M Britt Kemper Profiles

  • 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.

    I'd suggest finding a set of profiles of an amp that you like, then building one main performance from that, adding FX where appropriate. You can cover a lot of ground with 5 slots and shrewd use of the FX. Then, once you've got to where you're comfortable that the slots cover the majority of your set, you can start looking at those songs that require more special attention and set up a performance or several to get those covered. Too many performances, slots and FX to switch, and you start counteracting the advantages of having a solution that can pretty much do it all.

  • I create performances for songs since we play the same songs from night to night. If I were doing a cover gig, I'd probably just choose 2-3 of my favorite profiles and lay them out L-R clean to dirty. I would assign the stomps and fx to the remote foot switches and I could cover a lot of ground that way. My cleanest sound I would need is in slot 1 and my biggest lead sound in slot 5. Don't worry about using every amp sound you can at first. Just find a couple at a time to try at a time until you land on what works for you. I tend to use 3-4 base profiles and just tailor the fx for each song. Even if you use 3-4 profiles that's still a lot when you compare it to trying to use 3-4 real amps and all of the cabling that involves. What sounds good at home and what sounds good on a gig at high volume may not be the same thing so it takes a bit of experimentation. Just stick with it long enough and you'll have a great sounding and consisten rig though.

  • Hi Michael/ALL


    I just wanted to mention the Diaz CD100 15 profile on a Strat neck pick up is absolutely outstanding for Hybrid picking clean slow blues (rhythm)
    I have 99% of all the packs now, i am sure i am going to find a slow blues lead tone in the Diaz, i dont know if its you or SRV's technician (who built the amp)
    But that Diaz amp is very underrated.


    Good job Michael


    Ash

    Have a beer and don't sneer. -CJ. Two non powered Kempers -Two mission stereo FRFR Cabs - Ditto X4 -TC electronic Mimiq.


  • Which pack is it?

  • Thanks for these profiles, Michael!


    It's hard to pick a favorite, but the Tweedy pack is probably my favorite collection. A little while back I spent an entire night programming songs in performance mode for a 3 hour country cover gig. Each song had it's own profile and everything was strategically planned out. At sound check I somehow ended up on one of the Twin profiles from the Tweedy pack and ended up spending the whole gig on that one profile and simply using my volume knob and a boost in the Kemper for my clean, rhythm, and lead sounds.


    These days I'm working with a new country cover band and I spend most of my time bouncing back and forth between the Star Celestial and Lonestar Ch 2 profiles. I couldn't be happier with my Kemper thanks to your profiles. I've got not only the best tone of my life, but the most convenient and consistent. Would you mind sharing what you use for your song, Amazed? It's one of our favorites to play in our band.


    I can not wait to see you play in a couple of weeks here in MN with Jarrod Niemann and Jana Kramer. Looking forward to hearing you and your Kemper in action!

  • At sound check I somehow ended up on one of the Twin profiles from the Tweedy pack and ended up spending the whole gig on that one profile and simply using my volume knob and a boost in the Kemper for my clean, rhythm, and lead sounds.


    I'm with you on this. Most guys run with a single tube amp, so it's not all that bizarre to stick with a tone you love. I have a bazillion profiles, but when it comes to playing live I end up on 1 or 2 the whole night.

    Go for it now. The future is promised to no one. - Wayne Dyer

  • M


    I'm with you on this. Most guys run with a single tube amp, so it's not all that bizarre to stick with a tone you love. I have a bazillion profiles, but when it comes to playing live I end up on 1 or 2 the whole night.

    me too. Been using the Boggy Sol for my last few gigs. Sound awesome and covers tons of ground.

  • 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?


    Hey sanders4617. I play live for a living. I think it depends what kind of gigs you do but for anything big now, I prefer by far using the Kemper + cab than amp + board now (smaller venues is another story). Here is my two cents, have been going through high risk situations lately (first gigs with pop stars in festivals and learning the Kemper as I go.) I've been super anxious going through all this but now what I'm saying comes from an intense period of research and trial and error and I'm happy it's been mostly successful so far, I am grateful for MBritt and bought lots of his packs (#1&2 have the most use). Hear me out, at this point I think that unlike most other profilers out there, his are just "safe" to use live, by that I mean that once you have the volumes balanced out, you can trust that you can load pretty much any of his profiles with appropriate gain and they'll sound somewhere from good to awesome in a big venue/outside. I think that choosing the right profile is a bit counter-intuitive unless the user has some understanding of the physics of sound and how they sit in the mix and MBritt does because he's a guitar player before being a profile salesman.


    So the way I have it set up now: I keep it down to just 2 performances of 5 profiles each, roughly organized in gain: the first slot is always clean twangy Fender-like for Prince/funk-type strumming with a bit of compression (I think MBritt lacks a bit there but I use his Carr from pack 1 with gain lowered to very little, other is Bert Meulendick (sp?) Showman - there's also some decent clean Supersonic and Bassmans I got on the RE). Slot 2 is clean with little breakup (ie. I think I use Mbritt's Matchless, Morgan or /13), slot 3 is rock territory (one of MBritt Marshall/ 3rd pwr Plexi), slot 4 is modern heavy/compressed big distortion (I think I use his Bletchley/5150), slot 5 is solo (I think among others, I use his Trainwreck with a mid boost eq). Well, he has a ton of great profile to fit all these categories (except the first imo). Add to all this some effects on each patch and you can cover pretty much any application. I also always have a post stack 3 db pure boost available just in case the band gets loud unexpectedly or something is not balanced. I might add an extra performance just for specific sounds like an acoustic simulator or U2 like delay or some pitch shifting, but I haven't been needing these much. Now for practice at home, I have other another "practice" performance for low volume with more definition/highs and gain (and the "transpose" effect which is a godsent to practice stuff in the singer's keys)


    Now the other performance may be more "voxy" or something for example (depending what type of band/repertoire I play for), you might want more performances to "tone match" more accurately but to me its a moot point. I try to get 5 tones that are somehow "homogeneous" at various gain level - that's a bit subjective. The fact that he's using the same cab for most amps makes that easier; for example, lots of the profiles from the 3rd Power unsurprisingly are voiced similarly and go well together. When I first got the Kemper I thought I'd also use pedals up front but I realized the internal green scream blended even better than my Xotic BB up front so it eliminated the need of outside effects which is very welcome when I take the plane/train which is almost every weekend these days. Sorry for the long post, good luck.

  • Thanks Jed for the great information!


    I used the Kemper last week for a gig. Didn't have a foot controller or anything, so I just ran a few pedals in the front of the Kemper, and switched profiles by hand. I probably only used 4 different profiles. I created 1 performance.


    I got an FCB with UnoChip now, so I will take advantage of that tomorrow night.


    And I agree, the hardest thing for me to find is a clean sound that sounds even close to my tube amps. The Kemper really shines once you add a hair of grit and then all the way up to heavy distortion. I'll take some of your suggestions into considering tonight when I set the performances up.


    I really like the low gain Guytron profiles for a clean bite. I can pick lighter to get a cleaner sound and then dig in if I want to play a clean lead with grit. The /13 37 and Matchless work great for that as well.


    I guess the hardest part for me is finding a clean that does the 90s country really well and also the big bold clean of a Dumble. I have a Ceriatone OTS amp, and while the profiles do well, they just don't get the fullness and punchyness to pop through.


    For tomorrow night, I will be going from the Kemper into a 1x12 cab with EVM12L speaker, and then FOH with XLR (only 1, not stereo).


    Any suggestions on delay settings for mono? Some of the delays in these profiles sound killer in stereo, but not so much mono.


    Also with the FCB, I have the option for switching between the 5 profiles in each performance on the spot, and also turning on/off 4 stomp boxes + tap tempo.


    I really want to keep the tap tempo on there, so that leaves me with 4 stomps.


    I will probably run a compressor on some of the profiles, but not sure if I care to make it one of the stomps.


    I was thinking... Distortion, Boost, Mod, and Delay On/Off, then the tap tempo. Would you suggest boost at the end of your pre pedal setup, or in the fx loop area?



    Also. .you say smaller venues is another story.. What's your take there? Because I play mostly local bars and clubs, and they don't get that big.

  • I find that "clean" sounds are really subjective as are all tones, really. It can range from being able to strum chords with no breakup to playing single note stuff like Brad Paisley, which isn't clean at all. We recently started doing a song where I needed a Nile Rodgers type clean sound and my usual 3P, ÷13, and Princeton were breaking up too much, so I experimented and found clean Guytron and a Dr. Z Wreck profiles that worked great. I even found a clean Twin on the RE that would work for funky type rhythm, but I'm using the Z Wreck clean for that currently. As far as clean country tones, I usually start with my 3P Black Cln BC (fuller) or Princeton* (glassy) and tweak from there. The Deluxe Reverb and ÷13 FTR or JRT profiles also work for that kind of stuff.


    As for delays, I often just set the left and right to the same delay time so it's a mono delay, but the modulation (if you want any) will throw the effect into a pseudo-stereo mode with some L-R movement. That's what I use a lot on rhythm presets. For solos, I'll make a more 2290 type sound with stereo taps and a little ducking so I can sneak in higher mix levels without getting in the way of my pick attack.


    I've almost stopped using the pure boost now that I have morphing capability. I can just program the morph to add amp gain, turn mix up on a screamer block to around 50-60%, and bump up the rig volume an led or so, sometimes even adding a little mid on the amp eq. It's quite powerful and sounds really seamless.


    I think it's pretty normal for people to gravitate to one or two different amp profiles for the majority of the time. I do that, too, but I will always have a few songs that I can experiment with profiles. Over time and playing in different rooms, you'll get a feel for which ones work best the majority of the time. Save those amp stacks as presets and it'll save a lot of scrolling when making song performances.

  • I need to update my Kemper for morphing, that sounds way better!!


    What is saving an amp stack? What are the purposes?


    And ducking, does that basically hide the delay a little while you're playing and then become more prevalent after?

  • You can basically save "presets" of your fave stomps or amp stacks or other fx. This is helpful if you create profiles/performances for individual songs with set fx, delay times, etc.


    For instance, if I have a preset performance slot for a particular song with the delay time dialed in to the tempo and all over fx how I like them, I can just change the amp stack to try out different amp/cab sounds on the same song. Hold the "stack" button down for a couple of seconds to bring that into the main window and then turn the browse knob to try a different amp stack while keeping the stomps and fx unchanged. If you notice when you're browsing, there are tabs for all rigs or presets (or something like that). If you have a lot of rigs, it's very time consuming to scroll through 800+ rigs to find the amp stack you want to try. Once you find one you like and want to save, with the amp stack in the main window, hit "store" and then hit the save amp stack only (or something like that), NOT save entire rig. Then you can name that stack and it'll show up in your short list of amp stacks. I look at the saved stacks as my personal amp collection that I know works well. Pretty soon, you'll have your handful of go-to amp stack tones handy for easy access. I've even auditioned the different stacks while we're playing a song at soundcheck so I can tell how it's going to sound in the band context.


    You can also save your favorite stomps or fx or even the whole group of stomps as a preset, much like having separate pedalboards of pedals. You can also save your output settings in case you're using an FRFR for one show or a traditional amp cab for another show with different monitor out eq or settings.

  • Thank you @lonestargtr


    I have already used the Output and Input store functions for different guitars or cabs/headphones.


    I didn't think about just doing stack changes with the FX staying the same. That will be a very useful feature to use.


    Do you find that morphing with an expression pedal is the way to go or do you just do a click of the button to let it go to the morphed stage for you?

  • Thanks Jed and Michael, you know those cleans sounds you guys were talking about, i cant wait to try them for Reggae and Ska. (Strat/LP)
    Thanks guys really great Post s Jed/Michael, helps out a lot.


    Ash

    Have a beer and don't sneer. -CJ. Two non powered Kempers -Two mission stereo FRFR Cabs - Ditto X4 -TC electronic Mimiq.