M Britt Kemper Profiles

    Quote from pamplemousse

    hey Mike,
    just bought the 69 marshall & colonial packs, my first commercial profiles. they are perfect for classic & vintage rock tones and some heavier stuff too. thanks much.
    what would you recommend for some hot southern rock / texas blues with my HB Les Paul?
    cheers


    Thanks! What kind of tones are you thinking on the souther rock/tx blues thing? The Tweedy Pack has some nice mid gain tweed tones that I really like. The Diaz pack is kind of a bigger sounding tweed with more gain. Packs 1, 2, 3, or Vintage all have good options as well. Maybe just listen to the clips on the site and see if any of them fit what you're going for. There's quite a few options, I think.

    I'm all about the Diaz pack as I always remind mike and everyone here haha. It doesn't get the love/notice here it deserves... It is 50 percent of my live show these days, love the Diaz pack, especially the profiles with the archer and red pedals in front.

    Quote from lonestargtr

    Hey guys,
    We were doing some album promo at my house the other day and our drummer/video guy Keech asked if I wanted to shoot anything else while he was set up and I asked if he could shoot a quick little vid showing a Kemper tone for one of the solos. Check it out:


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    I love the tone and the playing. I could maybe get into this kind of Country music if it weren't for the vocal style. Kind of like how I'm too old to like a lot of the screamo metal from the other direction. ;) To each his own....

    @lonestargtr Do you have any recommendations on using the clean profiles live? I feel like the overdriven and distortion sounds on the Kemper are killer. The clean profiles sound great, but that's about the only time I wish I had a tube amp. And that's with all profiles I've tried (not just yours). I play a lot of music where my clean sound is very important, and play a lot of clean lead.

    Still working on the 3P pack idea with Jamie. He's been busy designing new amps lately. Not sure when our schedules will coincide, but I'll post info on it when it happens.


    As far as clean sounds (and keep in mind tone is very subjective), it depends on what kinds of cleans you're looking for. Funk-type chordal cleans need to be "cleaner" and not as mid-heavy in general. Country type Tele cleans can get away with a lot more gain and in some cases actually need it for a "cleanish" sound. Brad Paisley, for instance, actually has quite a bit of gain when compared to the '70's country Jerry Reed type stuff.


    I tend to go with my 3P Black Cln profile and just tweak the gain and compression to get where I want for that type of thing. If you're looking for more of a hard rock clean, they are typically more mid-forward and brighter and often less compressed. The strummy clean stuff was usually recorded with the clean channel of a Mesa, which doesn't have a lot of "tone" imo. For more Bad Co. type clean stuff, it's more Marshall/Les Paul stuff and you just have to tweak the gain until it hits the sweet spot between clean and dirty.


    Keep in mind that many of the "clean" rock tones used to be achieved with a gained up amp with the volume knob down a bit on the guitar. That's how it still had that muscular feel and not a wimpy plink to it. The amp was idling high and just waiting for some input, which is different from turning the amp down and not using the tubes and then hitting the input with full signal.


    Compression (both amp module and stomp) is very helpful in getting the transient attack reigned in when solo-ing with a clean sound. When you start cranking the volume on clean sounds the larger dynamic range can sometimes give you a super loud attack and a quick decay so that it sounds like a lack of sustain. Compression helps that a bit. Hope this helps.

    Quote from sanders4617

    @lonestargtr Do you have any recommendations on using the clean profiles live? I feel like the overdriven and distortion sounds on the Kemper are killer. The clean profiles sound great, but that's about the only time I wish I had a tube amp. And that's with all profiles I've tried (not just yours). I play a lot of music where my clean sound is very important, and play a lot of clean lead.


    Hey Sanders,


    I play in a regularly gigging Grateful Dead cover band (we average 2-3 'professional' paying gigs a month) and while I don't always agree with my band's music director's opinions, he typically demands that I use only clean profiles for my contributions. So, take this all with a grain of salt and vet it against your own ear and music needs but, well, you have come to the right place IMHO - Mike has a ton of great profiles and I am sure one way or another you will find exactly what you need.


    Echoing what he said, I think "3P Black Cln -1" (or something very similar to that) is now my #1 go to profile. II also have performances dedicated to /13, Dumble pack and other profiles so that I have options for whenever a situation presents itself where any one performance isn't sitting quite right in the mix. While I haven't visited them in a long time, I think there's some gold in his Vintage pack which was the first one I bought. Now in regards to some more recent evolution in my set up and approach, I've sort of slowly 'managed my manager' in regards to our band's musical director and have also been able to discretely and tastefully introduce a few of Mike's more 'mid-gain' profiles lately from the Colonial pack most notably, but there is a Marshal profile I used this weekend that really blew me away - I had set up a performance with several higher gain profiles for morph testing 4.02 and I used the gain profile 'as is' for the Morph State and then dialed back the gain to clean it up for the Base State and not only did I have a lot of fun with it in a loose jam session but got several compliments on my tone. I have read many folks feel like you get better results dialing back the gain on a mid-high gain profile than adding gain to a clean profile so you might try that with some of the overdriven profiles also. Hope that helps.

    Thanks for the responses.


    I guess the clean that I look for is that "Vince Gill" style of clean, in songs such as "Pretty Little Adriana." Sounds so full and clean. I'm sure a compressor was used as well.


    I am able to get these sounds from my Rivera Hundred Duo Twelve amp, and maybe I should also try profiling it as well. I'm sure like anything else, I just need to spend more time with the profiles and figuring out what works. Sometimes what sounds great by itself doesn't work as well in the mix.


    I've only had the Kemper for a short time as it is.. so I am still learning a lot!


    I love these profiles though, they are definitely the best I have tried.



    Vince Gill's tone is usually a Boss compressor and an amp so I would turn the mix up to 100% on the comp and add some squish on a fender deluxe type profile or similar (Princeton works great too. ). Gain would probably be set around 2-2.4.

    Quote from lonestargtr

    Vince Gill's tone is usually a Boss compressor and an amp so I would turn the mix up to 100% on the comp and add some squish on a fender deluxe type profile or similar (Princeton works great too. ). Gain would probably be set around 2-2.4.


    Which pack has the Lonestar clean? I saw that one pack had the Lonestar Ch2, but can't find which one would have the clean.


    Edit: Realized you said 3p.. but saw on a YT video that you had a Mesa clean. May be in your personal stash haha.

    Quote from sanders4617

    Which pack has the Lonestar clean? I saw that one pack had the Lonestar Ch2, but can't find which one would have the clean.


    Edit: Realized you said 3p.. but saw on a YT video that you had a Mesa clean. May be in your personal stash haha.


    The Mesa clean from that video was either from Pack 3's Cal Texan or one I had of the same amp from a different session. I try to be organized but I have a heckuva lot of profiles floating around. The 3P clean I use is one from Pack 1 as well as newer profiles of the same amp that I've done. I do keep some in my own personal stash, not to be a hoarder, but I'm just always trying to make the best profiles for our live show and they are often repeats of amps I've already put out.

    @lonestargtr,


    Hey Mike,
    Are delay and reverb fx recorded through the kemper or are they inserted later during mixing?
    I have been listening to 'Never Enders' and I find the production really rich but at the same time tastefully clear and tidy (as opposed to busy); really nice!
    So I was wondering on what the kemper's part is in that.


    Do you record mono or stereo? When you use fx, do you record them in a separate track?


    Great profiles and brill. album, well done!


    First of all, thanks so much for listening to our new music. I'm not sure how many people are getting to hear it, so every little bit helps. I recorded all of my parts running stereo out of the main outs of the Kemper. On tracking days where we're getting all the basic tracks done at one of the nicer Nashville studios (either Blackbird or Oceanway), my Kemper channels are run through whatever preamps the engineer chooses. I leave that up to him. All of my fx, including delay and reverb are just recorded "burned in" so I can't go back and just change the fx. It's kind of old school, but it lets me know that whatever tone I have on tracking day stays pretty much the same and nothing gets lost somewhere. For all of my solos, I record those at home using my little Balance interface and then dropbox the files to Dean, our keyboard player and producer and he drops them in.


    When we record the basic tracks (drums, bass, acoustic guitars, piano, electric guitars, steel guitar), we augment our band lineup with some Nashville session guys both to make tracking sound bigger and more complete right away and to get things done quicker (as opposed to me doing tons of overdubs). Plus those guys are helpful in fine tuning arrangements or coming up with little stuff we didn't think of or whatever. We (the band) usually go into pre-production rehearsal a couple of days before tracking day to nail down the parts we are going to play, arrangements, tempo, song keys, etc. and the session guys just kind of listen to and work within our blueprint. There are a few rhythm guitar tracks that aren't Kemper. We did 3 separate 3-4 song tracking sessions and used a different 2nd electric player on each of those based upon who was available. Those guys used real amps but all of my parts are Kemper. Mills Logan, the engineer (both recording and mixing) gets great drum sounds and was totally happy with what I was sending out from the Kemper.

    Just a head's up… I will be away from my computer from June 20-25, so if anyone needs to contact me during that time I may not be available. I will be traveling out of the country but will check back and catch up on emails and such as soon as I can after that. Thanks!

    So I'm loving these profiles by Michael, but I'm having a hard to getting everything setup for live use. Being so comfortable with an amp + pedal setup... I feel overwhelmed. I have all these profiles that I want to use, but it almost seems easier to only use a few. Then I begin to question having a Kemper, haha. If I'm going to only use a few of them, why have this? Although no matter what, it makes the perfect practice setup at home.


    Do you guys have any tips on using this live and how to set it up? Do the profiled amps react the same if I ran my normal pedal setup out front?


    @lonestargtr what is an example of how you setup a performance on the kemper? Ive thought about using 1 amp per performance.. and just have the different gain stages on each of the 5 rigs. Because I am playing 4 hours of covers, it is really hard to setup profiles for each song. Where as, if I was playing an hour gig (with original music), it becomes much easier to set it up that way. I really feel like thats where the Kemper becomes a huge advantage. You can fine tune the performance for each song, and can really nail down the tone.