Hello KPA

  • Hi, I'm meambobbo and I got my KPA on Friday, luckily my off day.


    I am coming from a Pod HD, but I also own a Spider Valve, and I've owned a Mesa Boogie Quad Preamp and Simul 2:95 power amp and a rock solid 4x12. I've also spent a considerable amount of time on other amps. I really like the digital approach due to the sheer versatility and ability to emulate giant speaker cabs and cranked amps in a variety of settings. Most of my time has to spent in lower volume settings now.


    The Pod HD has had me tweaking seeming like forever. The main amps I wanted it to emulate it doesn't have models of; however, I felt with a good amount of pre-eq'ing or distortion stomp effects you can get other amps to sound in the zone you wanted. I found the unit was full of other weird behavior, such as eq's with units in arbitrary %'s, lackluster cab/mic emulation, cab/mic emulations having different latency thus creating phase issues when combined, and eq effects introducing latency. I ended up creating a whole guide on the unit, collected from forum threads and usage, and I made it publicly available.


    The Pod certainly isn't a horrible unit, but getting there is insanely complicated. I finally felt I was hitting a ceiling with how good the unit could sound and certain sounds I couldn't get, and I knew I wanted a Kemper or an Axe-FX. The Kemper's unique design drew me in. If I disliked the built-in model on another unit, it's kinda tough toenails. But here, you just gotta find another profile. Also, I'm a budget player and found I could get the Kemper for a good bit cheaper than the Axe II. This rivals my largest purchase ever, so I would hope it's worth it...


    I started by taking the unit out the box and playing in my living room with some headphones. I went right to the tuner - immediately I knew the unit was quality - the display is high resolution and the pitch tracking was very fast and steady. Also I want to say the feel was better than I'm used to - like the unit was completely transparent. That might just be a bias - I still have to do a direct A/B Kemper vs. Pod before I'm going to say the Kemper blows it away.


    So anyway, right away, I decided to try to see how far I could get with the unit without reading anything about the user interface. It didn't take very long at all to be able to do everything I wanted. I toggled through almost all the factory presets that were hard-rock/metal. Also tried some random ones out. I could tweak a rig, save it as a different name very easily. Favorites/recently added views are very handy. I updated firmware and loaded rigs I DL'ed. All very easy. Sensitivity of the knobs is very high but the control is good, so it is pretty awesome having that much control.


    Through the headphones, things can sound pretty biting just browsing through the raw profiles. Clean/low-gain sounds were phenominal. Pitch and other other effects-based rigs were pretty interesting. But I was curious about the higher-gain sounds. I wasn't finding quite as many rigs that I really liked as I thought.


    I moved the unit to my work room so I could play it through some monitors. Being in a room instead of in the headphones, things opened up a lot and started sounded very nice. I also started diving in with EQ'ing and adusting the amp parameters. I'm really starting to get the hang of things.


    My favorite amps I want to emulate are the Mesa Marks - do the whole Petrucci thing. I was kind of curious about this, as I didn't see many clips online of the Kemper doing them, and many of the default rigs were rather thin and harsh. I have actually found some killer profiles that totally nail the Mark sounds, once I tweaked them a bit.


    The tones I'm getting are totally amazing. I'm a happy customer. The amazing thing is there's so much versatility. Demo'ing profiles I'll DL a bunch and go through them, and I'll have several for the same channel of the same amp, with the same cab, same mic, and same person doing the profile, and they sound subtly different.


    Overall, I don't think I'm going to have much to complain about with this unit. I have some plans so far as to how I can give back to this community, but I will save that for future posts.


    Oh, does anyone have a Dual Rectifier profile? That's the one amp I can't find profiled. ;-p

  • Welcome to the club!


    I also went from Pod HD to KPA, and, IMO, it totally kills it -- perhaps not in pure potential, but because I hated tweaking the Pod. It totally slays an un-tweaked Pod!


    Check here for some dual rect profiles:
    Dual Rectifier rackmount and Mako Mak2 + G12K100, all of my profiles here



    Of course, wading through the profiles in the exchange can be time consuming... but worth while, there are some gems there. Make sure you grab the Lasse Lammert Signature Rig Pack from the download section too, it has some great profiles.,

  • Ciao meambobbo, welcome here :thumbup:


    When you start feeling you want to learn more, remember the Profiler has got two dedicated manuals (one available on d/l).
    Furthermore, you can d/l the pdf in my signature.


    Have fun! :thumbup:

  • Thanks for the warm welcome. I'm finding the users here are on another level as the Pod HD as well. I'm just getting into the forums, and I haven't seen much of the "How do I do <basic function>?" "RTFM, noob" dialogue here, which makes me smile. I see lots of advanced posts on the unit, and many of the users seem quite informed as to all the deep parameters and how to manage rigs.


    I have actually looked through the basic manual and some of the advanced manual - I just avoided the UI stuff to see how intuitive the unit was and was VERY impressed on how easy it is to use despite it being something completely new and having so much capability.


    Viabcroce, I saw the wiKPA page - excellent stuff. I'm already a contributer actually - I posted the 2.2.0 beta release notes. I hope to be quite active in fleshing out the wiki.


    I have not gotten into mixing cab and amp profiles yet. That's kind of phase II for me. Right now my goal is to identify as many free rigs as I can that sound real nice, then tweak them to sound exactly how I want them. Obviously, part of that will be mixing amp and cab profiles - finding my favorites and finding new methods to get different sounds out of them.


    I did try to mess with the cab profile parameters. These have some rather bizarre effects on the tone and not sure how I would really use them right now. Subtle tweaks to character seemed to be ok, but any adjustment to low or high shift seemed to hurt the tone.

  • I saw the wiKPA page - excellent stuff. I'm already a contributer actually - I posted the 2.2.0 beta release notes. I hope to be quite active in fleshing out the wiki.


    Glad to hear this! I was referring to the .pdf tho, which is still richer than the site in many respects until I find time to finish transferring the whole stuff :)

  • I did try to mess with the cab profile parameters. These have some rather bizarre effects on the tone and not sure how I would really use them right now. Subtle tweaks to character seemed to be ok, but any adjustment to low or high shift seemed to hurt the tone.

    Hi and welcome meambobbo,


    a little goes a long way there. Just dial in / out a small amount and take some time to get accustomed to the tweaked sound. I use to store a renamed version and switch back and forth to hear the difference. This helps a lot.