I gave up...the Kemper ships back tomorrow. (Solved)

  • I'm hearing some vids online that just sound great. I need to investigate further for the chorus sound I want. I'm sure it's in there. Hopefully future Kemper owners will read my testimonial on the Kemper, that I went from frustration to absolute bliss. I wouldn't trade Kemper for anything.

  • bobbyodell - I'm really glad you kept the Kemper. I think a lot of us suffered from expectation that you just turn it on and it sounds identical to the exact sound you want thru any amp/speaker combination. It can sound near identical but not out of the box. Many profiles sound terrible out-of-the-box. I've even seen complaints about MBritt profiles, which are pretty much the standard profile for the Kemper (esp. for non-high gain). My first epic fail was after just buying the Kemper I went to a practice session with a friend who had a small PA in his music room, and expected to just plug the Kemper into that and it would sound great. It sounded like I was playing thru a cardboard box. I plugged into an external cabinet and sounded wooly. But that was a year ago and I learnt the device and I can get such awesome sounds, that are better than the original amps. I think with Kemper you gotta spend few months with it before you can then just stop tweaking and know the few setting you need to adjust..


    I saw Tim Pearce talking about his Kemper and was saying he just uses it like an amp. He only sets it to a Marshall Plexi and uses the gain knob- and that's it. I've got to this now. I have 3 favorite profiles and just use them, and adjust guitar (vol and tone) to taste -- and maybe add an effect to taste.


    Oh - in terms of Chorus, I love the CE-1 / Dimension sound you get on a JC-120 / AD-120VTX. My trick it to use Air Chorus and have the Depth set low (1.5 / 2.0 ish).

  • To judge the sound of the Kemper, I think it helps a lot to start on familiar terrain. This can maybe explain the different experiences people have.


    For example if you are comparing the Kemper amp section with a real amp using your trusted real cab (mic'd!!) first. The influence of the same cab, speaker, mic and room will be so big, there will be no very drastic differences.


    If you are next playing through decent studio monitors in a (semi) treated room, that you know very well from listening to mic'd cabs, again, there will not be big surprises (compared to demos of sellers for example). I only tweak for finetuning (or experimenting), otherwise changing the profile gets me faster to what I need.


    There are drastic differences in quality of profiles of course and you have to sort that out first. But there is such a large selection, it is virtually impossible that you don't find something that sounds good. If everything sounds bad or heavy tweaking is needed, then maybe its likely more the influence of room modes...

  • bobbyodell - I'm really glad you kept the Kemper. I think a lot of us suffered from expectation that you just turn it on and it sounds identical to the exact sound you want thru any amp/speaker combination. It can sound near identical but not out of the box. Many profiles sound terrible out-of-the-box. I've even seen complaints about MBritt profiles, which are pretty much the standard profile for the Kemper (esp. for non-high gain). My first epic fail was after just buying the Kemper I went to a practice session with a friend who had a small PA in his music room, and expected to just plug the Kemper into that and it would sound great. It sounded like I was playing thru a cardboard box. I plugged into an external cabinet and sounded wooly. But that was a year ago and I learnt the device and I can get such awesome sounds, that are better than the original amps. I think with Kemper you gotta spend few months with it before you can then just stop tweaking and know the few setting you need to adjust..


    I saw Tim Pearce talking about his Kemper and was saying he just uses it like an amp. He only sets it to a Marshall Plexi and uses the gain knob- and that's it. I've got to this now. I have 3 favorite profiles and just use them, and adjust guitar (vol and tone) to taste -- and maybe add an effect to taste.


    Oh - in terms of Chorus, I love the CE-1 / Dimension sound you get on a JC-120 / AD-120VTX. My trick it to use Air Chorus and have the Depth set low (1.5 / 2.0 ish).

    I would definitely like to here Tim Pierce's stuff on Kemper. This is exactly where I thought about going with it...5 presets MAX.