Touch Sensitivity with the Kemper

Check the input section of the Kemper. Here you can adjust how loud your clean vs. the driven sound shall be.

If you miss the compression or evetually power sag you liked for certain tube amps: check the amp section and its parameters. There you will find just that - for each and very profile: compression parameter and power sag parameter.

I am quite sure will will be able to nail down the sound of your desire.

Good luck!

Welcome, MrGuitarGuy! I second Spinner's comments, and was going to say that too.

Welcome back Spinner!

Welcome to the forum

Quote from mrguitarguy

Hello, everyone. It seems like a wonderful community here.

I've had my Kemper for a couple of days now and I'm enjoying playing with the variety of tones it provides. I apologize if this has been covered extensively, but searches of the forum have not yielded the answers I was hoping for.

I'm looking to really get the Kemper to respond like an amp with an overdriven power section. Typically, I crank my amps up pretty hard (often with the assistance of an attenuator if I'm at home) and I can go from great clean sounds to lots of dirt just by rolling the volume up and digging in on the guitar. So far while sampling the variety of profiles out there I haven't been able to achieve this same result. I've tried messing with the power tube sag setting on a few of the profiles but it seems to alway make the cleans get very loud.

I'm especially missing the compression that comes from oversaturated power tubes that makes them very reactive. The volume doesn't really vary from clean to dirty much on most of my tube amps when using this approach. Is there a way to achieve this with the Kemper? Many of the videos I see online seem to show this is possible. Does anyone have any recommendations on settings I could refine on my Kemper? I currently have the distortion and clean sense on 0.

I'm primarily using low to medium to low output pickups on my guitars (Humbuckers like Duncan JB and 59, single coils like Eric Johnson strat pickups, etc.).

I have not profiled my own amps yet, so I don't know if many of the profiles are from amps with less saturated power sections, but I would assume that many of the vintage Marshalls and other amps in that vein would be very reactive since they would probably be cranked up when profiled.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your patience with a noob.

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Also, some of the profiles -- especially the professionally made profiles -- seem to have better touch sensitivity. You can probably get an idea of which profiler makers work best for you, by testing out the rig packs. Also, a lot of the profile sellers have additional free profiles available. Some can be found on their websites, and some on this forum.

the profile you use and the input sense setup- pickups combination are key matters in any volume or tone knob playing. If your guitar is not hot enough and the gain in the profile moderate it is difficult to change from dirty to clean and not sound muddy. Some profiles out there have gain enough and are set up great for this volume swell and cleaning up trick. Old school tube amp playing. Other profiles don't make it because they sound just muddier. But you sure need a pretty dirty profile to start with.

I'm completely with you mrguitarguy and I had made many similar posts . As a blooze- and bloozerock player I share this problem of guitar-volume-use with the Kemper, but I can commit truely: I love my KPA anyway. Even I can tell, last week I ordered my second KPA-power-rack !

I'm quarreling with this issue now for 3 years and I'm still on my way, but nevertheless I'm convinced to reach my goal someday.

I had been spoiled for many many years by my Two Rock Custom Signature Reverb with 2x12" combined with a Fender Deluxe Reverb over a modified Leslie cabinet. This rig triggered by my strat's volume-knob made those things that mrguitarguy challenges above in an unbeatable manner. This sound was my "home" and my pride, but..........it was.really (and I mean: REALLY !) LOUD !!
In spring 2014 I decided to care for my, my bandmates and my audience's hearing and bought my Powered KPA with the intention of a quick profiling-session and an easy use of this profile in more moderate volumes.
To make a long story short: I didn't succeed in getting and tweaking one Profile to behave and sound the same as the real thing as quickly as I hoped.

But no reason to become desperate !
It's like in real life, you have to look into the problem and understand it as a (most interesting) task. My way up to now was:

At first I recommend to buy a good FRFR-Cabinet/Monitor. For me the Yamaha DXR10 is the best.
Then I searched rigs (commercial or free) which came next to my imaginations concerning clarity, punch, bottom-end, glassy-highs a.s.o (Two Rock, Dumble, Fender, Magnatone etc.).
Then I tweaked a lot with Amp-gain, overdrive- and distortion pedals in different slots and many trials and errors with compression and sustain.
Then give the studio-EQ a try. It's a HUGE and mighty instrument. There are some posts around how to use and tweak it.
I had been anxious concerning my affection to a subtle Leslie-shimmer in my clean sounds, but I can tell the rotor-cabinet-simulation in the Kemper is the best on the market and it's really very comfortable to use. (committment: on the market of around 2012, I had tested all available simulations at that time).

I'm currently using 3 Profiles depending on the gain stage I want to use. And though I had to accept and then adapt to switch between sounds instead of using my guitar-volume I can admit, I'm rather happy with my sounds. (This Tuesday I played my Two Rock Studio Pro Plus Combo in a local bluesclub-session again after a long while and I can tell I was a bit disappointed concerning my expectations).

Currently my aim is, to make at least one of the three Profiles get lost. For this reason I'm experimenting with my morphing-pedal. This was a recommendation of a nice guy in this great forum and I can confirm the morphing-feature is a powerful instrument.

mrguitarguy:
Please don't ask for my or other ready profiles (btw. they are commercial ones and not allowed to share), and don't hesitate to go your own way because otherwise you will miss a lot. You can learn so many things by this piece of gear (like Fletcher Munson effect, Cut through the mix, Guitar-sound in band context a.s.o.) and you learn to know, hear and use all parameters of the Profiler. But it's a long way to go (at least for me) and I didn't finish yet. And though for me it sometimes is a Hate-Love I had and still have lots of fun with this great piece of gear !

If you are playing quieter than you normally play with a regular amp, you won't get the same dynamic feel you are used to getting. The profiles I've made of my Jubilee clean up with the volume knob just like the amp does, as long as I am not playing too quiet.

That's right ! So I another recommendation is, to profile at and for different Sound Levels .

This isn't the best example, but I was trying to get something quickly before the giant storm hit. This is even sloppier than normal.

This was using a Top Jimi TJ - YJM Med profile, with the amp compressor turned up to 3.8, and the reverb level lowered a little.

Another quick one, before unplugging the Kemper.

@mrguitarguy Hey, there!

I was hoping it was you - I thought someone else might have chosen the same name you use online

DOUBLE Welcome, my friend

Quote from mrguitarguy

Hello everyone,

Thanks for all the warm welcomes, helpful replies, tips, and sound samples. I really appreciate you all taking the time to respond and I will try every suggestion. I was in a long session yesterday so I haven't been able to respond until today. As Patrick2099 mentioned, I have had better luck with the getting more responsiveness from some of the well known profilers of amps I've tried since posting (Michael Britt and Top Jimi)

@paults, good to see you on here my friend! It's been a long time. We should grab a coffee sometime. Please tell the rest band I said hello. I still have Sully's old Ampeg head. I'll check out your Marshall profiles I found on the rig exchange.

Here's a few thoughts I had in playing with it in the studio for the first time yesterday.

While the band grabbed lunch I did a quick profile of an Orange Tiny Terror with the master cranked wide open (with a Les Paul and V30 Mesa cab) since it was easy to overdrive the low wattage tubes, just to see if I could get a similar response to the Kemper. I only had about 45 minutes to mess with it and this was my first attempt, so please take my comments lightly. While I could get it to sound very close, it wasn't quite as responsive to the volume knob as the real thing and there was less of a compressed "tube" feel. Adjusting the various power tube settings on the Kemper seemed to help a somewhat, but it felt different, or "squishy" like a more traditional compressor device instead of power tube compression. I never got it to match the exact feel, but it was much, much closer than any other digital amp I've ever tried.

I'd say it matched as close as two different models of the same amp or different speakers on the same cab. Listening in a proper studio environment with acoustic treatment and high quality monitors. I could always pick out the Kemper when blindly A/B-ing, but it was subtle. Both sounded good, just slightly different. Either would have been fine for tracking though.

Overall I'm extremely impressed with the sounds of the amps. The effects sound really great too, though I do wish there was a spring reverb emulation. (This seems like an huge omission since there are a lot of plugins that do it pretty well). I don't think almost anyone can tell by the time your audio is mixed, mastered and converted to popular low resolution formats MP3, AAC, Soundcloud, or Youtube.

While I still might prefer cranking real amp, it would be impractical for most applications, plus you'd have to spend a small fortune on boutique amps and effects to do what you can with one Kemper. I'm sure as I get better at dialing in the amp it will only get better.

Thanks again everyone!

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Glad things are working out. For more touch sensitive stuff, I have had the best luck with Top Jimi and MBritt. I use different profiles for higher gain stuff. I'm still trying to figure out how to use this thing though. I haven't even messed with Clean Sense or Distortion Sense, yet.

Welcome to the Family I'm glad you've already found some friends

@Dimi84 also provided a video to show how to use the EQ ducking inside the KPA to help with dynamics. It's rather cool, so after you've tried the more obvious suggestions already made, give that a try.

( Dimi, maybe you could point a link to that post with the EQ ducking tutorial or recall the name of the post? )

That said, there are certain limitations within the KPA WRT simultaneously large amounts of preamp and power stage gain, but it doesn't sound like that's what you are experiencing.

Sonic

Quote from SonicExporer

@Dimi84 also provided a video to show how to use the EQ ducking inside the KPA to help with dynamics. It's rather cool, so after you've tried the more obvious suggestions already made, give that a try.

( Dimi, maybe you could point a link to that post with the EQ ducking tutorial or recall the name of the post? )

That said, there are certain limitations within the KPA WRT simultaneously large amounts of preamp and power stage gain, but it doesn't sound like that's what you are experiencing.

Sonic

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Thanks. That's another thing in my "find out what it is" list, along with using the studio eq for more than just low and high cut.