Day 1 Newbie Observations

    Hello! So I unpacked my Kemper Stage, installed rig manager, updated to the latest version firmware, copied in place some commercial profiles I really liked that were incredible on youtube. ;)


    OK, so Day 1, I'm not expecting instant gratification - the way that say, the Neural DSP Plini plug-in works in Logic which I'm basically upgrading from - I know it's me not knowing stuff.


    What's the best on-ramp? I modified a few things pointed to in 101 videos, cab settings, clean sense etc.

    All the profiles sounds really bad out of the box - if I mess around with reverb and delay and effects I can get to something beginner-acceptable.

    But it's not the tones I hear in my head. It didn't turn me into the love-child of Gary Moore and Steve Vai. :);(


    I was wondering, based on all the presets and profiles, if there are version dependencies or library dependencies I don't know about?

    How would I tell? Many profiles have delay and reverb off but when selected they present Legacy Reverb or Legacy Delay.

    Does that indicate a problem? A reference to a preset that doesn't exist on mine?


    I see so many examples of people with great sounds and I only got started so, yeah, I can work at this.

    What are the 101 tips and tricks I'm missing that you stumbled over?


    Thank you.

    Legacy delay and reverb are the old versions of those effects. However, to ensure backward compatibility, rather than delete them and replace them with the new versionS Kemper simply renamed them “legacy”. As commercial profilers generally want their packs to be compatible with the largest number of possible user configurations (not everyone regularly updates OS) They often use the legacy effects by default. You can change the effects to anything you want.

    Welcome to the forum! The sounds are there, but unlike "modelers", the Kemper actually profiles a given amp/speaker with the particular settings. So, there are often a baffling number of profiles for a particular amp, and all with different sounds. It can take a while to find "your" sound, but it's there :)

    Go for it now. The future is promised to no one. - Wayne Dyer

    Like 2

    So Day 2, I just deleted every profile I had added and started again, and I got better results this time. OK, this could be fun.

    First time around, when something attempted to reference a "legacy" reverb or delay, there was no list item it matched, like there was a missing patch or something - not sure, anyway, reloading and I actually see legacy items to select from - and that are paired in the profile to begin with. Thanks for the explanation on legacy items, WheresTheDug (I can almost hear your accent), that helped and encouraged me to just reload everything. Everyday is a school day.

    I'm following this thread (non-owner. maybe later). I believe you should get usable tones right out the box. Why buy something on the hopes you "might" get usable tone later? I though Kemper was a "guaranteed" tone maker. I've never had so much optimism and pessimism over a product before. UHG!

    Larry Mar @ Lonegun Studios. Neither one famous yet.

    Quote from BayouTexan

    I'm following this thread (non-owner. maybe later). I believe you should get usable tones right out the box. Why buy something on the hopes you "might" get usable tone later? I though Kemper was a "guaranteed" tone maker. I've never had so much optimism and pessimism over a product before. UHG!

    In the vast majority of cases folks are blown-away from the get-go, BT.


    You're getting paranoid over the one-percenters, mate. Of said group, the majority change their minds anyway after having eliminated pilot error or simply afforded their units fair gos.

    I'm not quite at Defender of the Faith levels yet but here I am, Day 3, using Kemper -> Scarlett 8i6 via SPDIF -> Logic Pro X, and this is the already the best tone and home recording set-up I have used. I'm not sure what I did wrong initially, but as fast as I screwed it up, I've fixed it and it's already met my expectations. Now, as with any new kit, I need to allow myself time to learn and experiment and tweak, but I'm already happy as a wee sand boy.


    It's just my experience so far, what will yours be? Good luck. Already loving the Kemper support community across this forum, youtube and the interwebs.

    Quote from BayouTexan

    I'm following this thread (non-owner. maybe later). I believe you should get usable tones right out the box. Why buy something on the hopes you "might" get usable tone later? I though Kemper was a "guaranteed" tone maker. I've never had so much optimism and pessimism over a product before. UHG!

    You can (and should expect to) get solid sounds out of the box. It *is* a guaranteed tone maker.

    Some people don't bond with a certain thing.....and tell everyone they hated it. The ones who like and promote it are generally fewer. We're too busy having fun.

    “Without music, life would be a mistake.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

    Like 4

    Tomorrow's challenge will be getting my Mission Engineering expression pedal to work as a wah. I know there are youtube videos for this. I can't expect to know all the things in one day. I'm some way from actually creating my own profiles but I had a question -- is it possible to profile isolated guitar tracks of favourite guitarists from record (or perhaps there are parts of songs that are only guitar) as well as just mic-ing up amps? Would that work?

    Quote from InfiniteSustain

    krig files seem improbably small for what they must contain, is there a file format?

    All they "must contain" is a bunch of parameter values 'cause they're Presets.


    If you tweak a real amp, how many parameters does that usually involve? Half a dozen? No doubt there'd be more with the Kemper, but the principle is the same; the Preset need only contain said values.

    OK, but the character of each amp is different, for a new amp, I see we're loading only .krig files - does that mean that each relies on a preset soundform of some kind? I see Rig Manager maintains presets separately but I haven't yet made any changes to any of that - if I load, say, a new Gallien Krueger profile, there's nothing remotely like it, it only contains the .krig file - there's no preset added? I'm reaching, I have no idea, just humbled by the mechanics of the device. Thank you.

    The Presets in Rig Manager are FX Presets. Same principle, but the stored parameters in the files are applied to the FX algorithms, as opposed to the Kemper baseline-amp algorithm where the amp components of Rigs are concerned.


    Rigs = FX Presets + Profiles (amp presets, but they're not called that), which include Cabs in the cases of Studio and Merged Profiles.


    All components are serviced by the file-stored parameter values, whether tweaked by the user (FX Presets) or created by the Kemper via the Profiling process (Profile, stored as a component of a Rig).

    Quote from InfiniteSustain

    OK, but the character of each amp is different...

    This is achieved through the many "invisible" parameters the Kemper uses to reproduce them. As I said earlier, it's the same principle as tweaking a real amp (very-few parameters), but in this case there's an unspecified number of parameters (many more, no doubt) that are "filled" via the Kemper's interpretation of the data received during Profiling.