Evening all
A few weeks back I was having a terrible time with the quality of sound from my Kemper. During the process I became so frustrated I decided to go old school and mic my Silver Jubilee 2x12. This was at extremely low bedroom volume with an SM57 so I was not expecting much but as it tuned out the attack and dynamic was there at such a low volume. I was shocked and started to contemplate selling the Kemper and just purchasing some low watt amps to record.
Later that evening I decided to try the Kemper again and this time I had in my mind "if it sounds like crap it's your fault" which I find is always the case with the Kemper. Low and behold between some bad eq choices on a Cubase template and a dodgy SPDIF cable I was back in the zone of lovely Kemper tone.
During the gap between the amp recording and finding the error I set the Kemper up through my cab as this was how I used to play live. I then went back through my purchased profiles from the following profilers:
Deadlight
Choptone
Topjimi
MBritt
Now as a bit of history when I played guitar in a band I used Choptones DI profiles of the Jcm800 Zakk Wylde with the cab from Deadlights AFD100. I send that to the board but used my 4x12 for monitoring. It was a fantastic combination. When recording in my little studio I used the JCM800ZW with Deadlights AFD100 cab plus Deadlights AFD100 profiles extensively.
The Top Jimi and MBritt profiles never hit home for me. No desrespect to the guys as they are both extremely popular but for my taste it just did not work.
Anyway during my test I found that running profiles from all profilers sounded really good through the cab including ones I previously didn't like. A good example of this would be Top Jimi's AFD100. To me as a profile they almost sound to distant like the mic is far away from the speaker but with no room reverb. Deadlights AFD100 sounds big, inspiring and up front. I was taken back when I loaded up Top Jimi's AFD100 through my cab and it was fantastic sounding where as Deadlights was not, a complete reversal.
Now this got me thinking, am I missing out on top profiles by not using alternative IRs to the ones provided by the profiler? I would be interested to know what other people's thoughts and experiences are with using IRs (free or purchased).
Apart from your thoughts, I was also looking for recommendations for Free IRs (4x12 V30 would be great) to try this out to see if using IRs opens up other avenues to other profilers.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give some background.
Cheers
Mike