Joint Depression - Lowdown

Hi all,

my first post, woohoo!

My band made a record / music movie consisting of 10 songs / music videos. Kemper was used intensively during album production: all guitars, all vocals(!) and parallel version of bass track was feed through Kemper, using different profiles. Some of the guitar tracks were also reamped. “Lo-fi” sound at the beginning of one song is all Kemper (slightly modified “Drive-Thru Speaker” profile), including the drums.

Using Kemper for the vocal tracks was very interesting. Because the recording quality of the vocals was quite… hmmm, modest (vocals were recorded using internal preamp of Boss multitracker), I reamped all vocal tracks via Kemper. First thing to do was to find a suitable profile for the vocalist and for the song. My favourites were “Neveish” by their nature. Then I removed a cabinet and eq stack, adjusted tube parameters and added some gain, compression and miscellaneous effects for the taste. I’m quite satisfied with the results, Kemper was really intuitive to use and it added the flavour I was missing.

You can check the results here: http://jointdepression.bandcamp.com/ and in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_j6Q2tcnqs

A word of caution: the movie is quite “Finnish”, as is the English pronounciation.

All comments and questions are welcome. I have most of the modified presets in my computer and all of them are free profiles from Rig Exchange, so sharing is also possible.

-Jari

Thanks guys! Ja terve vaan, Stevoe!

It’s really easy to spice up the production and add details with Kemper and this is exactly what I did during mixing process of this album. Instead of DAW effect plugins, I used Kemper for almost everything else except drum gates, reverbs and compression.

Usually I’m quite reclusive guy who likes to stay away from the internet forums. This time I made an exception. The main reason is that there has been some questions about using Kemper for keys, vocals, etc. This album demonstrates that it is possible to do that stuff and in my point of view, Kemper added the high quality ingredient I was looking for.

Kemper is a wonderful studio tool, not only for recording guitar/bass tracks but also for mixing. Reamping via S/PDIF is easy (for any track you want) and during reamp process you can operate the effects and parameters on the fly. For example, the sparkle MyAlterEgoHamish mentioned is an EHX-stylish Kemper octaver (or pitch shifter/whammy, I have to check this later) blended with unprocessed signal. I reamped the original track, added the octaver effect and modified effect parameters during the reamp process by hand and with foot controller. Very neat and intuitive. The only thing that sets the limits, at least in my experience, is your own imagination and creativity.

And because of firmware updates Kemper is getting better and better all the time. I just hope that a constant growth of firmware complexity doesn’t mean that a number of firmware bugs will also increase drastically. But for sure, Christoph’s team is aware of the risk and will be working to mitigate it.

Oh gosh, I’m really starting to sound like a Kemper fanboy… which I am!

-Jari