Live and studio guitar levels.

    Hi All,


    Looking for some advice from experienced Kemper users here…


    Firstly, I love my toaster… it’s changed my gigging and recording experiences immensely. My FOH engineer is simply overjoyed at how much easier his job has become!


    However, I have a bit of a problem when switching between two guitars using the exact same profiles.


    I Use two guitars, A PRS 513 and a custom guitar using Oil City Nightflight pickups.


    Now, there has always been a subtle difference in volume and tone when I played through my Cornford MK50II. Hence the reason for using two different guitars.


    My problem is the having listened to a desk recordings, and various audience recordings of a recent gig, the differences are not subtle, they’re chalk and cheese!


    Both differences of the guitars are far more noticeable when played through my Kemper.


    I’m thinking that perhaps the clean and dist sense could be the issue here?


    Most grateful for any advice!


    Cheers, J

    The ideal solution is to make sure the performance rigs you set up are set up for those respective guitars. As a small alternative that may or may not be appropriate dependent on whether you lock your input section or not, but one trick you may not realize is that you can make presets for your input section, that means you could make a preset for each guitar with different sens settings. Bear in mind that even though it's in the input section sens is really about amp block output volume rather than adjusting the gain going in to the rig, for that you'd need to actually use a Pure Booster as your first stomp and reduce the volume for one guitar. So input sens etc is just about output volume, Pure Booster for input gain/reduction, and ideally make rigs for each guitar.


    Having said all of that, if the question is simply how do you level the guitars at home, well that's a little more tricky. What you get into the desk is the same as what you would get into a sound card, so ideally use a DAW and record short sections of each guitar until you can bring both within similar volume, either that or ask your sound engineer if you can spend a little time before the gig to balance the levels with him some time, a second pair of ears really helps.


    Best of luck!

    I use an OCD clone in front of the KPA to boost my Tele signal up to the level of my others so it drives the profiles the same.


    I experimented with Input presets, but prefer the sound of this approach.

    The differences you're hearing, are they volume related or overall tone related? Are the differences predominantly when you're changing profiles? Trying to get a sense if the amp you were using was masking some of the tone differences between the guitars that are more noticeable with the KPA.


    I used to own a 513 and it definitely drove the input hotter on the KPA than all my other guitars. So it may need some input adjustments. In general the 513 is a different sounding guitar because of the pickups.