Amps for Desert/Stoner Rock

    Hi all,


    I’m new to the Kemper with two weeks of non stop playing and settings behind. What have I being doing since 2012? It’s the best piece of gear I’ve ever owned by a long way.


    I’m looking to buy/find profiles for Kyuss/Qotsa type heavy sounds. I’m rubbish with my Amps and would really appreciate being pointed in the right direction. I’ve some nice clean, crunch and standard rock profiles but can’t seem to find what I want without getting in to metal territory.


    Really sorry if this has been covered.


    thanks in advance.

    :thumbup:

    Welcome, have fun here in the forum and with your Kemper. Sounds as you already are in... same opinion here that it is really the most significant peace of gear in a long time :thumbup:8)

    For heavier tones I really like the Driftwood amplifiers, especially the Mini Nightmare is a good choice. There's a free rig on the Rig Exchange from a user mdan. It's a merged profile so you can change the cab easily to something which suits your needs better but the profile itself is already very versatile.

    I did lots of stoner tracks , and most often I used a real fuzz pedal in front of the KPA, always double or quad tracking and often playing riffs on a neck pickup P90 vs a bridge on the other side of the pan. Any quality driven marshall or higain will suit a quality fuzz ( I have a nitrogen 21 very versatile one, but a cheap SF300 behringer is enough ) . I think i use a free cameron profile most of the time.

    Remember that the gain knob will also give you all kind of fuzz on almost any profile with maxed gain, mixing these is another story ;)


    I also plan a dedicated stoner pack , as I was waiting for the editor to work on this.

    here is an example track :

    https://www.songtradr.com/user/song/dr-s…z-fest-stoner/1

    Thanks for the tips. It’s pretty cool and I’m enjoying using a different mindset(finding any amp) when trying to get a particular sound instead of playing everything through the same two amps.


    I’m gonna have to check out the Kempers Fuzz effects later. I’ve got a Wicker Man and Micro Synth if needed but I’ve been seriously impressed with the effects so far.


    I’ll look out for the pack?

    :thumbup:

    I've messed around with stoner tones for ages and found it quite hard to get a sound that's good live and in the studio.

    I've tried various approaches, have a look at m britt free dumble profiles. The clean ones.

    I've tried clean amps with pedals, russian big muff, tumnus and or pdf 2.

    Pdf2 gets you really close, especially to qotsa with a big clean amp.

    For kyuss I used a high ish gain mbritt marshall jcm 900 with just the tumnus in front. Messed around with swapping for an ampeg 8x10 but prefer 4x 12.

    I ended up with the treble and bass up, add 1 db on bass and 2 on treble.

    Obviously neck double humbucker, fairly low output tuned to c standard with 12s.

    Live I use an orange dual terror, I've profiled it, but still trying to find stoner heaven in the studio via kemper. After 1000 profiles I'm as close as I'll ever get.

    Many thanks for the super informative response. I had a go with the MB Dumble profile this week. I go back to it and add some fuzz etc. I noticed M Britt has a Dumble pack which I may have to purchase.

    I had the PDF 2 but didn’t love it as much as I thought I would.


    I need to understand how to swap cabs on profiles etc. I’ll have a look tonight.

    :thumbup:

    I bought his dumble pack but of all of them my favourite is the ceritone that is actually free with the kemper.

    I've tried all sorts of fuzz pedals, all much better than the stomp presets. Not a fan of the kemper fuzz.

    For kyuss tones the jcm 900 is it, it's what josh used, into an 8 x 10 ampeg cab. Load a profile with an 8x10 cab, then hold the cab button for a second, then press lock. Now change to a jcm 900 profile, store it, it will save with the new cab, then unlock the cab by hitting cab again for a second and unocking.

    I wasnt a huge fan of the 8x10., I think its attached to an ampeg bass rig originally.

    I played these side by side with blues for the red sun and they sound very close if you tweak it a bit.

    To be fair it's a unique sound, on it's own it sounds quite underwhelming, I end up preferring a more traditional 70s rock sound.

    The KPA fuzz is not so bad once you find the proper setting & matching profile, take a listen to this clip @ 3:15 , it's the Fuzz DS stomp . the muffin is also nice especially since the Mix% parameter was available a few months ago.

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    I still prefer a real fuzz pedal but mainly to tweak on the fly , especially the N21 as I can setup bassy fuzzy tones for rhythm parts and mix piercing leads with the help of the tone, color and boost knobs. I really dig the fact that the germanium buffer adds a lot to the organic character of my tone and the wild & chaotic aspects of these great pedals like the dirty gate , something I miss on my KPA. the combination is perfect and this pedal never leaves my signal chain : guitar, jack , N21, jack , KPA , that's it. The added bonus is that it's easier to mix in my DAW.