Profile Refining Feature

  • Hi there,
    After you've finished profiling your amp/cab you have the option to refine the captured profile.
    Basically the KPA requires you to play on your guitar-bass and will do the its tricks in the background while you're playing.
    Now that's the question. Does what you play have an influence on the resulting profile ?
    So for instance playing big power chords will lead to a different profile than for example playing a solo instead?
    Thanks

  • From what i have experienced it makes a difference what you play and what guitar you use for refining. Kemper did not yet loose a word about what is really happing when you refine a profile. I just guess it does something like those "learning" EQs, that try to match their own curve against another signal, in that case the reference amp. This would explain why some users reported that a profile sound more trebly when you play high single notes when refining. I always refine by playing e minor oder e major chord over all six strings with maximum velocity. This normally gives me good results which sound absolutely identical to the reference amp.


    I am not totally sure about this, but i have the impression that the guitar itself does influence the refining process too. On Saturday i had a friend of mine come over with his recto that we profiled. He also brought a vintage style guitar with P90 single coils that we used for refining for half the profiles before we switched to my guitar with the ultra modern high output häussel tozz XL pickups. I noticed that the profiles we refined with his guitar had very low "definition" values, while the one with my guitar had considerably higher values. But this could also have just happenend by accident, so i guess we would need to investigates this a little deeper.

  • But this could also have just happenend by accident, so i guess we would need to investigates this a little deeper.


    i hope it didn't happen by accident... i hope the kemper makes reproducible profiles of the originals!!! but i think, too, that it depends on the guitar you're refining with.

  • you really think, one from kemper is sitting in front of this forum day by day, trying to please us with profound official answers? if you want official answers please use the contact on their website.


    the kpa makes a snapshot of your rig...which is different with different guitars in the refining process.

  • you really think, one from kemper is sitting in front of this forum day by day, trying to please us with profound official answers?


    Dude, at this stage of product life plus with all these reported issues on the current firmware, I don't think it is too much to ask of them to check in every once in a day (or so) and read a few reported issues...

  • Dude, at this stage of product life plus with all these reported issues on the current firmware, I don't think it is too much to ask of them to check in every once in a day (or so) and read a few reported issues...

    I'm sure they do, that they do not immediately answer here doesn't mean they don not read it. Actually the best possible answer are the bug fixes (already quite a bit in the past 3 weeks)

    "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music" Serghei Rachmaninoff


  • Basically that's what happened to me......I got the refining wrong... :love:
    I was playing with an ESP with EMG active pickups and during the profiling instead of playing the full spectrum of chords/strings I was just doing power chords.The result was quite scary...
    Tried to do some solo with the profiled version on my amp (ENGL Gigmaster 15 + its ENGL matched cab) and on the higher pitch strings the sound was weird, I would say not usable honestly far from being good (it sounded actually crap). That's surely because that was my first attempt to profiling and I had played only drop D power chords while refining.
    However...when I play power chords now... the sound it's just unbelievably massive .It's great and honestly I never could get or hear such an amazing scooped present scary metal grinding insane distorsion. Sincerely I don't know how to describe it.The word 'great' it's probably not enough. (by the way who said somewhere in some other forum that the Kemper sounds crap for metal tones??)
    So I was thinking that this refining tool being sensitive to what you play and which guitar you use is (maybe) more of a feature than a bug. Probably once you've profiled your amp you can make several refining and store them in different rigs and use them at your will .Just speculating though nothing scientific ...
    Will share the profile probably this weekend..
    Cheers now!

  • The refining feature exists for a reason and yes it would have to be sensitive to what you play. If it didn't matter what you played with it then it wouldn't exist as you could simply not play anything at all through it.


    What it's doing is simply comparing the frequencies you put through it with the output to try and match the model/EQ more closely with the real amp. The profiling process itself sometimes isn't enough, so you can refine it by giving it more signals to test with, the more you play the closer in theory you will get, but of course it's never that simple, sometimes a response is different at different frequencies, an amp may not respond linearly between playing chords and single notes so playing one may result in the other sounding off, which means it's really a case of refine using the same sort of riffs/notes/playstyle as you intend to actually use with the profile.


    It's a case that while the KPA is clearly a huge leap forward there's still room for improvement in the technology, with the profiling (and probably the simulation side too) before it'll be able to match to the point that there's no discernible difference to a real amp in every single situation.


    Don't forget that without a dead isolation room and totally neutral mic and mic pre some of the profile is going to be stuff outside of the amp, room noise, sympathetic resonance not least in the guitar itself. The KPA is only modeling the bits it recognizes in that signal chain, maybe it should do a separate convolution reverb sweep that attempts to capture just the room and resonant characteristics and try to subtract them from the amp profile or allow you to dial them up and down as much as you want. That might get things that little bit closer still.

  • Refining has mainly to do with dynamics. Changing the profile's dynamic response can influence its overall amplitude response as well.
    Play in the "area" (sonically speaking) where you feel the profiling is less faithful to the amp.
    You can use whatever guitar you like. You can also tweak the amp, this will influence the profile.
    Refining will also influence the profile's volume.
    Refer to wikpa.org for further information :)