeling drives. It encompass many kind of drives.

The choices mean, it's set to correspond to a specific kind of drive but if you play with drive/definition/slimdown, parameters ; a TS-9 can be turn into a Klon.... Profiler can't change drive's name following what you do... The opposite can work....

It possible that some future update could allow it to display the last selected effects preset instead of the effect model, but as you said, the preset name only has relevance if you don't touch the settings. If you use had started with a TS-9 preset and then tweak as you mentioned to more of a klon setting, having the display say TS-9 t would be misleading. That said, I could see how someone might want the option for their effects slots to display the last chosen preset. If so, that would be a them problem if they heavily edit a selected preset so that it's sound and settings no longer has any coorelation to the preset named display. For those of us that would just prefer to remember what was what and see only the effect name, we'd leave this proposed display setting off by default.

I always thought, if I have so many rigs that I can't remember how I set them up, I'm probably trying to regularly utilize too many rigs for my own good. If I come across a Rig and have no idea what the starting point was for a particular effect in one of the slots, if it's important enough to me to know, I can always save it as a new effects preset, then explore some of the other presets of that effect model and see if it's the same or close. Put another way, if it's important enough for me to know the name of the effect preset I had previously selected, it's probably worth the few minutes it would take to locate in manually.

Maybe a useful feature request along the lines of Dynochrome asks, is merely the OPTION to switch the front noise gate to a classic downward expander, in order to save an effects slot for something else?

Personally, the sound conditioner is best for every noise gating needs other than really high gain sounds. What I love best about it is that set it to tame the highest gain sound I'm going to use and it doesn't seem to be an issue if I go to a lower gain level if I don't bother to lower the gate.

With classic downward expanders, at least the traditional noise gate pedals I've used in past, even expensive ones, they were very sensitive to the overall gain they were being used with. Meaning you needed it set one way for low gain, another way for mid gain, another way for high gain or you'd have major issues with losing sustain trying to leave it on all the time. This always made it extremely hard to have just one noise gate, quite aside from the tap dancing issues needed to turn the gate on and off with the distortion.

Cmbrowns: tell me what you think of this idea. I had proposed this a while back.

How about an 8-band EQ before and/or after the amp section? But make it part of the amp section. You'd essentially have the ability to add the their very musical 8-band EQ after the D slot and/or before the X slot. You can achieve the same EQ now by placing the EQ in the D or X slot, but of course at the expense of losing one of your 8 effects slots. This would also have an organizational benefit, aside from saving effects slots for something else.

I find from an organizational standpoint, I use EQs to shape the overall sound of a profile. At that time I'm not worried about getting the ambience right or adding other effects. I'm just sculpting the basic tone. As such, it makes sense to save such EQ settings as part of the PROFILE, along with other amp settings such as it's basic bass/mid/trem/pres and the KPA's special controls things like definition and clarity. That way, if I have a Rig with a certain combination of other effects, I can bring a new profile along with all its saved EQ settings into another Rig. Put another way, it makes a lot of sense to be able to save all the EQ settings I want to make to a profile as part of the profile itself, not just the Rig a profile resides. Some guitarists, like me, tend to organize along the lines of specific effects chains that will stay the same, but later experiment with a different profile.

Something like this might not be a benefit for what you are trying to do in terms of being able to toggle options within a particular effects slot. The closest you can get now with the current OS is to create effects presets which can be manually added to a Rig as needed.

This is an interesting convo. In my opinion, additional parameters such as EQ are always welcome. But as Yoda Guitar mentioned, what affect do additional parameter have on DSP? Haven't a clue. Having used the KPA for a long time now, I've settled on how I maximize things the number of things I can use simultaneously AND simplify footswitching.

I create one rig and load with effects, activating the combination of them that I'll use most often for the particular song or just in general in Slot 1.

I create separate Rigs (sometimes starting with copy/pastes of the 1st Rig) to use with the 1st Rig in a performance as needed. I won't ever need, using the OP's example, two drives with their own EQs active at the same moment at time, along with other effects, so I just make additional rigs to give me the adequate combinations needed.

If I need MORE combinations of effects than these five Rigs in a performance, I use the morph state. Since I don't use an expression for morph, I always set the Morph setting to be controlled by the 5 Rig footswitches with a rise and fall of zero. Since pretty much all the effects have a mix setting, I morph this mix setting to effectively toggle effects. (Mix 0% is off, mix 100% is on). This way I can press the Rig footswitch once and effectively toggle as many effects on or off at the same time along with adjusting other effect setting parameters to taste. Thus Morph functions like a second "scene" within the Rig. For example, in the base state I could have a drive's mix at 0% and an EQ at 100%, then reverse their values in the morph state (or anywhere between the extremes of 0 to 100)

This way, I have 5 completely independent rigs, each with an instantly accessible 2nd scene, requiring a single press on the same 5 front row of footswitches to access the morph/2nd scene. That's ten combinations with at most a double press of a front row footswitch.

If I need MORE combos of effects than those ten combinations, only then do I bother assigning effect blocks to the 2nd row footswitches.

Another thing I do to maximize effect combinations of effects is to utilize the ducking parameter on delays (around 1.5) and sometimes the reverb a touch (around 1.0). If there's one thing that would otherwise make me "need" to create more Rigs, it's getting the ambience right for different parts of songs or situations. In most situations I find I don't really need or even want different delay algorithms or settings of the delay in the same song, in most case just a mix adjustment of the delay in question would do the trick. Specifically when I'm playing a busier strumming pattern, I'd need the mix a tad lower and less busy picking needs the mix a higher. By utilizing ducking, I don't have toggle back and forth as it adapts musically to my playing. With these rather low ducking settings, the delay diminishes just the right amount automatically when I need it to without being really obvious that something is being turned on and off, quite aside from less tap dancing.

The remote or stage makes toggling two or more blocks on and off together super easy, whether turning on or off together, or turning one off and the other in as opposites.
What might be better, would be as you described, just more parameters. I could be wrong but don’t think the EQs take up much dsp. But for all the drives, perhaps hitting the page over button and then having their excellent 8-band as part of their drive effects, saving an effects block for something else.

So perhaps my question should be: have they stopped selling them in the US?

Quote from Delinquent

Available down under from retailers, strange it’s not for other countries.

Interesting. I'm in the US, which is what the store shows. I hadn't considered that availability is regionally based, as it's not like they're going to ship each unit al-a-carte across an ocean when ordered; they either have them available in certain countries/continents or not. But, yes, at least when I've checked from time to time, I don't believe I have ever seen the powered cab available from the KPA store in the US.

Quick, before chorus effects go out of style again! I remember when just before Y2K chorus effects fell out popularity, as they made you sound "80's"

Quote from Guitartone

As far as I know the Powered Kabinet is only available from the Kemper Online Store...it's never been available from Sweetwater, etc.

Interesting. But it's never available for sale there. So where can you buy one?

Interesting idea. I don't see it being practical though. Kemper's approach to DSP allocation is to prioritize a smooth transition from Rig to Rig without an audio gap, while allowing spillover of wet effects in the delay and reverbs slots. What you describe, if I understand correctly, is you want to have additional effects available in the 8 effect slots that you could toggle between within the same Rig. From what I understand, the Kemper is currently utilizing close to the max of its available DSP.

The easy workaround is to utilize performance mode. Simply copy and paste the Rig you are using in slot one into slot 2, or 3, or 4, or 5. Then simply place different effects (or effects presets you've created) into any of the new rig's 8 effects blocks. What you are describing isn't having more effects active at the same moment in time. In which case, why try to fit more into a single Rig when you have 5 Rigs in a performance that you can fill with different combinations of effects?

At some point, I hope to purchase a Kemper powered cab. I usually purchase gear from Sweetwater on a no-interest payment plan. However, Sweetwater sells every Kemper product except the powered cab, and the unpowered cab they supposedly do sell is always backordered. I've never seen the Kemper online store have the powered cab available to purchase either. There are also none available on Reverb. Perhaps the cabs were discontinued and I missed the announcement? Wasn't it released in 2021? I figured three years later, even if they were immensely popular and sold out quickly, the supply would now be able to meet demand. I hesitated to ask here about it, for if it were available tomorrow, I'd still need to wait to afford it. But if it has been discontinued, I might set my sights on something else. There are other cube-shaped FRFRs designed to use with all-in-one guitar products, but I'd prefer to get the Kemper one if they still make them.

Quote from BillyNoSocks

i haven't really experimented with that setting but i'll get to it i'm sure. tbh it's a bit underwhelming that the combo footswitch function is still missing and i don't really find the assign functions very useful. but i'm always happy about the fixes.

They have some stuff in the works, such as the new effects they said weren't quite ready yet. I think though, with the Player being so new and the long-term efficiency of getting them all on the same OS makes a lot of sense. Then getting those bugs worked out, then getting out some other new features.

Which footswitch thing did you mean? This one supposedly has the ability to assign footswitches from Rig Manager now.

The addendum and main manual have already been updated to 11.0 so we can see all the details.

I think a lot of people will love the ability to turn off clean compensation. Though to me, that's a feature that is unique to KPA that I love and something I probably won't turn off. However, being able to variably turn it off might be something worth experimenting with. To some degree a LITTLE bit of a volume jump when you bump up the gain might not be a bad thing since you tend to want a touch more volume when using a more distorted sound;. Being able to adjust this, rather than merely turn it on and off seems like another genius kemper idea.

Quote from OneEng1

It is still irrelevant as the ToneX, as nearly perfect of a capture device as it is, still does not have the workflow, or additional overall processing and efx needed to sound as good as the Player.

It's a bit of apples and oranges. The basic reverb on the Tonex units are probably fine in terms of having some basic ambience to work with when practicing direct, especially if you were to use headphones, which only the bigger 3-footwsitch Tonex and the Player have. But not as an outright replacement for a good quality versatile reverb. If you wanted to use the little Tonex on a pedal board, it is of course quite small and cheap. However, with the practical live limitation of having a single foot switch and lack of effects, you will invariably need to buy or at least make space on your board for more pedals to cover things the baby Tonex (and for that matter the original Tonex) don't do. You are also more drive pedal dependent on the baby Tonex as you can't quickly access more than two captures. So no net space saved on your pedal board. No money saved either unless you already own pedals that cover the things the baby Tonex can't do but the Player can.