Thanks everyone for looking into this. Being a huge Kemper fan and believer, It bothers me when Kemper doesn't get the recognition it deserves. It's seems since it's an "old" product it's not "cool" to say you play one now even though nobody has a problem talking about their "old" Marshalls.
Posts by Dynochrome
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Looks like a Stage - can’t tell if it’s MK2.
And it sounds like he calls it a Fractal. Captions read "fractional" but what would that mean? Right now I'm thinking he thinks the stage is a Fractal.
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The tour starts in February, so I'm sure he's referring to an existing Fractal product, like the FM9 or AxeFX.
But he's pointing down to the floor unit he's using when he says "I might have something like a Fractal like this". If you were right, then he would have said instead of this? (the Kemper stage) I think he thinks he's using a fractal in that video.
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Listen to what he says at 1:02:50. Sounds like he says (and points to it with his foot) : "I might have something like a Fractal like this"
If he doesn't say that what is he saying there? If I turn on captions it reads: " I might have a fractional like this for IEM". The closed captions maybe wouldn't pick up Fractal. So right now I'm going to conclude he thought he was using a fractal and once again Kemper got snubbed.
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See Rick Beato's new U Tube interview: The Neal Schon Interview: the Riffs, the Solos, and the Soul of Journey. At 1:02:50 does he say "I might have something like a Fractal like this" ? Wondering because I'm pretty sure that is a Kemper Stage.
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I always snicker when I see people local and professionals with this gigantic three foot by three foot pedal board and then when I hear it I concur that there's nothing on that entire board that I can't do way close enough for live with my Kemper. I used to feel the same way when I used regular amps and I would just have a 1 rack space effect unit that could do anything those gigantic pedal boards could but without tap dancing all over the place not to mention the noise from cables. Some people are just so stubborn about the pedal thing and are convinced that it makes a huge enough difference to warrant that mess. I love old Echoplexes and I think they do have some magic but I can tell you I can set up my Kemper delay so that there isn't a single person in the audience that would be able to tell the difference. I also have some old script & block phase 90s That I found a way to replicate as well. I've got a bunch of old vintage petals but they're just there to look at because I can do anything they can do with the Kemper close enough to not need to drag them around.
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The best part of playing a KPA is that you can try as many amps as you like, and in my case I tried hundreds of profiles , maybe thousands ...
... just to figure out that I only need a couple of princeton & JCM800 profiles to cover 95% of my tone needs.
it just took 10 years of KPA for me to undestand this
I had a similar journey. At first I was making performances with all kinds of different amps in them and that would cause ear vertigo when switching between them. I worked like crazy to get everything to sound good with the right levels when I switch between them. Because they were so different tone wise it was really hard to do that and I was constantly adjusting them. After contemplating it a bit I realized that in the past I had amps that would have just a couple different basic sounds and I could do everything with that. I found the best thing to do is just like you I have a clean amp (/13) that I have set from Strumming Acoustic Light Clean to crunch and then maybe a little more with a pedal, Maybe a fender type amp set in the middle and then another British style amp for my heavier stuff that I can go from classic rock distortion to Metal to leads by adjusting the gain and adding a pedal. I found that using just a couple amps and adjusting them makes it way easier to keep things consistent and more like I have been used to doing for years. It took me awhile to get there because I'm bad with choices and I wanted it all, only to find out too much is too much.
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Greetings, what power amp do you choose to employ if I may be so bold to ask?
Not at all bold, I'm glad to answer any question that I can. I used to be one of those people that thought that tubes would add some kind of magic, and while that was true with non digital preamps, you really just need to have enough power to push the amount of speakers that you want to use with enough headroom that there is no distortion.
I've known people that use one of those little power amps that are the size of a stomp box (EH.44 cal) and it worked really well. I think a lot of the suggestions that people have made on here sound good it all just depends on how loud you need to be and how many speakers you want to drive. Of course more power is better than less but size is a consideration most likely also and you don't need a huge power amp for it to be enough. The one that comes in a powered Kemper is about 160 watts continuous and is way more than enough to do any gig with. If you had something like that outside of the Kemper in a box I bet it would hardly weigh anything or take up that much room. Just make sure it is responsive and has enough power to stay clean and punchy.
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I wonder if a comparable tube based option exists? Small and Practical.
I don't know why Anybody would want a tube based option. Any coloration to the Kemper output is generally detrimental to the accuracy of the profile. A profile done correctly will already have the tube coloration "built in" And from my personal experience any tube distortion added changes things and not for the better. Not only that but you're dealing with the fragility of tubes, heat, weight etc. People have it in their mind that the tube sound will somehow make it warmer or more magic but all it really does is make things more distorted and fuzzier, So some hear that as "warmer".
Solid state amps are generally more reliable and with nothing to gain by having a tube option I can't see why tubes should be considered.
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I am still exclusively using the Marshall jmp1 preamp profiles i made when first buying my Kemper. I’ve tried other stuff but they’ve never gained foothold within my setup.
Very easy to make, since i just profiled from the emulated outputs of the JMP1. I’ve been a direct into the desk guitarist for 30 years, so no reason to even have a cab and a mic figure in to my FOH sound.That's so awesome that you've been using the ones that you made when you first got the unit and never found anything to top it. I think I own around 17 "professional" packs which have a lot of good stuff in them, but I have always said that if I had to do it all over again I would probably only own two or three of them. When I made this profile, I didn't even really do it "right" and compare back and forth I just got a sound that I knew went on tape good and plugged it in, profiled it and it turned out really good (for me)
I used to buy around $3000+ worth of amp gear on average a year the problem being if you buy an amp you had to make it work and then when you got tired of it sell it for a loss and buy another expensive amp you thought would be better and then be stuck with that for awhile. Now that I realize that there is no perfect amp for me and my taste changed so much the Kemper has saved me tons of money because I can be as finicky as I want and go from thick to thin, grainy to tight distortion etc with the turn of a knob.
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just tried it...a bit too much gain for me but I dialed it back a bit and it sounded great
Yes many of us have found that it seems more accurate to dial the gain back some more than it does to dial it forward. I was using some pretty hot pickups so I thought that I would leave the gain pretty high and let people just dial it back a bit to get where they wanted it if they were using cooler pickups. To me it's a little too much gain for rock rhythm and for leads I might just need a teeny bit of front end TS boost from if I wanted it super sensitive like to do easy touch harmonics etc, I thought I kinda put it in the upper middle of that range.
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Thanks for the feedback! it's really fun to hear what other people think. Everybody's system and how /what they listen through is so different that it's very intriguing for me when people play profiles that I have a good idea how they sound on my stuff.
For most things I agree it is too much gain for most of the stuff that I would do, but that's what it just happened to be with the Gain set at 11:30 with the internal pot about 10:30. It is thick. If you compare it to some things that professional profilers have done like say BHP Warren Marshall or something it's way thicker than that.
If you listen to some of that awesome 80s metal guitar tones that some people consider top of the heap, there will be almost zilch bottom end to it. Compare to Dokken "kiss of death" ( that a lot of people consider a pretty good 80s tone ) and be surprised by how much bottom end you have to remove from the guitar tone to get there. The profile I have here would never work for tha it has way too much bottom and is way too fat. Sometimes thick doesn't really work in the mix.
I thought this profile just did a good job of standing on its own and with a little bit of EQ will cover a lot of 80s style "modded" type high gain. It's something that I would use in a three piece band when there wasn't another guitar player to fill things up.
Thanks again for taking the time to critique it no matter what is said it's not going to hurt my feelings, I didn't spend any time capturing this profile at all, I just got a sound through the amp that I liked stuck the mic in front of it and hit profile. I'll bet if I would've spent 15 minutes on it I could've dialed in something "better" but that would likely be subjective. I'm just amazed how fast and easy the Kemper could achieve capturing this tone that I thought was pretty fun to play. I almost feel like I could have borrowed the pedal spent 10 minutes profiling it like this and then taking it back. I like the Kemper profile I made of it better than using it through my Marshall because I can use the effects I'm used to with my Kemper.
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thanx, I'd like to hear/try it
So what did you think?
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What? And all these years I've been blaming my amps ha!
As we love our tools and obsess over sound, we have to remember 3 things about playing live:
1) 99% of what people listen to comes from what we play. Only we and a coupe of other guitarists care about the sound.
2) Stage presence and audience interaction counts for so much! You can be a brilliant play and stand like a miserable statue and no one cares. Play 3 chords with passion and the audience will love you
3) No one cares about the guitarist, its all about the singer. The good news is they care even less about the drums...oh and who is that other bloke with 2 strings missing on his guitar?...I apologise in advance to my fellow bass playing friends...it was a cheap joke.
I always tell people in my groups that the audience will assess you in the first 30 seconds and decide whether they're going to really pay attention and interact or turn around and keep talking to people. If you're on stage looking like you just climbed off the bar stool with your camo hunter hat and Hawaiian "party"shirt it's not going to help. Being on stage is a visual thing and you have to look good up there. I always say you need to dress so that there's no doubt that you are in the band.
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... and then you put it in a mix on stage ..... It is simply mystifying to me that many people don't think your ears are the best tool to use, or that usability, efx, reliability, etc, aren't important.
That's really the difference between the people that sit at home and obsess about the smallest Null details and the people that are on stage getting wild and bashing it out with a killer sounding amp. At the end of the day your performance, stage presence and the ability to rock the crowd matters more than anything else. An example is there's lots of famous recordings that everybody loves that I think have the worst guitar sounds ever but it doesn't really matter because the songs and the performances were great. Killer guitar tones alone will not make you a superstar.
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Name : JF4104 + BEOD By JF (Me)
if you wanted a little brighter/ crunchy just turn the treble and presence back up to 0 or maybe add one DB each. Moving the mid treble and presence around just one DB does a lot here. I had them back down a bit when I downloaded this because I had a bright guitar at that time I was using.
I use an old legacy reverb that I used to have set for Van Halen type stuff, you might want to use yours-adjust mix up for more VH1. The phaser in slot C is my version of the evh phaser sound, and the light flanger in B is something I like to use sometimes on leads. Please report on what you think I'm curious, I think it's pretty decent.
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I think it was these videos he was referring to.I thought it was titled :Kemper Profiling Amp Vs 3 Classic Amps + The OX Box - Blindfold Challenge!
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Do you remember which one?
Kemper Profiling Amp Vs 3 Classic Amps + The OX Box - Blindfold Challenge!
I recall "The Captain" guessed right but "Chappers" couldn't
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I'll upload it tonight and let you know. I was going for a thick juicy sound like you would hear in a lot of late 80s early 90s records. Not the mid Scooped Pantera/ Metallica type but more like you might hear from hair metal bands that were using modded Marshalls or Soldano preamps.
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Normally I don't do a whole lot of my own profiling, I mostly use things that somebody else has done. I will mainly profile just when I'm showing somebody how accurate it is that is a naysayer or something. Sometimes I like to mess around with my old amps and put mics on them and just stay in touch with my roots. Normally that will remind me why I like my Kemper so much.
I was watching a video where Pete Thorn was using a BE-OD and said it was some of the best tones he ever recorded. I had an opportunity to grab one real cheap and tried it on my stock 4104 Marshall through the gain channel and I wasn't really all that impressed. It was too "pushed ". I put it on the "low" channel which has a pretty non remarkable splatty clean sound and it was fantastic sounding. That pedal really isn't an overdrive per se but more of an "amp in the box" I discovered. I miked it up and was blown away by the tone I was getting it was so good that I knew I had to preserve it in my Kemper. Leaving everything the way it was I quickly profiled it using a condenser mic not doing what I usually do and isolating it but just leaving it right in the room and setting the levels more by eye than ear knowing that I was already getting a good sound through the mic.
The very first profile I made sounded really really good and I believe rivals a lot of the stuff that I have on my Kemper now. It not only sounded as good as the original sound going through a really nice preamp and a little bit of 1176 compression but as usual added that "Kemper magic" and sounded better than what I had first done with a microphone and preamp. Once again I was surprised by how quickly I could create a great profile into the Kemper without hardly even trying. I just thought I'd say this because after all the discussions about mark one versus mark 2 and the accuracy etc. The regular old version 1 has no problem creating tones very quickly that can match or somehow magically make things better somehow. If anyone wants to check it out I'll upload it to RE I'd be interested in hearing what you thought about this profile that I just literally slapped together in seconds.
