I noticed a weird behaviour today with my combination of monitor and main outs - my main outs are going to inputs on a MOTU Ultralite mk4 and the monitor out to the power amp in a powered speaker. I've got the master volume linked to the monitor out only because I like to have the main outs at full volume to the interface and control my kab with the master on the toaster.
I found that the master volume didn't attenuate the sound at all (so at zero volume I was still getting audio to the power amp) but did change the eq of it. Fiddling around with the ground lift switches on the main out fixed this, which I think means I must have swapped the ground and signal in the wiring to my power amp (oops). Just posting in case anyone else has a similar issue - things seem to work perfectly but having wiring swapped like this has odd consequences when you've got shared grounds!
I've had a similar issue, with no connections the power kabinet ticks at a constant rate. Sent it back to kemper for repair after discussing with them and the repaired unit was fine for a month but has just started making the same noise again. I'm very tempted to just pull out the power amp and find my own to replace it.
I look at it like this. How many times in the night are you going to use a sitar emulator or a sequenced bit crusher in a night? For like a song or a 15 second part? For what it takes dragging it around the audience would likely never know if it wasn't there and you had something close. I recall someone having a sitar emulation effect that was pretty good that I recall messing with, (likely in an artist/legend pack as I rarely find much useful in RE). There aren't many useful effects the kemper can't do just the weird stuff that wouldn't get used much anyway. That's just me, if someone wants to go through all the bother dragging a POG around for a 10 second part more power to them.
Depends on what you're playing really. There are definitely things the profiler doesn't do at all, synthesised sounds, anything with slow modulations or sequencers. For most kinds of music, most of the time, you can get away with just having the profiler effects though, they're solid. If you're playing weird music you use weird effects more, and you probably want a pedalboard but you don't have to have all the regular compressor, drive, reverb on it which is great. It's a win all round really.
Either desktop monitors (nice in stereo, and of course you get the final mix from that) or a DXR10, neither of which were bad options really but they didn't feel quite like playing an amp properly, the kabinet does.
On a mac you could use something like https://rogueamoeba.com/loopback/ to virtually mix your application audio, input from the profiler USB, and mic and send the mix back out to your focusrite outputs for monitoring. It's probably not the simplest, which would be to just send audio from the profiler into your interface as you did before, but it is possible.
...just taken delivery of a powered kabinet and spent a couple of hours playing it, and I feel pretty dumb for not buying one as soon as they came out. Fantastic piece of kit. I know this is a pretty low information post but hey, if you're on the fence about it just get one, your life will be better
There are effects the Kemper can't produce, I've got a board with a sitar emulator, sequenced bit-crusher / filter, synth and others from the H9, a gamechanger plus pedal, and a CBA Habit which is utterly ridiculous, the profiler can't really do any of those things. It does completely remove the need for 'normal' pedals though, which is great as it means my pedal budget can go entirely on fun weird things! So I use the profiler's compression, drive, reverb and delay along with any EQ that's needed, and if I want something more 'magic' I can add in this board and go to town on it.
It kind of depends what effects you're using in the H9 I think, some are just better sat in front of the amp and some after. The kemper's reverbs and delays are really good now, so mine is mostly used for pitch shift and more 'odd effect' patches which mostly work best between the guitar and the profiler. The great thing about having such high quality bread and butter effects in the profiler is you can spend your gear money on mad stuff you wouldn't have bought before (currently running a sitar pedal, sequenced bit crusher, and the new Chase Bliss Habit which is absolutely fantastic, all things the profiler just can't do)
(This is a years-later follow-up to the locked thread at Sitar sounds, please, because some things have changed since then)
We've been talking about sitar sounds on a facebook group thread the last couple of days. The thread above comes up in searches, but people were having trouble finding the rig, so I figured I'd post some info here for the next person to search!
The rig you're looking for is called 'PITCH Wide Sitar 2', and it can be found from Rig Manager in the 'Tutorial Pitch Effects' rig pack.
Use a piezo pickup (ideal) or the most 'acoustic-like' pickup otherwise (on my elite strat I use the middle pickup). Play as close to the bridge as possible.
The KPA can't create the sympathetic drones from a sitar by itself, you have to modify how you play to get that sound. Use open strings below the string you're going to use for the melodic part. You'll need to tune those to match the key, but for starters playing a melody on the G and using the open A and D as drones works well.
Playing lead notes, try putting a very fast bend and back to pitch at the start of each note.
It ends up sounding like this (just messing around, you can hear a couple of instant 'that's not a sitar' moments when I slide, you have to be really careful to avoid some techniques!)
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Thanks to Sean Oakes who asked the question originally on the FB group and got me to investigate, and to everyone on the original thread. I own the EHX ravish and this isn't quite as good but it's certainly usable.
I often find myself downloading either free or commercial rigs, and then spending a lot of time with the profiler setting up effects the way I like.
This makes me think I'd quite like to be able to separate the 'amp' and 'effects' parts, and see those parts in rig manager as distinct things. So, I might go to RM and load up a particular amp I like, and then go to another section and load up my 'disco function band' effects chain. The kemper effects are so good now, and require so much configuration to really use properly, it seems a missing option to share these settings (either for my own purposes, or with others).
Call them effects scenes or something.
This is somewhat related to my question elsewhere of the best way to share modified rigs (the answer is 'not through rig manager as the t&c require it to be original').
The problem with that approach of course is that the updated versions aren't discoverable through the rig exchange. Makes me think there's probably a change needed at some point to reflect the extra value from the effects setup over and above the pure amp profile. I'd like to be able to find profiles which are purely the amp / cab / mic part, and mix them with an effects chain, possibly from some kind of effects exchange equivalent to the rig exchange. Feels like they should be separable in some way.
At that point I'd also quite like macros for effects chains but that's definitely spreading out into new functionality.
I quite often find rigs on rig exchange that need a fair bit of tweaking to sound right, at least to my ears and with my guitars. So I'll adjust them, add stomps if they don't have them, generally tidy up. I'd like to share the results but I'm not sure what the best way to do this is without upsetting whoever put the rig I used as a base up in the first place.
I guess there are two questions - what's the license for rigs uploaded to rig exchange, and what's the *polite* way to do this that won't upset people?
If the Kemper uses DSP chips, which I believe it does, it won't be a question of just running a wrapper around VST code written for a general purpose CPU. Software written for a DSP (or a graphics processor, dedicated FPGA etc) is designed to use the capabilities of those chips, you can't naively translate from code written to run on a general purpose CPU core. Getting the best out of a DSP architecture isn't trivial.
A closer example to what you're asking for is the UAD hardware, which runs as an external co-processor with dedicated DSP and can host plugins, but those plugins have to be designed for the hardware, you can't just run a regular VST on them. Same would apply for the Kemper, it could be designed to host plugins of some kind (internally that's probably exactly what's happening) but they would have to be Kemper-specific plugins. It'd be cool if that was possible, but it would be such a support nightmare for Kemper I really don't imagine it'll ever happen.
Ah, yes. Thanks - rather non-obviously in the manual under the 'Tuner button' section on p128 of the reference manual... Might we worth re-iterating that bit of information in the section describing the looper I think
Is there a way to completely disable the looper button? I used my kemper+remote hosting a jam session last night, everything worked perfectly, guitarists could get the idea of the remote switching 'channels' on a virtual amp and I had the effects slots set up in a way that was easy to explain quickly before each set. The only problem, and it was a major one, was that while reaching for the tuner / mute button people kept hitting the looper button, which of course switched the thing into a completely different mode. Consequent stamping on buttons to try to switch it back resulted in random bits of loop recording and playback and I had to keep jumping up to turn it off.
It would be lovely if there was a way to just turn the thing off when it wasn't needed, is there?
I have an H9 which sits either on a pedalboard before everything (and gets used for EQ, compression, distortion) or in the stereo loop. At this point it's more a question of when I give in and buy a second so I can stop switching between the two roles. It's possible kemper will come up with some amazing delays and reverbs, but eventide also keep updating the H9 with amazing stuff (the sculpt algorithm is pretty mind-blowing when you figure out how to use it, for instance, and the rotary simulator is just perfect).
If you do a lot of studio work where you're going to care about exactly what that shimmer tail sounds like, or where you think you'll notice the extra quality, the eventide gear is incredible and completely worth the money. If you just want a fairly standard set of decent delays, reverbs etc I'd just wait for the kemper to acquire them. They'll be good, they won't be as good as the H9, but it's quite possible you won't, or shouldn't, care about the difference.
The profiler's MIDI implementation isn't good enough at the moment to fully make use of external effects, in my case this makes me less likely to use the profiler rather than less likely to use the effects...
Vaguely related - I have a Morley Bad Horsie touch wah pedal, the neat thing being that it's normally off, but the moment you hit the spring-loaded treadle it fades in so you can put the effect on individual notes. Is there a kemper equivalent? I'd quite like to replace it, but that's mostly because it squeaks and writing a patch on the kemper is easier than finding where I left the WD40...
Looking good - I'm really looking forward to using the morphing for my next gig now it's out of beta, didn't really feel I was happy to risk it before. Not going to be a huge thing, just a few tweaks, but I'm happy it's working and giving me a few extra options.
Would love some more feedback on the midi control thread though, morphing's nice and all but it won't work with my outboard gear so...
This is also on the list, but again a question of priorities.
If we would enhance the delay effects within the Profiler this might make external devices redundant and add much more value for the majority of Profiler users. Most of the time I read or hear about external effect devices looped in this seems to be related to delay gear.
There are two obvious applications for sending CC from controls out over the MIDI ports:
1. Control of external pedals. It's possible the profiler will get better delays and reverbs, but it will never be able to do everything. We've all bought about £2000 of profiler, plus guitars, basses (and in my case saxophones and cellos) it's not all that surprising that we'll end up with effects pedals. You promised us an octopus of control, we've not got it. I certainly bought the remote expecting that I'd be able to use it as a control centre for my existing gear, which it currently does not do - PC messages aren't enough.
2. Recording parameter automation for re-amping etc. Being able to record a dry signal, but with CCs for e.g. morph would make re-amping actually useful. As it is, it's not something I'm ever going to bother with as I'd lose any performance controls I used when recording in the first place. If I'm putting e.g. a wah on my recording I probably want the same wah on the re-amped version, but that's not possible unless you're sending the pedal CCs out into something. I can send the CC back to the profiler, but without the ability to receive and record that data that's of very little use right now.
I appreciate that you consider improving the built-in effects to be a priority (I personally don't agree, but I have the luxury of having outboard effects which I'm fairly sure are going to be better anyway), but we're talking about reading a number from memory and writing it to the MIDI output port at a regular interval, plus the configuration UI to control that, it's something that's orders of magnitude less costly in terms of developer time *and* DSP usage than a new and improved effect algorithm. It's frustrating to have something so fundamental to a MIDI implementation missing in an otherwise excellent piece of hardware, even more so when it seems like an easy thing to do (that's not a completely uninformed opinion, when I'm not playing music I write software, including embedded software).