Posts by RosboneMako

Thanks!

Looking forward to hearing some responses here. Since guitar is normally played thru a 12" speaker, it seems larger would be better. So should people go 8", 10", 12" etc ??? But a 12" speaker starts to roll of highs in the 4-5 kHz range. So maybe the 12" was picked over smaller speakers for its roll off and not its bass response?

I only have a few sets of speakers at home. Behringer 2031Ps and some low end Edifiers. So I do not have any suggestions.

The Behringers sound really good. But lack a little crispness. And the Edifiers are way too crisp. With the Behringers, I can hear the difference between profiles. The Edifiers and various computer speaker sets, I cant. They all sound like the the speakers, not the profiles.

To my ears, the tweeter is the key piece for guitar. So much of the guitar definition is high frequency. So a very transparent and smooth tweeter is needed.

A lot of guitar cabs have bass down in the 100 Hz range. So a bigger woofer would help with fullness and thump.

I am always curious about some of the cheaper powered PA speakers for fun guitar listening also. That way you get into 12" range pretty cheap.

I thought this issue was resolved about two patches back. Hmmm.

PROFILER Operating System 8.7.4.37194/37507

Audio

fixed: Mid boost of Metal Equalizer

Quote from V8guitar

Dude, sorry to hear this, that must be tough.

I bet your sounds are still better than mine

The tough part is explaining it to Doctors for them to look at you like you are nuts. Then they order a bunch of stupid tests that dont even look for the thing you just told them was the issue.

Doc: Your blood work looks fine. Vitamins, cholesterol, etc

Me: No shit Sherlock. You need to look for stuff that is NOT supposed to be in your blood. That is the issue. If I eat carbs I start feeling like I have been poisoned, my inner ears swell up, and I start spinning.

Doc: Uhhhh... we dont have a test for that.

Me: Useless.

If it wasn't for the internet I would be dead from suicide. You can only take being dizzy for so long before walking into traffic starts sounding like a viable solution

The upside is my wife (and work) made me retire. So I sit and play with my Kemper all day long. Cant complain about that too much.

I found this amp in the Kemper Merged profiles: TH - Mars VM OD1

I made some custom IRs for it to get a few options. It probably has more gain than Joshua may want so I dropped the gain on two profiles (LG). The F variant sounds good on my Les Paul(HB) and the G2 variant sounds good on my Strat(SC). Of course my hearing is crap so YMMV

TH - Mars VM OD1 SF25.zip

Quote from frama78

To me, that specific Marshall-"emphasis" in the mids is missing. It works well for very "vintage" and very "modern" tones but not exactly how I hear Marshalls

This to me is the missing ingredient. There is this thick mid push in a Marshall that I only seem to hear in a tube amp. But maybe that is because you can only play a Marshall thru a 4x12 cab at volume. You don't try to play your Marshall head thru some little speaker or headphones.

I would like to tweak some tones up for Joshua, so I would like to hear exactly what he is looking for. I like tweaking and I like a good challenge

I know sometimes with profiles there is a weird THONK emphasis in the picking attack. I have also seen profiles where a mysterious resonant high freq exists making picking attack sound very harsh. In both cases, I think this is in the AMP section of the profile and it cant be removed by an IR/Cab. Would be best to move to a different profile. And then maybe add an EQ before the amp section for mid push and attack adjustment.

Quote from Wheresthedug

It doesn’t matter what you use, only that it sounds great and inspires you to make great music.

This is the key right here. A certain guitar style and color makes me WANT to play it. And when I write songs, it is all about tone. With a good sound, I can write songs all day long. With a bad one, I cant write any songs.

And as V8 said, I just changed out my monitoring solution. To my dismay it sounds much better. Even though both were fairly clean transparent amplifiers.

It would be great if you could point to a song or something that had the sound you are looking for.

Quote from deadman42

All the best for your further journey with that. But watch out for your hearing mate. If it is already that impacted then please take care a lot...

To go way off topic, I have intestinal issues (leaky gut). This lets things get in your blood that are not supposed to be there. This in turn causes inflammation all throughout your body. The inflammation is directly connected to what foods I eat. Each food causes a different reaction.

The inflammation manifests the most in my ears. So I am dizzy most of the time. And if I eat certain foods, I get very dizzy. So I maintain a very strict diet.

The problem with my ears is they were never good my whole life. And now they are in a constant state of tinnitus as well from the inflammation. It is hard to tweak a tone when you have 10 different frequencies all screaming in your ears while you do it! Like you have a bunch of watch alarms going off in your head all day long.

So be gentle when I post a profile to the exchange and it sounds terrible

Quote from charlphi

It was tuned, but the intonation absolutely false.

Very interesting. I got a G&L Jazz bass really cheap a while ago. The low E string is impossible to get intonated. I can move the saddles thru their whole range and the intonation does not change. Seemed impossible. I have not messed with it much since I ordered a Squire Jazz bass shortly after

Quote from deadman42

Glad you sorted it, glad it was indeed not the Kemper and indeed thanks for coming back and sharing the information with the audience here. To me it seems often that some weak elements in the further signal chain create the biggest challenges rather than the Kemper... which for me is the most solid and reliable gear I ever had. Compared to a handful of tube amps which "left me in the wrong moment" for sure.

Rock on!

Thanks! I wanted to post that I never gave up on the Kemper, even though I bought a Helix after not being happy at first. But I really love the whole Kemper ecosystem. And being a fan of Line6, I wanted a Helix anyway. I love both for what they each do.

I also wanted to make a separate post so people searching the web for these symptoms can find it easier.

I agree with your statement that the Kemper is solid. It never made sense to me that the hardware could sound different from unit to unit. It has to be just a processor and a DAC. They should all sound identical. But I was limited in my monitoring solutions. I only have one set of speakers I trust are flat, the Behringers. And I hate the sound of guitar in headphones. And I never suspected that my super flat solid state receiver could color the sound that badly. For a time I suspected that the amp had a hidden "loudness" circuit, so as I changed the volume the tone changed as well.

Since I went thru all of this pain, I wanted to post: If your Kemper sounds bad, it is your monitoring solution, not the Kemper.

And this information would apply to any unit you buy: Kemper, Helix, Fractal, etc Maybe that is a better post title?

And in my case, the amps changes to the tone were very subtle and changed over long periods of time. It was unnoticable to me and my bad hearing.

Another thing that tripped me up was the speakers. Since I was driving them harder and harder throughout the day, I thought maybe their response was changing. But I recently went over the specs and saw they are rated for 150W. I probably hit them with 5W at best. That prompted me to try a different amp. I wanted to verify they did not change at volume. And they did not.

Currently I am happy with the cheap $100 receiver I am using. It is working very well. But there will soon be a day where I start thinking about getting something as reliable as possible. Or maybe I do not. Just get a new one when it starts to sound bad. All amps will rely on the power supply caps for power. And a class D amp will rely even more on the filtering caps after its switching stages. And those big electrolytic caps are the first thing to slowly change over time. So class A/B or class D? Maybe I will cross that bridge when I get there

Most of you guys have seen my posts about my Kemper Stage not sounding right.

I had 3 concerns:

1 - The profiles never sounded as good as what I have heard others get from the same profiles.

2 - The profiles sounded dead. Like there was too much compression in the line somewhere.

3 - If I tweaked a profile all day long and got it perfect, it sounded terrible to me the next day.

I think I may have an answer. I use a standard stereo receiver as my computer/Kemper monitoring device. I use it with Behringer 8" passive studio monitors. It has always sounded very good and flat. And I could add an extra bass boost that would let me know how it might sound on a subwoofer type system. I also have bad hearing.

The stereo receiver was the problem. Well a major factor.

Over the years I always found with my previous gear, I would tweak a sound and it sounded bad the next day. Several Line6 products right up to the Kemper. But it really showed up more with the Kemper, due to the amp getting older and the Kemper sounding better to begin with.

There was also a 4th issue that I knew was not Kemper related: As the hours would pass I would need to continuously turn up the volume. I assumed my ears were getting adjusted to the level. Again, bad hearing. And this also led to a point in the day where no matter what, everything sounded bad. I assumed my ears were fatigued.

After struggling recently, I decided to swap out my old favorite die hard receiver with a new one I had laying around. Boom. Night and day difference.

1 - The Kemper sounds much better overall. A lot of that gritty crisp distortion I knew was missing is there! Some is still missing but now I know it is most likely from the speakers. I have played the Kemper thru other speakers I have and it is much more crisp thru them.

2 - Profiles sound much more dynamic. I would still like more because I am a weirdo, but much better.

3 - Now when I tweak profiles, I am not confused the next day when they sound terrible. They still sound good the next day.

4 - I set the amp volume at 50 and play all day. Never need to turn it up, never get fatigued.

I think my old amp was sagging. This led to a loss of upper mid distortion. And as the hours passed, it got worse and the frequency shifted slightly. Since it all happens so slowly I never noticed it changing.

I now trust the Kemper a little more as my gold standard. Which makes me very happy since I love everything about how it works and what it does. Still one of the most amazing things ever created by human kind.

The killer app missing from the Kemper is a De-Esser.

This would let it be used for vocal processing and would help tame profiles that have a runaway frequency.

Would want high pass for vocals. A tunable freq and Q for guitar.

Quote from Miktan

Was the frets bad because of hard- or softwear…🤓

I use my old Fruit of the Looms to wipe down the neck so mine is from Under-Wear

I love to tweak tones so my mine are biased that way:

1) Use Rig Manager. It makes tweaking a breeze.

2) Create a collection of Cabs (IRs) in your Local Library in Rig Manager. There are 18000+ profiles for free on the Rig Exchange. Many people are not great at micing and mixing an amps sound. Cycling thru some CABs you have saved can sometimes make a bad profile sound good.

Each amp profiled will have certain frequencies pushed. So there is no One-Size-Fits-All CAB. You need a lot of them to find the one that resonates well with the amp.

3) In the AMP section, always tweak the Definition, Clarity, Sag, and Mix.

DEFINITION - Think of it like choosing what type of pickups you are using. HBs or single coils. Goes from a flubby bassy tone to a high range quack.

CLARITY - Think of this as making the amps gain area larger. If the profile gets into distortion too fast, add some clarity so you can play around in the in between regions before full gain.

SAG - Adding some amplifier power supply sag. For low gain sounds it reduces some crispness and adds body. For high gain it adds some low end thump you would get when your amp is on 10 and may make it muddy.

MIX - If you have a profile that sounds too compressed or dead, add some clean mix to it.

4) Tweak all tones using the thing you want to play them on. And make sure that thing is good. I mix on studio monitors, since I normally record at home. I would always tweak a sound then come back the next day and say "this sounds terrible". Turns out my amplifier was coloring the sound all throughout its volume. Tweak at volume setting 5 and it will sound bad on setting 7.

So nail down your monitoring situation. And then test it throughout its volume range. I think this is 75% of why people become unhappy with modeling/profiling devices and go back to tubes.

You are never asking a Marshall amp with a 1960 4x12 cab to sound exactly like a Fender Jensen 1x12. But we somehow expect a Kemper to sound like everything ever on garbage speakers. It wont. It will sound like garbage speakers no matter what you do. Get a good flat monitoring solution.

Pros tweak at high volumes on PA's since they play out. At home I use Studio monitors. Some people like headphones. Some get the Kemper speakers or other FRFR speaker systems.

Quote from V8guitar

Seriously, love the idea of how you are creating your own starting points and working with the Kemper on potentially unique sounds.

This is the whole point of the stuff I normally do on the Kemper. There are 1000's of great amp captures on the exchange. Why not try to give users some different options. I think you even said today, I may not use some of the extra features on the Kemper, but I want them.

To expand on making an IR:

The 1st step for this demo was to get the frequency response curve of a normal guitar speaker. Next I selected some frequencies where I felt the freq curve was changing. Then I drew this curve by clicking on the selected points of interest in the Goldwave Spectrum Filter graph area.

Now that I have the base response, I can tweak the tone by changing or adding points. This is where this becomes a useful tool that lets you tailor the response to your sound.

NOTE: To edit a point, just click on the point and drag it. Or you can select the point in the dialog text fields area and type in exact values.

TIPS: In Goldwave, you have different audio playing options. I always make one option a repeat. Clicking this option will play the selected audio clip numerous times (I pick 100). Once I have the IR created, I play the loop and Goldwave draws the max values it saw in the FFT spectrogram window.

You could also select any isolated guitar tracks you have and play them to see what the frequency response looks like on the recording. This works best with high gain stuff because the extra harmonics (from the gain) fill out the curve better. This would basically be Tone Matching. Get a curve, then draw that curve manually in the Spectrum Filter.

I recently profiled a very heavy distortion pedal all by itself. It is going for that swedish buzz saw sound and has ton of gain. The Kemper profiled it fine, but destroyed the profile when I refined it. There was something about the freq response that completely confused the Kemper so every time I played a chord the entire sound of the profile changed. Like I was using a wah pedal. I redid the profile and skipped the refine. Sounded fine.

Morphing the gain sounds like a good fit for your purpose.

I like to use the Compressor stomp. Start with the Soft default (3.0,2.5,0,85% mix) and roll the intensity up as needed. I usually start at 3.5 and go up to 5.5 max. It really starts to push things around 4.5. This will add some thumpy bass and roll some highs, so may not work for your application. Great for solos though. The stomp also has a level so you can punch up the gain like a pure boost in there also.

The compressor in the amp section can do some great work for this also.

Adding an EQ may be another good option. Since you could increase the level (pure boost, gain) and adjust the low frequency all at once.

Another subtle option for morphing is the AMP CLARITY. At the default of 0 the amp gets into distortion fast. So you could setup your sound with a higher clarity number like 2.5 then morph back to 0 for more gain/crunch.

The Kemper gives you so many options. Very good software implementation.

How is the modulation helping?

Quote from DonPetersen

Using a few bands of EQ doesn't really give you a whole lot of control, there are tools to create a IR by hand.

When you design the frequency curve in Goldwave, you do it using points. You can add/subtract points. I have not hit a limit on the number of points yet. For testing purposes I added 75 points and got tired of clicking

So you can draw any crazy curve you want.

The point was to show how easy it can be. There are probably lots of tools out there as you suggested. This is just one.

Quote from DonPetersen

this sound can also be achieved by the 'Character' parameter in the CABINET module:

I read the CHARACTER effect as increasing or smoothing peaks in the frequency response. You still need a response to begin with. That is where this post comes in. Creating a custom IR (freq resp).

The example I posted above was a from a graph I found on the web of a V30 speaker. I think the graph was created from a speaker in air (not in a cabinet) because the low end response is very low. There are no large peaks or dips in the response. In my mind, large peaks and dips (errors in the response) would be from cabinet resonances and microphone placement issues. That is why I wanted to try this method out. To get the desired freq response without the hassle of fighting mic positioning, cab resonance, EQ coloring, etc.

It is an attempt to get a more realistic response of what you would hear at the cabinet if the cabinet was very flat and you had perfect microphones , EQ, and placement. You could add more points to the curve to get resonances and suck outs if you want. I have not tried, because I am trying to do the opposite of that.

The other point is to get an IR that is EQ'd exactly how YOU would want it. Everyone has different tastes. And the Kemper only has 4 possible FX slots after the amp. So, tweaking the IR could free up a slot after the amp that would possibly be taken up by an EQ FX. I hear people on the forum always asking for more slots. This is one way you could free up a slot. But it will take some work and is not super easy. But it is incredibly fun for some of us.

I hear a lot of great tones on the Rig Exchange that are ruined by poor mic placements. There are large frequency suckouts here and there that make it sound like it is in a tunnel. This totally ruins the sound for me.

So you have three options:

- Adjust the Character as mentioned. This cant fix large problems. It can't add in the missing frequencies without modifying the overall response. So it is great for small changes, but not large suckouts/peaks.
- Use a different CAB/IR. Easiest fix. But every IR has its own sound. So you have to sort thru a lot to get the perfect tone.

- Build your own IR. You can use the method I outlined for greater control. Or use a tone matching program to basically do the same thing using some prerecorded material to create the freq resp for you.

I am not an expert in this field. I am just a guy who likes to spin the knobs and create some fun new things. And to me the Kemper is the most amazing device ever created for guitar. It allows us to have complete control of all aspects of a profile.