This is my approach to getting "great" sounds.
I used to roam around all the 5150/recto/marshall/... profiles on RM, listening to them om my KRK studio speakers. Like many of you i don't like a most of them.
I bought some commercial packs wich sounded a lot better.
Then i used only the commercial cab profile with the free amp profiles............sounded good to me.
Then it hit me...... Like in real life, cabs sound very different and miking a cab is a real magical and difficult proces with various end results.
I now see a total profile as two separate profiles, the amp profile and the cab/mike profile.
I deleted every profile (900+) on the Kemper.
Started Rig Manager.
Made seperate folders for every amp I wanted to explore.
In RM, for exampIe I saved the newest 5150 profiles from different users and put them in the 5150 folder. Did the same with other amps.
Here it comes.... I wanted to test the amp part of those profiles, not the cab/mike part!!
So I killed the studio speakers and connected my power amp & Mesa Rectocab.
Then, in RM, I went thru all the downloaded profiles keeping only my most favorite. Without the cab/mike part of the profile, the amp profiles really are very similar. I saved some profiles wich sounded great thru the real cab but sounded horrible thru the studio speakers. Adding my favorite cab profile (commercial pack) made the same amp profile sound great again!
It took me a whole day going thru the hundreds of profiles but i'm now back to about 90 profiles (total of 20 different amps) wich are on the laptop on RM, not the Kemper.
Tomorrow I will take the Kemper + laptop to the rehearsal room for more testing/deleting of the current 90 profiles at high volume. I hope to be ending up with only 10 amps and 3 profiles per amp.
I hope more Kemper users will test the free profiles on RE this way cause there are a lot of really great amp profiles wich are covered up by bad cab/mike profiles.
So the idea is to test only the amp profile, not the cab profile. And add an excellent and separate cab profile later.
Cheers,
Tom