Hi all,
been an active lurker for these past few months gathering as much information as possible to help me with my decision process. Seriously, the wealth of information and also friendliness in this forum was one of the reasons to take the plunge.
Yeah - the Kemper arrived:
And now it's here, arrived last Saturday. I hadn't expected it to arrive before early April, but hey, I won't complain. I didn't have time to really dive into the finer details and configurations as yet, just scratching the surface, going through the standard profiles. Even that blew my head away. I have to say, I don't know when sound impressed me the last time as much as Kemper's output has been doing since I started using it. I can't remember ever having produced a better sound on real amps, but then I never had access to propper high end amps or the rooms to crank them up so they actually sounded really great. I played a few songs at a gig last Friday and the sound on stage was really bad, I presume it wasn't that much better off stage. Had we all played Kempers, it would have been so much better - but even so we still had a lot of fun
A little bit about myself:
I'm a fairly acient non-professional, non-gigging musician, concentrating mostly on recording in my little studios. I'm a multi-dilettante, i.e. I play many instruments, but not very well. I started first on piano then turned to guitar, making the switch to electric guitars within one year. My guitar teacher thought I needed rhythm, so he taught me the basics of drum and bass playing first. From the mid 80s to the mid 90s I fronted a few bands, played guitar and in my last band switched to bass.
Even before I started my first band, I mixed some friends gigs and continued doing so, getting into (4-track) recording fairly quickly. After my last band folded I worked as a sound and also lighting engineer, mostly in a theatre setting, but also small tours with local bands here in Bavaria, Germany.
In 2000 I switched started working in IT and only recorded songs, first switching to a Yamaha AW16G for hard disk recording. I then discovered Reaper in 2012 and never looked back. The only thing missing was something that would get me the guitar sound I needed. Which brings us to the present and my new Kemper!
My recordings:
I write mostly rock/pop songs, but have always dabbled in electronic music as well. Currently I have 3 projects, two of which active. One is a solo downtempo electronica project, the other one is a virtual band project collaborating with people all over the globe. The third one, a solo project re-recording really old songs of mine the way I always thought they should have sounded, just finished with the release of two albums:
Ancient Gems - full band setup (apart from drums on a couple of songs all instruments played by me)
Ancient Gems Acoustic Versions - as the name says, the acoustic versions of some of the songs
Now I need to get back to my toaster and coax a few more secrets out of it (like how do I get rigs created there into the rig manager ...)