Hey there,
I’ve had my Kemper about a month now, and enjoyed every minute of it. However I have a work flow problem with it (maybe you power users can help me out). Here is how it usually goes. Say I want to play Wipe Out by The Ventures. So I sit down at the Kemper w/ my Strat and dial up an amp that gets me in the ball park. Something vintage clean to crunch. (Ventures used Fenders and Mosrite amps). There are lots of similar amps to choose from. Good. The only problem is the cab it comes with doesn’t provide the tone I'm looking for (despite twiddling the available knobs in the amp/eq/cab). So I need to find a cab that when paired with the amp has the surf sound that I hear in my mind. Ignore the obvious delay/reverb for now. This cab choice is much harder for me than finding the amp because there are so many more parameters (basically I want the whole stack spectrum to be close). This is where things break down.
One way could be to lock all but the eq and cab slots and walk through my 700 or so rigs playing a riff and seeing if it sounds good with the amp I chose (hugely time consuming). Another way might be to use Tills cabs (a smaller and more parametric search) but again this is time consuming, and his collection (although great) is only based off a few cabs, so they tend to fall into a number of discrete families of tones. Yet a third method would be start one of those previous searches, and when I get close, use the 4 eq knobs in the eq section to tweak it, but I find that to be not enough control to usually get me where I want to be. So I could add another eq in the x slot or mod slot, but you can see now I’m just adding more and more band aids to this problem, and consuming more and more time when all I wanted to do is play the song with a fairly close tone. What bugs me about this is I can actually see the frequency content I want in my mind. I know roughly where I want the peaks and valleys and I want to quickly select a cab (or really amp/eq/cab combination) that represents this.
So I’m open to suggestions.
I had thought about injecting a sine sweep or white noise into each cab on my KPA and capturing the output so I could graph each cabs frequency response. But then I have the problem of how do I rapidly scan through 700 or so plots when I have a sound in mind.
I could organize the data in different ways… Boomy to bright might be good, or maybe how mid scooped (or not) they are, etc. But then I have the problem of locating the one I want to try, quickly, and then if that doesn’t work, look for another one that that has a similar response (but may be far away on the browse knob), again not a good solution.
Another possibility would be to analyze all 700 or so, but only keep 10 or 20 cabs as presets that cover the widest and diverse amount of usable tones (auditioning 10 or 20 when tone searching is not bad). Then fill in the gaps with eq tweaks.
Does anybody have some good suggestions? How do you guys accomplish this? Thanks in advance.
dB