Kemper Tips and Tricks - Clean and Distortion Sense

Thanks a lot for doing these tutorials! I'm a new Kemper owner and find these really helpful.

-Bob

Another great one from HW, straight to the point and useful.
We want more! .

Ash

Very nice video, H.W.

I left the following comment on your YouTube channel, which might be helpful as an additional tip/trick:

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Excellent video. I would add the following additional tip/trick, relevant to your video, which may be of help to KPA owners. You can save the Input Settings as a preset. That way, you can have multiple "presets" of various inputs variations of your Distortion Sense setting, which you can tailor to different guitars. This is very helpful during a live performance, when you switch guitars in the middle of a set. For example, your Tele could be saved as an Input preset called "Tele", and your Les Paul could be saved as a different Input preset called...wait for it............"Les Paul".

I like that sweater.

This is great and insightful but I do think it (potentially) misses one important point about clean sens.

If you have a profile that has a gain setting between 1 and 4, my understanding is that this is a blend of both the clean and distortion path. If you adjust clean sens then you're altering the ratio between them and hence the profile sound. For a totally clean profile (gain at 0) then clean sens does indeed change just the clean level but not as you increase up to 4; it changes the sound. Not so much of an issue until you start locking clean sense for a nice vintage Strat at +8 and then load a profile with a gain of 3...

I do wish that the way the Kemper manages this wasn't such a black box tbh..

I've moved away from changing clean sens and now leave at 0 irrespective of guitar. If I have a profile that is too soft or loud in comparison to another I just adjust the rig volume and save guitar specific rigs and try and choose profiles that have the most appropriate gain structure to start with.

Regards,

Simon

Quote from grappagreen

If you have a profile that has a gain setting between 1 and 4, my understanding is that this is a blend of both the clean and distortion path. If you adjust clean sens then you're altering the ratio between them and hence the profile sound.

That isn't my experience at all. As soon as gain is introduced, it is only the overall volume that is affected, not the ratio between clean and distorted. I'll have to test this later, thanks for the tip.

I still don’t get it myself. If you have to set the clean sense for every profile, why not just adjust the amp volume? I’ve tried the clean sense as a global but it doesn’t work when so many profiles are at different levels.

I might have to change my method which was always setup the way Kemper had instructed with Clean Sense using a specific rig they recommended (can't remember to long ago). For quite some time I have set Clean Sense on two presets Strat at around +8 and Les Paul at either -1.1 or +1.1. It does even out the volume level when switching on guitars on the same rig which is what I thought it was supposed to do and then I tweak with rig volume from that point. Distortion Sense has always been left at 0. Clean and Distortion Sense very easy to understand just check all the previous threads and questions about the right way to do it.

I think the boss here, CK, should explain this thoroughly once and for all. When you try a "real" amp with a different guitar you have to adjust gain and EQ, so I try to avoid issues by choosing those profiles of an amp which suit a particular guitar without having to change much. But what "sounds good to you" is always a reasonable piece of advice. When a cleanish profile has low volume with, say, a Strat I prefer to change the rig volume rather than increase the clean sense input, but perhaps I should do that or both things. Mostly I prefer inputs at 0.

I tend to think about Clean Sense as a sort of input sensitivity to adjust the level of different guitars for the clean side of the profile (for example, if you have a really hot guitar output, you might see clipping at the input LED, reducing Clean Sense will reduce that clipping).

Distortion Sense is a little less tricky in that it can be used to balance the distortion side of the profile to different guitars. A lower output guitar like HW's Tele can be brought up to a similar level of distortion to his PRS single cut.

Quote from flyingheelhook

I still don’t get it myself. If you have to set the clean sense for every profile, why not just adjust the amp volume? I’ve tried the clean sense as a global but it doesn’t work when so many profiles are at different levels.

Quote from flyingheelhook

If you have to set the clean sense for every profile, why not just adjust the amp volume? I’ve tried the clean sense as a global but it doesn’t work when so many profiles are at different levels.

Part of the benefits of the clean sens is that you can set it globally (with the possibility to save the input setting, hereunder clean sens, dist sens etc per guitar). This then allows you to increase or decrease gain of each individual profile without volume jump between the different gain levels - for THAT profile. So when you reduce the gain, it is exactly as loud in volume as when you increase it.

You would then use the rig volume - per rig - to obtain equal level across multiple profiles. MOST profiles sound more or less the same level - at least in my experience - anyway (with some notable exceptions).

Similarly, if you adjust and lock the dist sens per guitar, then a gain value of say 5 would give you the same amount of distortion for ALL profiles when you switch to a different guitar (and load the corresponding input setting in the input menu). So the telecaster is just as distorted as the LP when the gain is at five, with the tailored dist sens values.

Hope this makes sense

That does help, thanks.

I found an interesting side effect of the Clean Sense control this week. I'd been setting it so that the input LED didn't show clipping, then turned it down another 1-1.5dB just to make sure. In playing with it this week, I found that slightly higher settings, just below clipping, allowed the presence of the pickups to come through, restoring some high end that I wasn't getting.