When Recording With Your Kemper...

  • I find my profiles globally have a lot of bass through my monitors and on the recorded tracks. They sound perfect through my Atomic CLR. I'm sure there is most likely a setting I can adjust to fix it. I don't necessarily want to adjust the bass too much. Who here runs a high pass filter on their guitar tracks? Where do you usually set it? I have never messed with high or low pass filters before. Thanks in advance for your help!

  • Who runs HPF's on recorded tracks?


    I'd put it this way:
    Anyone who doesn't is inviting trouble.


    Where you set it for each track will depend on how much low-end weight / mud / thud exists in the sound and also which instruments any given track is sharing that low end with.


    Perhaps the easiest method to arrive at something usable is to simply use your ears - gradually raise the cutoff frequency whilst listening to the track in the context of the mix. Two possible approaches here:


    1) The trickier, "pro-engineering" approach:
    Listen to the muddy area of the mix's frequency spectrum and look for it to open / clear up.


    2) The easier, "Monkey-brained" approach (yeah, what I'd do):
    Listen to the guitar part and when it suddenly becomes too-thin and loses too much character to be identifiable as a decent guitar component of the mix, stop raising the cutoff at that point and experiment with how much you can lower it back down. Expect that you won't want or be able to lower it back down too much, but IMHO this approach helps ensure against "over-thinning", which will make the mix sound wimpy if you raise it on too many parts without at least checking to see if you've gone too far.


    At any rate, your low end, especially the kick and bass tracks, should "miraculously" start to sound better-defined / clearer.


  • Thanks brother MM! I have been recording a long time and like what I hear but I have always thought I need to learn how to sharpen up my tracks. I appreciate it and will give these suggestions a try!

  • Hey, no worries, man.


    Just remember:
    The idea is to remove unnecessary "weight" from the tracks - the stuff you can get rid of without destroying the tone. The listener's brain will "imagine" that it's there anyway if the tone's beefy, and the mixes should provide plenty of low-end satisfaction thanks to the kick and bass parts' being more-easily / clearly heard.


    It's most-often that "uneccesary weight" that, IMHO, causes low-to-mid-range conflicts and build-ups of energy that suck the definition and life out of mixes, making them more-boxy and "home-demoey-sounding".

  • well, yes, I always have a high pass filter on guitar amps...
    but it's almost always at 25Hz.


    I have a feeling that's not what you mean.


    if you have to EQ the incoming signal for it to sound "right" then you're probably better off doing it at the source first.

  • well, yes, I always have a high pass filter on guitar amps...
    but it's almost always at 25Hz.


    I have a feeling that's not what you mean.


    if you have to EQ the incoming signal for it to sound "right" then you're probably better off doing it at the source first.

    Dayum dude, you've got quite the arsenal of credits to your name... congrats, now I know when I listen to some of those albums :thumbup:

  • You can chop the flub pretty hard though depending on the genre and all that will happen is the kick and bass will continue to create the bass frequencies but have a little breathing room to do so.


    Just be careful because treble is addictive and it's very easy to end up with a "scooped" sound that's initially exciting, focused and present but hard to listen to for any length of time.

  • a friend use to do some kind of filter sweep with Fab Filter to find the frequency he wanted to take out. He would use some kind of slope cut. But in general he would just cut anywhere from 70 Hz to 100 Hz plus or minus 20hz.