Posts by RosboneMako

SPOILER: The video says that most of the stuff like tube style, etc do not have a large effect on tone. He points more to the staging of EQ and gain. He shows a chart where each major style of amp puts its EQ and gain stages in different orders.

1) This could be a reason why some people feel the Kemper has a "sound" to it. Since it has a single gain stage and EQ. It does have a few AMP parameters like Sag etc that may act like a second stage. I think for 99% of us, the single stage is good enough.

2) I like to roll the sleeves up and play around with placing stomps in various orders. This acts like various gain/EQ stages. My current favored combo is the OC->GreenScream->Compressor. Simply moving the order around creates all new options. Adding more stomps to the Kemper would be amazing to give more options for this.

I really liked his breakdown of speaker cabinets also. This guy goes the extra mile to figure things out. Great watch always. At the end of the cabinet video he lets the true issues out about speaker cabs: Cabinet volume, etc.

Things about speakers I have read:

- Magnet size is important for correctly moving the speaker accurately. Bigger is usually better.

- Speakers are designed to work in specific cabinet volumes to give the flattest frequency response they can.

- Sound will emit from the rear of a speaker and bounce around inside a cabinet. Deadening material in the cab helps reduce this effect.

- A closed back will help the low frequencies. Having a tuned port will help even more.

- Guitar cabs purposefully ignore all of the ideas above, so they get a certain "tone" as opposed to being flat and clear.

Questions for you guys:

- Do any guitar cabs ever use a sound deadening material in the cab itself? I have filled my cabs with stuff like blankets/fiberglass insulation/etc.

- Has anyone ever used a BareFaced Audio cab with the vented horn on the rear?

I have tried a little of both worlds. Some people like paid for, some dont. It comes down to how you are using them. For example people say M.Britt profiles sound great at a loud volume thru a PA.

If you don't mind screwing around dialing in a tone, I would go the Rig Exchange and find some good DI profiles of the amps you want. Since you already have good IRs you may get better results that way. Most people have problems micing an amp perfectly, so a DI and IR setup gets rid of that issue. And gets a clearer picture of the amp itself.

I also tend to get better results switching the AMP EQ to pre and using a Studio EQ after the amp. This works better with slightly brighter sounding IRs. Trying to push a freq that doesn't exist can be a losing battle. But trying to get rid of too much fizz is a fight also. But a HI CUT on the studio EQ can do a great job for the fizz.

Here are the official videos that demo the different Fender pickups.

Custom '69

Fat 50's

Texas Special

Vintage Noiseless

Tex Mex

If you dont know what you want and are not real sure about what you have, it is best to start with a good reference point. Since I was looking for an SRV type sound I went Texas Specials. So I had a reference point I was sure of when trying to dial in the tone. If my tone was off, I knew it was the amp/setup and not the guitar.

On my strat the neck pickup sounds very dark and bassy. The bridge pickup sounds nice and chimey. There is a large volume difference between the two. So it makes them not super useful for anything other than the SRV type sound. You need a high gain sound to smooth out the changes in volume and tone.

If I recall, I think I liked the Custom 69s best when watching the vids.

Bayou,

I recently bought a Behringer TMS300 Tube Amp modeler for $21 at Sweetwater. I of course immediately profiled it

I profiled it with no speaker emulation. The profile came out pretty good. I used a custom IR I made in Goldwave for the cab.

In general it was ok. Once I started tweaking it, it started to become something altogether cool. I knocked down the gain and then applied some over drives and compression to get it singing. This seems to be a magical composition for the sound I like to go for. Blues on 11. The way the pedals interact with each other is very cool.

In my mind:

- Think of the OC gain as the preamp gain.

- Think of the Green Scream gain as the post amp gain. The GS tone control forms most of the voice.

- The compressor adds some mid thickness and sustain.

I always have better luck with the AMP EQ as PRE, and then adjust the EQ with the Studio EQ.

A Treble Booster brightens it to me to perfection.

Added some ROOM ambience also.

I was jamming out to this all day on my SRV based strat, then read your post and thought it may work for you???

ROS TMS300 Brit A.zip

Quote from RiotBadger

Does anyone have any tips for someone starting from scratch other than RTFM?

- Put Rig Manager on your computer/ipad. Makes tweaking a no brainer.

- If a tone feels like it is missing something, put a Treble Booster with MIX at 8-15 AFTER the amp.

- Legacy Reverb has some small room options you can use to get a little amp in the room sounds. Set decay and delay as low as possible adjust with mix at 100% then pull it back to taste.

- The OCD pedal is pretty amazing. Adding a pedal and/or using the AMP MIX to let some clean in can help you get a little more dynamics and feel.

I do not play out live or have a Kab so I have no good tips for that stuff.

Welcome to the family!

Quote from BayouTexan

I know I am guilty of thinking way too far ahead of my current musical skills but I like difficult tasks.

"We do not look to put a man on the moon or dial in a cool guitar tone because it is easy. We do it because it is hard." - John F Kennedy

Nice!

Up/Down should move the selection. Left/Right arrow keys should set the selection.

Quote from OneEng1

I don't know about smart, but an electrical engineer at least :).

Thanks for chiming in! I was hoping you would. I was even going to drop your name in my first post.

Engineer here also. But I spent my whole career doing programming and system integration. So I do not have a ton of day to day use of my degree. Just enough to be dangerous and sometimes lead people astray

When I first started going to school I had dreams of making a pedal switcher and modding some amps etc. Once I bought a computer, I started programming and never looked back. Now I am not good at either engineering or programming. Trained in the one I dont use, self taught in the other.

My guess is the tone knob and the DAW EQ will have slightly different effects due to the tone knobs loading effects on the pickup. But it may be a very small change???

The DAW EQ will simply roll of the high frequencies.

The tone knob will change the impedance the pickup is driving.

Lets say you have 250k pots and are driving a 1000k amplifier. Your pickup is trying to push voltage into two parallel 250k's that are in parallel with the 1000k load. That is 111k load.

Now you turn the tone knob 50% off. So you have a 250k in parallel with 125k in parallel with 1000k. That is a 76k load.

Since the tone knob is driving a capacitor normally, these values are not valid. The load will change with frequency. Just wanted to do the math in my head to see if I was completely nuts.

My complete noob guess is the resonant frequency (the WAH part or voice) of the pickup will change. I think a similar thing happens when adjusting the volume knob.

Someone smart can come and clear this up for us

I threw together a rig to highlight some of the options I laid out above, trying to make it easier to try. Hope it helps.

PodHDPak EpicTrik SF16F3.zip

Note: This also uses an IR I made from scratch in Goldwave. Was going to post it later for the topic I created.

I would start here with the profiles already available to you:

5 best Metal Profiles already in your Kemper

I dont play much 7 string, but here is what I have found from playing around on the Kemper and reinforced from YouTube vids.

When dialing in a metal tone you should:

- Adjust the AMP DEFINTION. This adjusts the input curve to reduce(10) or add bass(0). It also tweaks the mids and articulation. So you want to roll it around and listen as you play. There is often a sweet spot where mids start to shine. For metal, this will be around 6-10.

You do not want any low freq stuff hitting before the amplifier. This is what makes the sound muddy. You want the amp to focus its gain on the mids and highs.

- I like to use a Graphic EQ as my 1st stomp. This lets you custom tailor your input to the sound you want. Think of it as a custom DEFINITION control. Most 7-8 string players actually remove a ton of bass. So You will want to roll the 80Hz down like -6dB. Then 150Hz to -2dB. Then you can really start tweaking your sound by boosting the upper mids like 1K, etc.

- Adding an EQ after the amp. This helps you put back some of the low freq stuff you removed to get a less muddy sound. The STUDIO EQ (cut the mix) is a good place to start. The METAL EQ is great but has been buggy from patch to patch, so its MID GAIN may not work. Adding an EQ after the amp will kill some articulation. You need to decide if a better tone is worth the loss.

- Add some AMP DIRECT MIX. This adds in some clean guitar signal to the amps output. This helps thicken your tones mids and adds some dynamics that get smashed by super high gain amps. Since it shares its EQ with the AMP, it can be a balancing act getting the mids right.

- In some cases adding a TREBLE BOOSTER after the amp helps tighten the bottom end and add some high sparkle. You want the mix very low, like 5-15%. It will kill some high freqs so check your pinch harmonics on E string above 12th fret. This works best for Marshall type sounds, not as good for Recto type stuff since it lowers the high freqs.

Adding In-the-room sound depends on how you are playing. I would assume you are recording (since an amp is already going to have the sound).

You can add one of the many different stereo options such as reverb SPACE, EQ/Phase wideners, Double tracker, etc.

Coming from a Line6 background, I like to add some reverb ambience. This is built in to the microphone/cab setting on Line6 modelers. The Kemper LEGACY REVERB has an Ambience and Matchbox size. Set the decay and delay times as short as possible then tweak the mix to your liking. Sometimes adding a bigger room or a little decay sounds good too. Sometimes I use the Natural Reverb and really tweak the reverb Hi/Low freq knobs to make the sound fill in a spot I think is missing.

Good luck and let us know what worked for you!

Here is how my brain thinks about it:

XLR cables were designed for microphones. Microphones output a low voltage.

TS cables are meant to carry higher voltages coming from guitars, equipment, etc.

Lets assume you are getting 1mV of noise on your cables from your surroundings etc.

A microphone may only output 10mV at a certain pressure level.

This means you will have a ton of noise. 10% of your signal will be noise (1/10).

A guitar may output 1000mV of voltage.

This means you will only have .1% of noise on your signal (1/1000).

Since noise shows up much more in low output voltage microphones, a new type of cable needed to be designed to eliminate as much noise as possible. The XLR was created. It splits the signal into positive and negative halves. These halves are brought back together at the end of the cable. When the two are brought back, any noise that couples on to the cable gets canceled out. +1 and -1 = 0.

So a TS cable has two wires. Lets call them + and ground. Lets say the voltage is on the + wire.

An XLR has 3 wires. Lets call them +, -, and ground. A positive voltage is on the + wire and a negative voltage on the - wire. This is called a balanced connection. The voltages are balanced to the ground connection.

The confusion with the Kemper is that it does not output a low voltage on its XLR connections. Audio devices expect a low voltage coming from a microphone to their XLR connections. The Kemper outputs a high voltage you would expect from a guitar or equipment.

So you do not want to run XLR-XLR from the Kemper to your device. It will overload the devices preamp.

The longer the cables are, the more noise will get coupled on to them. They are antennas after all. Picking up every broadcast coming from tv stations, radio stations, electronic appliances, computers, etc

So you can run TS cables as long as you want until you start hearing noise. Then switch to XLR->TRS cables. Assuming your audio interface accepts TRS cables (balanced line level).

As Wheresthedoug pointed out, the Kemper XLR outs are balanced to reduce noise. And it also puts out a higher voltage than normal to move the noise floor down as well.

Another thing to think about is how does the equipment create the balanced XLR style signal. An easy way is to use a transformer. Does this transformer color the sound at all? Who knows. My ears are trash and I would never be able to tell any differences between any cables or methods

The guitar tone sounds good overall. You have a lot of mid range that gives it a nice singing tone. The excess mid range makes the recording sound a little muffled.

You could pull out the mids in the Kemper.

If you lose some singing tone from the Kemper cut, I would just do a mid cut EQ in your DAW after recording. Like lose a little 400Hz and boost a little 2kHz if it still sounds muffled.

I would play with removing the AMP compressor to see if the sounds gets more dynamic also. Adding Direct Mix helps that also, I see you have some already.

Direct Mix adds mids also. It depends a lot on your Amp EQ. Would be great if the Direct had its own EQ. That would help a lot.

The Kemper AMP mid is hard to dial in because it adds some gain/volume. So your ear hears the gain getting stronger and you think it sounds better. But its really just getting muddy.

You could look at the big profilers like Michael Britt and follow their lead.

Usually first 2-3 characters are your initials or designation. For Britt its MB.

Followed by the amp name (69 Plexi).

Followed by the channel used: (Jumpered).

Then some thing that indicates the gain or pedals if used (Timmy OD).

EXAMPLE: MB 69 Plexi J Tim

But anything works. There are no rules. You have a limited number of chars you can see on the Kemper screen so it is usually truncated like the example.

See this video and in the description

Quote from BayouTexan

I did exactly that a few months ago. I picked up a cheap Squire Precision Bass from Sweetwater. Kemper makes it easily sound like a $1000 bass. If I could play better, Kemper could make me sound like Geddy Lee.

I just picked up a Squire 60's Jazz direct from Fender last week for $239. Sound is perfect (also a Geddy fan). My other favorite bass is an Ibanez, GSR200 also around the $200 mark. Last week the short scales (GSR20) were on sale for $139 at Adorama I think.

I have heard Fender was laying people off after the bug surge of people buying guitars over covid so they have too many guitars. Now is the time to catch a sale. Dont pay full price because they are all bloated.

Quote from RosboneMako

Just one of the sad realities of getting old, you realize no one is in charge. Just a ship afloat on the stormy seas with no captain

Since we are WAY OFF topic...this is why Kemper is successful. The person at the helm fully understands what they are trying to do. Not some bean counters trying to change things just to justify their existence. Kemper will always be amazing while CK is around. Another great reason to support such a great company.

Quote from Wheresthedug

Americans don’t speak English, don’t use proper measurements (what the heck is a 32nd of an inch in real money) and don’t get me started on spelling 🤦‍♂️

What is sad is I am old enough to remember when the US was switching to metric. Then just quit. So we are stuck with all this dumb stuff like a 9/54" allen wrench instead of something sane like 4 mm. Just mind numbing. There is a new term amongst the young ones: Hard Dumb. That was hard dumb for sure. Just one of the sad realities of getting old, you realize no one is in charge. Just a ship afloat on the stormy seas with no captain

Good question.

Have you looked at the Kemper Tribute packs. They are in Rig Manager. Wont be full songs just generic tones that T.Dill demos to sound like an artist. Search the YouTube videos for the demos or look on this website.

Could look at Live Play Rock as well for some artist presets. I have never used them so I cant vouch for quality.

You are describing my dream job. But my ears are trash, so I would be terrible at it