created recording-profiles used live ???

    At first: I love my two profilers and I am a great Enthusiast for now 5 years of this most inventive and future-proof piece of Equipment . One of my best investigations so far. And the customer-support is great and exemplary. But....


    .... I have a Problem with the live-use of my recording-profiles:


    During last autumn/winter I recorded all guitar-parts of our new CD with my profiler . We Play Blues and Rock in a three Piece band and I'm mostly using low- to midgain sounds . Our recording-engineer was really convinced of my sounds and put them into the mix without changing anything to them (except: room-simulation and delay, which he matched to the Overall recording).


    The tracks of all our Songs (drums, bass, vocals and guitar) are now mixed and ready for mastering, all Songs Sound really great on different audio-systems, and I'm very happy and looking Forward to our CD-release.

    I then asked our recording-engineer to make me a quick mastering just only of drums, bass and vocals and cancel all guitar-parts. This for reason of practicing for our CD-release.

    I took These Drums&Bass-Waves into our rehearsal-room and sent them into our X-Air 18 Mixer and played them via our Yamaha-P.A. (DSR12 and 18-Subs) at gig-volume (the X-Air18 can store all volumes into Scenes and so it was guaranteed that I used the volume-levels of our live-Settings for sure).


    All my song-wise created profiles, I used during the guitar-recordings, were on my profiler and I wanted to match them to the relevant Backing-track of Drums'n Bass.

    I know the impact of the Fletcher-Munson-Effect on different volume-levels very well and I really expected a pretty great ammount of needed EQ-correction.


    But did not expect this huge difference!!!


    None of my accurately dialed Sound was usable at all !!!

    No Bass, fizzy heights, rasor-like distortion, completely different/indirect haptic to the Sound, no Dynamics with string-touch a.s.o

    BTW: The combined Drums-Bass-Vocal-Track didn't Need more than a slight EQ-correction (though These sounds also should be influenced by Fletcher-Munson).


    I tried to use the profiler's Output-EQ. This didn't help much. The differences were too strange.

    Also Definition-, Clarity- and Amp-EQ-Settings weren't successful to match to the recorded sounds exactly.

    I ended up using all of the above mentioned Parameters, Gain- and volume-corrections and additionally different IRs and learned that the creation of new profiles was inevitable to come to recording-authentic live-sounds.


    So, The Advertising on Kemper's HP is not comprehensible for me at all: " ... just spend a little time making PROFILEs in the studio, and you can play live with the exact same sound :thumbdown:that you used on your blockbuster hit ....."


    The X-Air has a very powerful channel- an output-EQ so I was tempted to use it and could gain much better results than with the profilers Output-EQs.


    Obviously a "Fletcher-Munson-correction-EQ" in the Profiler's Output-section would heal many of these Problems, but volume-level-storage in the Output-section would be needed, which shall not be supplied in future-OS-revisions, the Kemper Team emphasized several times.


    I actually now am a bit confused an wondering:


    - why the Fletcher-Muson-Effect has such a huge Impact to my profiles, while Bass Drums and Vocs are influenced nearly neglectably

    - what I could do better to reach my Goal of "sounding live as good as on CD"

    - did I make a mistake or are my expectations to high

    - why no Feature is given to us by the Kemper-Team to compensate this issue

    - should I commit suicide


    Thanks for you help in advance

    I don’t think the Fletcher-Munsen (equal loudness curves) aspect is anything to do with the problem in this instance. If it was volume/frequency related it would be having an affect on the drums and bass too. The loudness issue is really a problem at extremely low or high levels. There is a big range in the middle where any difference is likely to be minimal.


    It sounds as though there might be something wrong with the mixer channel settings. If it is a programable mixer is it possible that a setting has been stored in the past and forgotten about? Could there be a bass cut or high pass filter setting stored on the channel? How is the channel gain? I set my KPA up in a few rehearsal studios using my normal main XLR outs. However, the desks in those studios automatically engaged the Mic Pre when an XLR was plugged in. Even with the Mic Gain at the lowest level and my KPA main outs a -12db plus significant reduction on master volume I still had to keep the channel fader almost all the way down. In these cases the sound was horrible as I was probably overloading the desk pre amps. Could this be a contributing factor in your case? If so try using the TS outs instead of XlR.

    Quote from Wheresthedug

    I don’t think the Fletcher-Munsen (equal loudness curves) aspect is anything to do with the problem in this instance. If it was volume/frequency related it would be having an affect on the drums and bass too. The loudness issue is really a problem at extremely low or high levels. There is a big range in the middle where any difference is likely to be minimal.


    It sounds as though there might be something wrong with the mixer channel settings. If it is a programable mixer is it possible that a setting has been stored in the past and forgotten about? Could there be a bass cut or high pass filter setting stored on the channel? How is the channel gain? I set my KPA up in a few rehearsal studios using my normal main XLR outs. However, the desks in those studios automatically engaged the Mic Pre when an XLR was plugged in. Even with the Mic Gain at the lowest level and my KPA main outs a -12db plus significant reduction on master volume I still had to keep the channel fader almost all the way down. In these cases the sound was horrible as I was probably overloading the desk pre amps. Could this be a contributing factor in your case? If so try using the TS outs instead of XlR.

    Good idea ! I will give it a try and report my experiences.