My simple solution to getting better high gain tones

  • Hey all, first post here.

    Ever since I bought the Kemper back in 2019, I've been struggling like many to get a high-gain tone that didn't sound fizzy. It was especially problematic when switching chords - it would create this weird chirping sound from the attack and from the tiniest string scratch. VSTs sounded better, and I've read many of the problems that people have had which is why I wanted to post my personal solution which is so simple, it's painful:

    I simply turned the volume knob on my guitar to lower the pickup volume. Many of us are so used to having the tone and volume knobs cranked for other types of amps and VSTs, but with the Kemper, it's too hot. I knew my pickups were hot but it never dawned on me to turn down the knob on my guitar about halfway. I would always try and turn down the gain on the Kemper or try and set some other setting. Btw, I have an Ernie Ball Music Man RS guitar with stock pickups.

    A glaring tell is when you go to the Rig Manager and see that a profile's gain is a 4 out of 10, you play it....and you get a heavier distortion sound instead of a fair crunch sound. The moment I turned the guitar itself down about halfway, all of the sudden, I got the correct level of distortion from high-gain profiles, the fizz is gone, and everything sounds as it should. It's embarrassing but I had to mention it because I can have that same volume knob cranked all the way up in VST amps and it's fine. Not the case with the Kemper profiles.

    Every time you demo a high-gain profile, turn the guitar's volume knob down to where it's too clean, then bring it back up until there's just enough distortion. And if somebody comes along and asks why their guitar tone is so bad, I recommend mentioning this guitar volume knob as the first thing to check.
    One good profile to test their level in the Rig Manager is to use:
    "DP \'65 Deluxe Crunc" by the author "Heater."
    When my guitar's knob is down where it now should be, this sounds like a fairly good crunch tone. When the knob was all the way up on the guitar, this profile suddenly becomes a full-blown distortion sound when the rating is a 4 out of 10 in terms of gain...so that's the first sign that things are too hot. This particular profile's higher gain happens to sound pretty good when the guitar's knob is all the way up but it's not meant to be a high-gain profile and so this is a good way of telling where the guitar's knob should be. Then toggling through other profiles gives me this starting point where things suddenly start to sound pretty good.


    I can already tell that many people will be shaking their heads at this obvious advice, but it's apparently not so obvious to many of us! 8)

  • To get good high gain tone...


    My first trick was to -- turn down the gain.


    My second trick was to -- never cut the mids. Only do that in the mix as necessary.


    My last trick was to -- EQ! EQ! EQ! Low cut, High cut, and take out the mic'd nasalness which for me was a narrow band around 7.0K. I applied this EQ to every profile and it's like night and day good!


    Took me 2 years to figure this out. ;(

    Larry Mar @ Lonegun Studios. Neither one famous yet.

  • All of these are good suggestions. I find the Kemper to be very sensitive to volume and tone knob settings unlike most modelers I've used. A lot of pros will run the volume on like 8 with their tube amps to give them that "something extra" and I often do the same with the Kemper. Sometimes depending on the pickup I might roll down the tone too. That's what they're there for. Distortion sense might do the same though I never mess with that. As I have mentioned countless times clean sense only affects if the sound gets louder or softer or stays the same as you increase/decrease gain on the rig you are on. The way the manual explains it is a bit confusing but there is a video that explains it perfectly. (clean sense)

  • It's useful to have the full range of volume available on your pickups - I don't think you should have to reduce vol on guitar just to get a useable tone - reserve this trick for if you e.g. want to clean up a sound for a quieter portion of the song without changing profile.


    Apart from adjusting input clean and dist sens as mentioned, try a pure booster in the 1st pedal slot. I usually boost a little, not to the point it sounds like a "boost" as such, but just to get the profile to feel more authentic - i.e. to get the right amount of "bite" and full range of dynamics I'd expect from the amp. However the pure boost also goes into negative values, so if your pickups are too hot, try this - just adjust it till it feels and sounds right - this amount will likely vary slightly from profile to profile, but remain in the same ballpark for a given set of pickups.

  • It's useful to have the full range of volume available on your pickups - I don't think you should have to reduce vol on guitar just to get a useable tone - reserve this trick for if you e.g. want to clean up a sound for a quieter portion of the song without changing profile.


    Apart from adjusting input clean and dist sens as mentioned, try a pure booster in the 1st pedal slot. I usually boost a little, not to the point it sounds like a "boost" as such, but just to get the profile to feel more authentic - i.e. to get the right amount of "bite" and full range of dynamics I'd expect from the amp. However the pure boost also goes into negative values, so if your pickups are too hot, try this - just adjust it till it feels and sounds right - this amount will likely vary slightly from profile to profile, but remain in the same ballpark for a given set of pickups.

    I agree, it seems like this is a workaround and not tackling the root cause of the problem.

  • Rolling down the guitar volume may add a touch of a cocked-wah tone depending on the guitar/pickups/etc. Meaning it thins out the Q of the pickups and creates a larger boost at their peak frequency.


    So you could try running an EQ as your first stomp and boost the mids. GEQ would be a good start with its 640 Hz boosted. Or a Studio EQ with the 3rd filter section tuned to 700Hz. You could roll around the 700 Hz to find the best freq and then adjust the Q of the filter to get more of a WAH sound. A gain of 3-6 dB should do it.

  • Many great players rarely had their volume knob on 10. Scott Henderson never goes higher than 9, as he thinks having the volume pot fully "open" diminishes the sound. But I agree that the entire range of the volume knob should have usable tones.

  • I had this thing too.
    Seems that rolling a little down the volume helped to get rid of some nasty high frequencies.


    Never had to do that on a amp and then realized that the kemper’s input does not react at all like an amp.

    I resolved the problem by adjusting the height of my pickups according to the way kemper reacts.

    I’m a HS /HSS player, so I had to raise the single coils (a lot) and lower the bridge HB to get a kind of standard tone.

  • Some profiles offer excellent flexibility by only using your guitar's volume knob. I have a ToneJunkie 56 Tweed that's a full lead tone when using the know fully, but I can make it extremely clean by using the volume pot of the guitar, so it becomes a kind of all in one profile for certain songs.