Posts by bsd512

Direct profiles don't use a cabinet so you have to use some type of device that sits between the amp and the cabinet that sends the raw amp signal back into the Kemper, instead of the chain that includes the cabinet.

The Suhr Reactive Load box is not just a resistive load, it's an inductive load like a real speaker, so it doesn't color the raw amp signal like cheaper resistive load boxes. You can think of it as a very inefficient speaker. You can actually hear it, if you put your ear down to it as the power flowing through it slightly vibrates the coils within it. It can handle up to a 100W amp at full master volume.

If you mean do I get better profiles than actually mic'ing a cabinet, for *me* - I'd have to say yes. IRs are usually expertly mic'd and sometimes with multiple mics. I get great results making studio profiles this way. And to make the Direct profile, all I have to do is disable the IR and I get the direct raw amp signal that is what you need for making a Direct profile.

When I profile, I usually do both studio and direct profiles, and then merge them, so that when I turn off the cabinet in the Kemper when I want to drive a real cabinet instead of FRFR, I get better authenticity than if you turn off the cabinet from a studio profile. So if you have a powered Kemper you can power a speaker cabinet directly, and if you don't have a powered Kemper, you can still send the Kemper line-out into a power amp connected to a real cabinet. Sounds really great doing either of these.

Does that answer your question?

In my experience, this works well.

My setup for doing this is using a Suhr Reactive Load box to replace the speaker on the amp, feed the line-out of the Suhr RL into my Helix using a return block, after the return block use an IR for cabinet modeling, and feed the output of that back into the Kemper reference input. Then profile away.

Works really well, and is very easy to make direct, studio, and merged profiles. For the direct, just disable the IR block in the Helix and redo the profile.

I've gotten really nice profiles this way - all silent and can do them anytime without bothering neighbors or family in the house at all hours of the day or night.

Edit: I've done little amps as well as big amps this way (up to 100W heads). Both work well.

Kemper and Helix - best friends.

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Looking behind me ...

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Ok, great. I was going to suggest that "BSD" or "IRT15H", I think mine is the only match for that also.

I hope you like it!

Thanks for sharing it, but I'm not finding it, did you pull it down?

I just got a Laney IRT15H and did my first profile of it. I plan to do more, but figured I'd share this one now.

This is a very cool little amp and has some great tones available. The rig does not have any effects enabled by default - but just press the delay and reverb buttons to give it some body and ambience. Toss a tube screamer in front for some nice compression and a touch of drive if you want to tighten it up.

I hope you like it. Let me know!

Laney IRT15H DR 5, Author: BSD

Amp settings:

INPUT: 15W
REBERB: 0
TONE: -2
DYNAMICS: 3
VOLUME: 8
TREBLE: 1
MIDDLE: -1
BASS: 0
DRIVE: 6
PRE-BOOST: ON:2

-Brian

Quote from MaximeLajoie

By the way, you can get my free profiles here.

Let me know if you like any of them.

Ha - I see you have a SovTek amp up there. The "VodkaSonic" I mentioned above is a customized SovTek Bassov Blues Boy modified by Steve Carr of Carr Amplification who is local to my area. It's my guitar teacher's amp and is a unique one-off. It's sounds pretty incredible. My guitar teach knows Steve Carr and they are friends. And that's the one I'm reluctant to upload to RE without his permission.

Incidentally, we first profiled it with a 421 mic. I didn't know anything about the amp but Steve basically turned it into a guitar amp with a clean and drive channel, and did a bunch of rewiring, changed out tubes, and who know what else. So I suggested he set it up and mic it like he would at a gig and we profiled it that way - feeding the mic directly into the Kemper. It was pretty fizzy, so that's one that got the studio EQ in the X block after the tone stack to reduce the harshness. Sounded good!

I later borrowed the amp and profiled it using my Suhr RL and Helix/IR setup with some hi-cuts. I then took my Kemper over to his studio and played him both the mic'd profile and the Suhr/Helix based profiles through my Line 6 L2t powered FRFR PA and he said "That's just crazy! That's *exactly* my amp." And then proceeded to crank it up and play and couldn't put it down. He did say he thought the load box method sounded better than our mic'd method. That's not a definitive opinion because we really didn't spend a lot of time on the mic setup and we just did one profile. With the Suhr, I did about a dozen profiles with varying levels of gain from both the clean and drive channels through an IR of his cabinet which was a Marshall 1960B with Greenbacks. He was VERY impressed, though, at just how exactly it reproduced the unique sound of that amp.

I'm looking forward to trying out your SovTek and the rest of the amps you have samples for. I'll probably buy a few, too. Thanks!!

Another great tip! Thanks!

I'll definitely check out your profiles. Thanks again.

BTW - I want to say thanks, MaximeLajoie. You've given me some things to think about and try. Additional suggestions are welcome of course, but I probably have at least several hours of experimentation to do from your above suggestions.

Thanks!!

I have a few decent mics, some I own, and some I've borrowed. But I do not have so great of a pre and analog eq - hence feeding the Helix which does have those. And I don't have a particularly good room.

What I notice most that I don't care for with my mic'd profiles vs using IRs through Helix is the high end harsh fizz - I can get that with the Helix, but it's easy to dial out using a simple hi-cut in the IR block. I have experimented a good bit with mic and placement to find what I feel is the best mic location for the cabinet. That helps but it's still pretty harsh. Beyond that, I have worked around that somewhat by putting a studio eq in the X block with a high cut and that sounded much better. But I'd like to get a better profile out-of-the-box without having to put another block after the tone stack to shape it how I think it should sound from the tone stack (and take up a valuable FX block).

This is still a learning process for me, though. I do plan to experiment more with mic'ing the cab directly. The Helix does have a very nice clean mic input and plenty of eq's and a studio pre that can be added to the chain. The main problem I run into there is that the reference amp is so loud when dialing in a tone that it tends to overwhelm even good closed back isolating headphones when listening to the mic'd tone with the amp blaring 20 feet away which makes it very hard to hear just the mic'd tone without the amp shaking the floor and rattling the windows.

A good amp isolation box would fix that, but that's not only expensive or very time consuming to build, but also takes up a lot of space which I don't have in abundance.

Running through the Suhr RL and Helix seemed like the perfect solution. But I really need to rule out that it may be affecting the profile quality by doing that. The profiles I do that way are super super close - I really cannot tell the difference except in edge cases. So it's really just the edge cases that I notice the differences. Like somewhat lightly playing a simple single-note scale. The reference amp has more edge and gain while the profile sounds almost clean with a slight edge. If I adjust the gain on the profile to match more closely the reference amp in that case, then the gain is too high when playing chords. It's like I can fix it for one aspect, but then that throws off the accuracy in another.

High gain tones are less of an issue than low-gain and light crunch.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs here and my expectations are unrealistic.

Maybe a small selection of pre-recorded dry tracks could be provided - like 3 or 4 and you could pick. Ideally, though, the Kemper algorithms would refine from a variety of playing inputs that would cover the most common playing styles - chugging, lead, open chords, light touch stuff, etc. And for different gain characteristics from light crunch to heavy gain. That may be asking for too much, but ideally ... even if the refining algorithms need to be updated to adapt which would be more work on Kemper's part. This is a pretty darn sophisticated device so I'd think the extra effort during profiling and refining would be worth it to get truly accurate reference amp representation with one refining pass. That would be perfect.

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I have made traditional mic'd cab based profiles instead of the above IR method. I'll revisit that and while I don't think they sound as good as the IR based profiles, I'll at least verify whether the Studio matches the Merged more closely.

Thanks!

EDIT - sorry, I didn't answer your first question. I've profiled a Marshall DSL40C combo w/mic and IR. A custom "VodkaSonic" using a mic and IR. And also a Laney L20H using IR-only. The Laney profiles are here - these are the studio versions:

Laney LionHeart L20H uploaded ...

I don't have permission yet to upload the custom VodkaSonic profile(s) to share - it's a unique amp and I didn't feel right about uploading it for sharing without permission from the owner. I just need to ask, he'll probably be fine with it.

Yes - I have my amp feeding a Suhr Reactive Load box. I think I do what you do, just in reverse, first I do a direct profile, then without changing anything, I turn on the IR and do a Studio, then merge them by copying the cab from the studio profile into the direct profile and select the merge feature, then save to a new profile name.

Specifically to your question on my setup above - Guitar to front of Kemper, Kemper direct out to the front of the amp. The amp speaker out feeds a Suhr Reactive Load. Then I have the direct/line-out of the Suhr feeding an FX return of my Helix. Inside the Helix, that feeds an impulse response to simulate a real cabinet for the Studio profile. And I turn the IR off to capture the amp Direct profile (no IR = no cabinet). The output of the Helix feeds back into the Kemper reference input.

Note that I'm not unhappy at all with either the Merged profile or the Studio profiles that I capture this way. In fact, this method gives great control over things like cutting out some high-end fizz from the studio profile by using a little hi-cut in the Helix IR block, so I'm liking these results a lot vs using a real mic and cabinet. But the main reason I do it is that I'm not in a sound isolated environment and doing it with a real mic and cabinet would be too loud.

But I was surprised that the Merged profile sounded different than the Studio profile when I A/B them back to back. Neither is bad or anything, they are just different, though I prefer the Studio profile and I know I dialed it in as closely as I could to make it sound like what I was hearing when I made it with a lot of A/B'ing back and forth to get them to match as closely as I could. So while the Merged doesn't sound bad, it's different enough from the Studio to make me think it's not as accurate as the Studio. I was expecting them to be nearly indistinguishable.

As far as profiling itself, I'm doing that as best I know how. After adjusting the amp to taste, I let the Kemper do it's thing with the automated process. Then I refine it by playing as described in the Kemper manual. I do that both for the Direct and the Studio, and do my best to adjust the adjustable parameters (pick, sag, definition, EQ, etc) to match the reference amp as closely as my ears will allow in a variety of playing situations.

Side note - it seems a lot easier to match a high gain tone than one with light crunch and get the break-up to match closely. Chords are ok, but single notes especially those played lightly without a lot of force don't seem to have the same edge that they do through the reference amp - all else being equal in the signal chain, i.e., reference amp is still going through the Suhr RL->Helix->IR->Kemper ref input. It makes me wonder if I'm not playing a good "refining sequence" when refining or something.

That is what led me to suggest an "automated refining" process using a built-in "Kemper approved" pre-recorded dry signal in order to eliminate this variable or at least provide that as an option. Clearly it's not a very popular idea, though.

Addition to Profiling Process - Automated Refining

Thanks and any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

I hope you all like these. I did not include any effects in the profiles - so ... BYOE. Even something simple like just a little reverb can make them sound a lot better. But I figured everyone pretty much has their own preferred settings for those, so I thought they'd be easier for people to test out to see if they liked them or not if I simply left the effect sections empty.

BTW, if anyone has any suggestions for improvement in how to make profiles like these better, please let me know. I'm pretty new at the whole profiling thing and any suggestions or tips for improvement are welcome.

Thanks!!

I got access to a Laney LionHeart L20H amp this weekend and made a series of profiles with it. Neat amp! I thought they turned out pretty good. They're up on Rig Exchange under user "BSD". Hope you like them!

Clean Channel:

LANEY L20H CL 1
LANEY L20H CL 2
LANEY L20H CL 3
LANEY L20H CL 4
LANEY L20H CL 5
LANEY L20H CL 6

Drive Channel:

LANEY L20H DR 1
LANEY L20H DR 2
LANEY L20H DR 3
LANEY L20H DR 4
LANEY L20H DR 5
LANEY L20H DR 6

When profiling amps, what you play during refining seems to have a significant impact on how well the profile replicates the amp. I find my own playing can by hit or miss in this respect and often do multiple profiles so I can redo the refining process in order to get better accuracy.

Would it be possible to include, builtin-in to the Kemper Profiler, a "dry" guitar sequence developed by the Kemper Pros to feed the refining process? I tend to believe the Kemper developers know a lot better than the average owner what to play and how to play it when refining a profile. Please package that sequence up and build it into the Kemper as the perfect way to share it with your users.

If you do this, I believe the benefits are:

1) Better profiles from your users
2) Because of #1, Kemper will gain even higher status as a superb profiler
3) Faster, more accurate, and more consistent profiles, saving your users time and effort, which can be significant when doing a lot of profiles in one sitting

Win, win, win.

Just taking a stab at this - I envision one of the panel buttons after the UFO noise sound profiling process is complete, a button would have something like "Auto-Refine". That would feed the Kemper Engineering Team's pre-recorded guitar dry signal into the appropriate feed internally just like "Refine" does during the process now. Ideally, this process could take the place of "Refine", but "Manual Refine" would still be available for those cases where the "Auto-Refine" did not produce the results one hoped for. But ideally, Auto-Refine would be so good that people would rarely, if ever, need to Manually Refine.

Thanks for considering!

Situation: I have a nice reactive load box that does a great job. I use it with the amp and send the line-out to Kemper to create a direct profile. I take great pains to make the direct sound as close as possible to the real thing. I then send the direct out through an Impulse Response for a particular cabinet to create a studio profile. Again, I take great pains to make them sound as close as possible in every playing situation I can think of. Then I create a merged profile of the two.

Problem: the merged profile sounds good. But when I compare it to the Studio profile from the prior step, the studio profile is much more better.

I love the idea of merged profiles and their flexibility with more accurately capturing the direct amp so that other IRs or real cabinets can be substituted in the cabinet block more accurately than with a studio profile. But with the "real" studio profile sounding so much better and different than the merged profile that it contributed to, I'm thinking about abandoning this approach and just making Studio profiles - since they sound a lot closer, even identical, to the real amp and cabinet.

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong that would contribute to this discrepancy?

Thanks for any insight!

I went the opposite route - I am a Helix owner of over two years now and love it.

However ... I've been fascinated by the way the Kemper works. I didn't really *need* a Kemper. But I bought one because it's just such a cool piece of equipment - profiling an amp, any amp, and getting such great results simply from automated profiling process. Truly fascinating! How cool is that!

I got the chance to profile a custom one-off amp this past weekend. It is one of my guitar teacher's amps that he loaned me for that purpose and based off a SovTek Bassov Blues Boy that was modified and customize by Steve Carr of Carr Amplification to become a unique creation. He calls it the VodkaSonic.

And ... I used the Helix to help with the profiling process by using a reactive load box on the amp, feeding the load box line-out into a Helix return, feeding that into a Helix cabinet Impulse Response, and then the Helix output back into the Kemper reference input.

This works amazingly well and using the Impulse Response vs the native Helix cabs (which IMO are not that great but a lot of folks swear by them), applying hi-cut and lo-cuts during the profiling process to attenuate high frequency mic fizz, I was able to get a series of really nice Merged profiles, both direct and studio, and then merging them.

So my Helix and Kemper are best friends.

I do prefer to use the Helix effects, but only because they are so darn easy to set up with the amazing Helix UI. So I typically use my Kemper in conjunction with the Helix by simply patching the Kemper into a pair of send/return blocks in an otherwise standard Helix pathing preset. The send goes to the front of the Kemper and the stereo return from the Kemper line outs. I am super happy with that setup. And with either unit, you can grab and go very portably.

The other day I took my Kemper to my guitar teacher's and plugged up to a Line 6 L2t speaker, dialed up his VodkaSonic. He said - "That's just crazy! That's exactly my amp!" He cranked it up and played it a bit and was truly impressed. The real amp is a pretty large head and probably 50-60 pounds - and then he has a 4x12 cabinet to go with it. I didn't use the cabinet since I used the reactive load box into the Helix and then an IR of that same cabinet. Talk about portable by comparison. Of course, all you know all about that portability.

In my opinion, the Helix and the Kemper complement each other very well - like I mentioned, they are best buds. I'm sure the Kemper has great effects, I just haven't delved into them all. Part of the reason for that, and I hope this isn't taken the wrong way here, but the Kemper UI really can't be compared to the ease of use of the Helix's when it comes to setup, easy viewing of all the possibilities and option, selection, etc. But with the Helix, while it's amp modeling is very very good, you don't have the option of incorporating custom amps - *your* amps. I seriously doubt there will be a VodkaSonic amp modeled any time soon in the Helix. But I have one for the Kemper and it sounds very cool!

And even the model I made for my rather lowly DSL40C sounds really good - I like it every bit as much as the native Helix amp models and get great tones from it. I could certainly live with just a Helix, or just a Kemper, but when you combine them - it's a very very nice rig and capable of so much.

If you want to skip ahead - scroll down to "Suggestion for Kemper Firmware Update".

I'm pretty new to Kemper, about 2 months.

I've been profiling a lot, trying to get better at it, and have made some decent profiles. I'm currently using a Suhr Reactive Load box to profile silently. My setup is pretty straightforward:

Guitar -> Kemper front input
Kemper direct send -> front of amp
Amp speaker out -> Suhr Reactive Load
Suhr Line out -> Helix Return, and
Helix 1/4" mono out -> Kemper Return Input

In my Helix Path, I have the Return input followed by an OwnHammer IR -> 1/4" Helix out which feeds the Kemper Return input.

Works great.

I am making "merged" profiles, first profiling just the amp by turning the IR off in the Helix to make a Direct Amp profile. Then I turn the IR on, and make a Studio profile. Then merge them.

This works really well.

But dang, refining the profiles when doing a bunch at a time is really time consuming and somewhat error prone. I have found that what you play during refining makes a pretty big difference in the accuracy of the profile. I have found this is ESPECIALLY true of cleaner and light-crunch/crunch amp settings. It's really difficult to get accurate amp break-up in the profile, that is present in the reference amp. Chords sound fine, but single notes sound clean in the profile, whereas they are a little crunchy in the reference amp and it's not accurate. If it turn up the gain a little bit to get the break-up, then chords sound too gainy and other things aren't quite right.

One question - and one suggestion:

Question: What am I doing wrong? I'm totally open to suggestions and thanks in advance for any expert advice.

Suggestion for Kemper Firmware Update: Why not include a few pre-recorded guitar dry signals from the Kemper experts within the Kemper itself to "refine" the profile automatically after the normal profiling UFO sounds and feed that automatically into the Kemper to automatically refine it? If what you play affects the profile, and it sure seems like it does, it seems like the smart folks at Kemper could come up with a few appropriate dry guitar sequences to feed the "refining process" automatically from a few standard selections. This would make the Kemper profiling completely automated and maybe eliminate the manual refining process, take the human error out of the refining process, and relegate refining manually as optional, and at the same time increase the accuracy of the resulting Kemper profiles, making it a better product.

Easier, more accurate, and totally automated = win, win, win

This would have saved me a ton of time today while profiling a clean, 4 crunch settings, and 4 high gain settings, twice each (direct and studio), and then merging. A lot of the time, was re-doing the refining process over and over until I had a reasonably accurate profile in comparison to the reference amp. And for the clean and the 4 crunch profiles, I still wasn't completely happy with them. The high gain profiles seem much easier to dial in through refining, than clean and crunch. I think I spent 6 hours on this today at least. I think that time could have been reduced to maybe an hour or two instead with automated refining using "Kemper recommend" guitar refining sequences pre-reccorded inside the Kemper.

Is that just me, or do other people experience this too? Again, it's not the chords that don't sound right, but more single notes and light touch playing, especially with the light crunch and crunch settings such that the break-up is not very accurate under some conditions.

Thanks for any feedback!

Quote from stratocaster

Hi,

Thanks for sharing Your profile sounds real good !!! To make it sound good for my gear/taste I lowered the bass -1.8 , got rid of the noise gate which opened up the sound a bit , lowered the gain to 6.2 defenition 7.3 compressor

within amp ( pushbutton) down to 1.0 Now it sounds killer to me (I used to own a DSL40c so I know how it sounds)

I play a powered head through JBL's 305 with a '79 Strat.

Hey, on the noise gate, I keep forgetting about that giant noise gate knob handily positioned right on the front of the Kemper. That worked fine for me, too, but I'd already uploaded the profile with the noise gate enabled. I saw in a later response you turned the noise gate back on for certain things - is there a big difference in the way the external noise gate knob works for eliminating input noise vs a noise gate in the first stomp position?