Posts by lonestargtr

Quote from arcraver

Isn't 72 Mars 1 2 is in the 2020 pack?

You are correct! I did include it in that pack. I forgot.

Quote from Stefan_01

Thanks Michael, much appreciated. In which packs are the 72 Mars 1 2 and Match C30 R5?

That is indeed the question. And after scouring my packs and such I've discovered that those two aren't in any of my packs. Those amps do appear in Pack 1 but those specific ones I made at a later date and since I had already included those amps with similar profiles I just never released them as they seemed redundant. I'll see what I can do... I know the Match C30 R3 is very similar to the R5, it's just a different C30 amp I was profiling. The 72 Mars I have profiled numerous times as it is my personal amp and I keep trying to beat what I've gotten.

Quote from Stefan_01

Hi Michael, I have a difficult question ?. Hope you can help me out. If you play only a Gibson Les Paul and have to use 5 Mbritt profiles to cover the whole spectrum of music from pop tot rock for a live gig. (Clean/Clean+/Chrunchy/Rhythm/Blues Lead/ Rock Lead/ Big solo). Which Mbritt profiles would be perfect for this? Thanks.

That is so hard to say. It's all personal taste after a point. For me, I like blackface type clean tones, mid-gain tones either a klon into a blackface or a matchless, and lead tones I like marshall type tones. That being said, lately I've been using the Grammatico SSS profiles for almost everything. I like the clean tones and the mid gain tones with pedals in front (lately I've been using the CS profiles). I also use one of my older Matchless C30 rigs for mid gain and my 72 Marshall for lead tones. In the past for clean tones I've used predominantly my 3rd Power Blackface cln or Morgan RCA35. These are just my starting points and then I tailor them for the songs we do. I create performances for each song, but I do keep one generic performance for when I just need a basic bank of sounds and that's typically what it has in it. Currently, I have the SSS MB4 in slot 1, SSS T1 in slot 2, Match C30 R5 in slot 3, SSS CS2 in slot 4, and 72 Mars 1 2 in slot 5. All have probably been slightly edited but that's what I use.

Quote from dmatthews

I hummed

I hawed

I watched twice

I caved

I'm impressed.

This might be my amp.

Display More

I know. I first went to try the amps out at Grammatico's place at the request of a mutual friend and when I left I was haunted by the amp. It really felt like after 40 years of playing guitar I finally heard and felt the tone I've always had in my head. It's not a high gain amp but for everything else, this amp just feels right.

Quote from Garrincha

Isn't that also the amp David Lindley used while he was with Jackson Browne? Browne himself used a different Dumble if I remember correctly, but I always thought Lindley used an SSS on "Running on empty".

I might be wrong though, it's probably 30 years since I've read that in a guitar magazine.

I do believe Lindsley and Jackson both had steel string singers. That’s where SRV first heard one I think, at Jackson’s studio. Not sure which s/n those were or which s/n this one was based on but it’s fantastic. I cannot imagine a real Dumble sounding much better.

Today I released my Grammatico SSS Pack on mbritt.com! Some of you who follow me on IG (recommend) will know that I've been gaga over this amp since I tried it out back in April. I couldn't get it out of my head so I ordered one and during that process spoke to John Grammatico about possibly doing a deal to split proceeds of the profiles with him so he can be a part of the success (if it has any). This is the result. The amp is based on the Dumble Steel String Singer made famous by the likes of SRV, Eric Johnson, and John Mayer (among others). As soon as I played through this amp I could see why. I must confess to becoming a little bit jaded about amps after playing through so many over the years and profiling a hundred more. Very few amps "wow" me anymore, which is kinda disappointing sometimes. This amp wowed me. It's not like any other amp that I've played. Even as good as the profiles came out, they still don't capture all of the overtones and nuance that the amp puts out. But the profiles do sound fantastic and I immediately put them into rotation in our live shows and haven't looked back. If you want a unique clean to edge of breakup tone (and even some lead tones) this amp pack should be on your list. It has a healthy low end without being flubby. It has a crisp top end without being ice picky. It has lots of mids without sounding boxy. Even though it's clean, it sustains like a gain amp. I can totally see why SRV used this amp. Check out the sound samples in the video below: Thanks!

fantastic playing! this is awesome!

Quote from rik777

whippinpost91850 where can I find that magic cab? Thanks.

The magic cab is a CAB preset in my 2020 Pack.

My apologies if I wasn't clear in my original post. I'm not trying to mislead anyone and never meant to imply that I was going to be selling the rigs I've been making for my live performances. My exercise in the experimentation was merely a "what if" that happened to work in my situation. I know how merged profiles are supposed to be made and have made plenty. I've also swapped cabs on studio profiles a ton. I am always looking for ways to fine tune things that I have or can create better tones to use in my live performances, from incorporating real drive pedals to swapping cabs, etc. I may have made the mistake in saying "merged rigs" (for lack of a longer, convoluted explanation) in my initial post, which wasn't really the whole point I was trying to make. I'm not making true merged rigs to sell, rather, I have been experimenting a lot and hit the "merge cab" button using direct profiles and my favorite cab block. To be clear, I've tried everything the "right" way and still looking for something more so I was just trying something I wouldn't normally do. I did get defensive when told that doing such things will "only lead to wrong results" when my ears tell me something entirely the opposite. And again, not recommending this method or even explaining why it works. I am just always looking for ways to make what I already have sound better. And like I said, it will have to stand up to rigorous stage testing too, which I haven't gotten to yet. "Nonsense" was just referring to feeling like I was having to defend my post on a Kemper subject when I clearly had many other things on my mind yesterday (son's graduation) which take precedence over the minutiae of semantics around kemper profiling. My apologies. I think the primary point of my post is just to give a "what I've been up to" in response to releasing new packs.

Quote from Ibot39

Saving a IR / cab to a direct profile ONLY does lead to bad results, when the cab part is not fitting the amp part - pretty obvious.

Not trying to be argumentative, and not trying to perpetuate this nonsense, but this sentence is way too judgmental without knowing what it sounds like to me. I am not trying to recreate something that exists in the real world, but trying to innovate a little and create a sound that yes, may or may not add some characteristics of a profiled amp to another amp's direct profile. The end result does not ONLY lead to bad results, as I am attesting. You may not want or like it, but it works, nonetheless. So no, not obvious.

Quote from Jemjulio

I assume this the equivalent of the Magic Cab I.R in the HX stomp presets?

yes... similar if not the same

Quote from Ibot39

Don't get me wrong - if something sounds good, it is good. And I really like your profiles, bought most of them already.

But people still think sellers of profiles have all the knowledge about the Kemper - at least know the basics.

If you don't figured out the concept of (real!) merged profiles, what cab driver is doing, ... you should really catch up. It is worth to understand it.

When you make studio profiles and tailor your tone with your mics until you like it. Now when you take this cab, of course it is not predictable how it will sound with a direct amp profile of another amp (or the same amp with different settings). Cab driver just estimates where the amp part ends and the cab starts. If you just copy that to another direct amp profile you are copying a cab that may still include a different flavour of power amp, is missing the deep resonance from the original because you balanced it with mics and now it sounds thin, ...

Hitting the merged button in this case just is another random element and is definitely not intended for this scenario. We are now far away from anything "authentic" or capturing the real thing. Really!

THAT is exactly why Kemper developed the real (!) merge procedure. That works and gives authentic results, when done right as written above.

If you just want to copy IR to direct amp profiles and don't want to rely on luck or try and error to get authentic results, you have to capture those IR in a different way. (Hitting merge button still is not a solution at all). So it is possible to do direct amp profiles + IR / cab that sounds good and (almost) authentic, but it requires a quite different approach (for both parts) than doing studio profiles.

Display More

Thanks for the condescending tone. I have made plenty of merged profiles the "right" way and wasn't knocked out by them. Perhaps I'm just an idiot, like you imply. I never said, "do it this way". I just said I did it this way and I like it. As far as your opinion of how I get the tones I like for myself, I kinda don't care, but I do get offended when you imply that I'm stupid for not knowing better. Please move on.

Quote from rik777

Congratulations on your son's graduation. Sorry to hear about your singer leaving the band. That's always a pain in the butt.

lonestargtr what is the Magic Cab?? Never heard of this.

Thanks. It was a cab preset I included in the 2020 pack. There was a time a while back when I was trying to figure out why some profiles sounded bigger and different from others, so I started experimenting with swapping cabs to try to "fix" some profiles that I wasn't as big a fan of because they sounded cloudy or muffled. I found that sometimes swapping the cabs fixed them. In my experimentation I found a cab from one of my most-used live profiles and just started adding it to other presets that I didn't like as much. Most of the time I felt it improved them, so I just saved the cab as "magic cab" as a preset so I could get to it quicker. I had actually saved a few different ones, but this one in particular got more use. It's strictly a personal taste thing, but I like it.

Quote from Ibot39

It is ONLY a merged profile (by Kemper definition) if you make a studio profile first. Then make direct amp profile with the same cab connected to the amp and don't change any settings. Then you load the studio profile and copy THIS cab (no other cab or IR, only this). Next you load the direct amp profile and paste this exact cab. Now you hit the merge button and saved it as a merged profile.

No cabdriver algorithmn at work now, but a clean separation between the direct amp and the cab from the corresponding (!) studio profile.

Everything else simply is not a merged profile! Hitting the merge button with any / another cab will lead to completely wrong results! If you just copy an IR or another Kemper cab to a direct amp profile you just should save it (not hitting merge button in this case). But again, just copying random cabs to random direct amp profiles is NOT merged profiles! And would be (unintentionally) misleading buyers.

That seems to be a pretty strict definition of a Merged profile and I'm not attempting to sell any such profiles, anyway. And as for completely wrong results... I respectfully beg to differ. And just saving a cab to a direct profile does not sound good. It works fine for doing that with studio profiles, but just adding a cab to a direct profile, at least the way I've been doing it the last few days, just sounds wrong.

I'm not saying that this is the recommended way of doing things, nor am I saying that the manual is wrong (of course it's not). I'm just saying that I am getting great results for myself by doing this. It was an experiment to see if it worked and for me, it did. I do not know everything there is to know about the cabdriver algorithm, but there is absolutely no way that the direct amp profile "knows" what cab is being added to it, be it from the studio profile or another studio profile.

Quote from Ibot39

I don't know if I got it right. That's why I am asking. With "merged", you mean combining a (new) direct amp profile with your favourite Kemper cab? In this case it is definitely not a merged profile. Or maybe I don't understand?

In my understanding, any time you do a direct amp profile and "merge" it with a cab it is a merged profile. In the past, I've done them alongside the studio profile of the same amp and I wasn't as crazy about those. The merging process can only happen with a direct amp profile. When you add a cab to it, you hit the "merge cab" button, thus creating the merged profile. As I use one of 2 cabs most of the time, most of my cabs have a certain similarity but the amp in a studio profile does affect the cab portion of the studio profile. As such, I've created thousands of cabs even though it's probably only 1-2 cabs. The magic cab is simply one of those that I find works with most profiles. That is not to say that any IR would work as well with direct amp profiles. It would probably take a lot of trial and error til finding what you like, but so many options are out there these days.

Quote from Ni6htWalker

lonestargtr when are you going to release new amps packs?

That is a good question indeed. I assure you all I have been working. I can't keep up with ToneJunkie's pace. I'm not sure if it's because I'm older or my kids are older or just the current state of the industry. Lonestar's original singer left (again) in February so that began about a month of finding a replacement, rehearsing, doing a couple of shows, and then we were off again for two months. My son is graduating high school today (a valedictorian, no thanks to me) so there's just a ton of stuff going on at home.

I have also been on a bit of a tone search as well. I'm always looking for unique amps that I haven't profiled yet and have found a handful and profiled them. It's getting harder to find things that are different enough from what I've already done to make it worth the process of buying/selling and the time and cost that entails. Gear, especially amps, seem to be moving much slower nowadays.

Last year, right as everything was shutting down, I converted my live rig from the toaster with some pedals in the fx loop to a pedalboard setup with the same pedals but with the Stage unit. This was just before the Kemper Drives came out and I just thought that the real overdrive pedals added a "girth" to the sound, not so much a tonal difference from the Kemper Drives. Perhaps it's just a slight volume bump with the real pedals, but I'm not sure. Also, I used a handful of different amp profiles but ended up using the same CAB section for all of them (magic cab) to keep the bottom end from shifting too much from rig to rig. The magic cab has a big bottom so anything not on magic cab seems to lose low end. All this to say that I've been experimenting at home the last few days with some new profiles of my favorite amps and making some merged rigs to try out in the upcoming shows. I won't know if it's a total success until I get hear them in a band mix, but I've actually been really excited about some of these new rigs. In the past I've not been as fond of the merged rigs but I wasn't merging them with a "favorite" cab, just whatever I was profiling with that day. The results then didn't sound different enough and there was something "detached" sounding whereas the studio rigs sounded smooth and "together" (perhaps purely in my head?). But since I was swapping the CAB anyway, I thought I'd try it and I'm currently enjoying the results.

What's the difference? Well, to me, it's a "bigness" to the note. Single notes don't sound as compressed and overall, it just sounds bigger than it's studio counterpart. And I've profiled so many times using the same mics/cabs/etc and some days just sound better than others. Using magic cab preset has just been working for me and has a tonality that I find pleasing. The low end can be a bit much with some profiles, but nothing I can't tweak around.

*Keep in mind, this is all just my journey to create rigs/performances for our live shows coming up. If I'm just recording, for instance, I have no problem using the stock studio profiles. When recording, it's all about finding the tone that fits in the track. For live shows, especially when switching from clean to dirty rigs, everything needs to sit in the same ballpark tonally, and keeping the cab the same definitely helps. And many times in our show, it's just guitar/bass/drums so my guitar needs to fill a bit of space. Other times, there is a piano with a healthy bottom, but I still need to fill that up when he stops. It's just finding the right tool for the job.

I will probably release some new packs in the near future, but really want to do some road testing and I have more work to do on some others. Thanks for your patience!

great playing! Thanks for sharing

Quote from Kaschko

Hi everyone,

Is there actually a forum verdict on which Kemper Kone speaker imprint comes closest to Britt's CL80 cab?

Sorry if it's already mentioned in this thread... but it's 158 pages long....

Thanks!

Display More

I'm not sure how "close" they are but my favorite imprints are the JBL D120F, Celestion G12-100, and G12M Creamback.

Thanks for all the input on the video. I knew when I put it up that it was probably going to be picked apart, so that part is to be expected. As far as the comparison clips, I think there is more difference in the actual playing, than there is in the actual amp vs. kemper. For instance, when I play the Marshall, I tried to play the same thing over and over knowing that I was going to be switching back and forth. Just depending on where I switched the solo buttons, there may be differences but I think those are more based upon how hard I hit the strings etc. Also, for the split second it's switching, there is a crossfade/summing that accentuates the difference, but after a second, those differences disappear. Also, I didn't adjust for the 3-4ms of latency of the Kemper on the two recordings so some of the initial tone shift could be that as well. I notice the difference more when switching from real amp to Kemper than from Kemper to real amp, so that's what makes me think some of it is the latency playing tricks right upon switching.

On my monitors I certainly don't think any of them sound like different amps altogether. If I used either of those on a recording, I would dare people to tell me if they could tell me which one it was without switching back and forth quickly.

But again, that's just my opinion and everyone is entitled to their own. The private joke about "secrets" is that I've often told anyone who will listen that I have no secrets. Could I have refined longer? Perhaps. I have also refined too much and it sounds more muffled to my ears. I wanted more than anything to de-mystify what I do. Yes, there is some tech involved, but in the end, it's a bit like cooking. Everyone around the world uses the same basic ingredients, it's just how they're all put together that makes it taste (or sound, in this case) differently.

Some people are going to think they sound close enough to perfect and others will hear a difference. I don't hear that drastic a difference, personally. I did a test comparison before I shot that video and I almost used this clip in the long video but I didn't have a shot of me recording it because I was just testing the audio and screen recording at the time. I used the same profile and amp but it's just a different actual performance and it again, sounds pretty near identical to me. But, again, just my opinion.

If you have 20 minutes to kill...