How to get the "Brown sound" with the Kemper...

great video......and it sounds so good..........

sounds great. Be nice if they just uploaded the 'new' rig. Is that not possible because of the TAF association?

I think it's good not to provide the rig as download.
The whole point of this great video is to learn how to do it on your own.
Shouldn't be to hard to do and it certainly helps you to do some tweaking to your own taste and/or guitar.

Just my thought,
Martin

Quote from lightbox

I think it's good not to provide the rig as download.
The whole point of this great video is to learn how to do it on your own.
Shouldn't be to hard to do and it certainly helps you to do some tweaking to your own taste and/or guitar.

Just my thought,
Martin

I see your point but all im going to do is copy the video and then tweak after anyway. It would be nice to get straight to the tweaking

I get so confused with the brown sound. Eddie Van Halen used a super lead to record his albums. This is a jtm45. If you check out the video below you can see the differences in the amps. Adding a treble booster, eq, post eq is great, but I wouldn't know where to start if I was trying to hit the actual eq. It would take me a long time to figure this out. It sounds pretty good as far as the fair warning album. I think pete's van halen ozone match superlead hits the first album well. Anyways, without listening and going back and forth tweaking I seriously don't know if I would think to do preamp eq and then post eq. How would anyone ever figure this out?!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvvfsAtlILU

Quote from jeddie

I get so confused with the brown sound. Eddie Van Halen used a super lead to record his albums. This is a jtm45. If you check out the video below you can see the differences in the amps. Adding a treble booster, eq, post eq is great, but I wouldn't know where to start if I was trying to hit the actual eq. It would take me a long time to figure this out. It sounds pretty good as far as the fair warning album. I think pete's van halen ozone match superlead hits the first album well. Anyways, without listening and going back and forth tweaking I seriously don't know if I would think to do preamp eq and then post eq. How would anyone ever figure this out?!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvvfsAtlILU

I was going to post the very same thing. I find it rather strange to use an amp that sounds (and behaves) vastly different from what EVH used and then use loads of EQ and a treble booster to make it sound somehow similar.

Recently somebody at Plexipalace had the original amp in service and found that it was a bone stock '68 JMP and even the variac didn't do that much. It just sounded that way when cranked to the max. '68 JMPs were much brighter and had more gain than earlier JMPs and JTMs, so that's why they needed the treble booster in the video.

It would be a lot easier to just use a profile of a cranked '68 and be done with it.

But I see a problem in my approach: I'm not entirely sure, but I think we don't have a profile of a '68 JMP yet And AFAIK the only profiles of 60s JMPs are commercial ones anyway. So I guess they used the JTM in the video because it is a factory profile and at least from the same decade the original amp was from.

Great Video nonetheless...
Very educating in a way.

Quote from jeddie

I get so confused with the brown sound. Eddie Van Halen used a super lead to record his albums. This is a jtm45. If you check out the video below you can see the differences in the amps. Adding a treble booster, eq, post eq is great, but I wouldn't know where to start if I was trying to hit the actual eq. It would take me a long time to figure this out. It sounds pretty good as far as the fair warning album. I think pete's van halen ozone match superlead hits the first album well. Anyways, without listening and going back and forth tweaking I seriously don't know if I would think to do preamp eq and then post eq. How would anyone ever figure this out?!?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvvfsAtlILU

Quote from Garrincha

...I was going to post the very same thing. I find it rather strange to use an amp that sounds (and behaves) vastly different from what EVH used and then use loads of EQ and a treble booster to make it sound somehow similar...

This is the dilemma of the KPA owner. Most players who've owned other amp modelers don't get too caught up with the name of the amp and focus on the end tones. When your able to let go of preconceptions regarding how an amp is supposed to sound, the sky's the limit regarding the end tonal potential. But given the KPA's accuracy, many users think a profile should not be touched nor tinkered with. Rather than using a few core amp models as tonal bases and building out, we have collectors with 1,000's of profiles which when you get down to it are all minor variations on the same theme. Experimentation should be encouraged more with the KPA. With the amp parameters you can really transform amps into entirely different beasts. Start with an amp with a good feel and general tonal color and tweak away. No reason to wait for the "correct" amp when you can have it today.

I just went through the video and I like what I got. The phaser not so much but hey thats me.

I never would have thought about cranking the bias but it sounds good and its in my favs now.

Quote from Will_Chen

This is the dilemma of the KPA owner. Most players who've owned other amp modelers don't get too caught up with the name of the amp and focus on the end tones. When your able to let go of preconceptions regarding how an amp is supposed to sound, the sky's the limit regarding the end tonal potential. But given the KPA's accuracy, many users think a profile should not be touched nor tinkered with. Rather than using a few core amp models as tonal bases and building out, we have collectors with 1,000's of profiles which when you get down to it are all minor variations on the same theme. Experimentation should be encouraged more with the KPA. With the amp parameters you can really transform amps into entirely different beasts. Start with an amp with a good feel and general tonal color and tweak away. No reason to wait for the "correct" amp when you can have it today.

I do like to use the deeper parameters of an amp profile to transform an amp into something that didn't even exist before. I mean in a sense of creating a new amp for a completely new sound.

But for recreating a certain legendary sound I rather prefer to just use a profile of the original amp and be done with it.

Just the other night I tried to copy Joe Walsh's Lead sound. I know he used a '59 tweed Deluxe. Whatever I did to whatever suitable Fender profile I tried, I couldn't get that sound. I gave up after three hours of tweaking.

To me the point of the KPA is not in eternal tweaking like you need to do with other modellers who just don't have a suitable model of a specific sound. The point of the Kemper is to have those amps at your fingertips without smashing them with EQ and compression and what not.

well my take on it is. guitar related gear is so varied (too varied in fact)
So this is about getting in the ballpark, to me its not so close to EVH, but a very good general rock tone.
and if they started with the right amp to start with, well then it wont be a instructional video now would it

In terms of "how to get there"
well its the simple case of use your ears.
Many people are scared of EQ, (Serious Pre EQ) is some of the best sounding effects you can get in the Kemper at times. (if needed of course)
And as far as needing to EQ something to get in the ballpark, well you think "joe bloggs" walks in to a studio, lays down tracks and walks away with a mix.. NO. its compressed, limited, EQ'd and what not before you can walk away. - this is showing you what you can get with a bit of time and effort, and is very good addition to the Kemper videos.
and sometimes we need to ignore the label to find what we seek.
because our gear outputs a different sound to what our heroes played.

Lots of viewpoints on this, but IMO it's a great tool for KPA users. Gundy is a talented guy!

I'm sorry, but the best profile for the VH I've ever played to date from anything, Is that recent profile simply called "67 plexi"... It is the best I've ever heard right out of the box, nothin I've played can touch it.

Quote from Guitartone

I think 'some' are missing the point here.

Who cares if it sounds exactly like the Brown Sound or if someone else can get a better Brown Sound out of their Kemper.

The point is that it's a great video tutorial in learning about the Kempers potential when tweaked...it also demos how easy the tweaking is.
It takes a ton of effort and time from both the Kemper team and Gundy to produce videos like this....the point is to say thanks, not to scientifically analyse every minuscule detail of the tone.

IMHO

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Quote from Guitartone

You think the legendary amp tones you talk of were straight recordings of the mic'd amp?
I doubt it, I think they were 'smashed' with all kinds of studio trickery before they ended up on the LPs we listened to.

Depends on the decade we are talking about

When some legendary records were remixed for 5.1, they were transfered from tape to ProTools. And some of those ProTools sessions were used by Avid (with permission) as dealer demos. I happen to have three of these and one is a very legendary record
All were recorded in the 70s and you'd be very surprised how close the tracks sound to the final result and how little needs to be done in the mix. Basically you just bring up the faders and it sounds much like the final mix. That was the philosophy back then, basically the trickery was already done at recording stage and consisted of carefully choosing the mics, the placement and maybe the room. They actually didn't have much to play with at mixing stage. A Neve 1073 or a Helios channel are pretty limited in what they can do. They sound gourgous nevertheless but it's more about adding some sheen than transfering an amp into something completely different.

So yes, if we talk about Joe Walsh as in my example or early van Halen, what you hear on the record is pretty much how the mic'd amp sounded. They might have cut the bass and added a bit of presence but that's it basically.

That all changed in the 80s though with the advent of SSL desks with parametric EQ und compression on every channel and bus and automation of every parameter. Together with digital reverb and other effects there were much more tools for trickery than before and that got used up to the point of being too much... It's impossible to tell what Lukather used on a given track nor does it matter anyway since the amp was the smallest part of the equation back in that decade.

Today guitar tracks don't get that much processing as in the 80s and 90s and many engineers are going back to old school as far as guitars are concerned. I've recently seen a documentation of Green Day and Chris Lord-Alge talking and showing what he did at mix stage. And he sure does all kinds of things to the drums (you wouldn't believe how complex the trickery is to make a modern drum sound) but the guitars are not that processed. There was a snippet of Billie Joe Armstrong double tracking a part (recorded by the camera mic of the film-team) and that was pretty close to the endresult as we know it. You might clear some of the midrange to make room for bass and vocals and you might cut the bass and give 3 dB treble at 8kHz, but that's pretty much it. No compression at all. The only trickery was actually the fact it was triple-tracked with three different amps and for hard left and hard right each.

And considering this was a Chris Lord-Alge mix - the king of processing stuff to the moon and back - I found that very remarkable.

The smashing of the complete mix was done afterwards in the mastering house. But that's a completely different story

My point was that it's an awesome video, but how they heck do I figure that out on my own. ha!