Hello all
Well because of Covid I decided to take a second journey and a slightly more expensive and extreme one.
After my initial journey I for some reason just could not settle on the JVM profiles as the sound I was looking for. There was still something inherently wrong with the sound that just did not inspire me. The JVM profiles sounded great too but not inspirational.
I unplugged my Kemper, put all the leads in the loft, I went a bit mad and decided to purchase my ideal rig and set it up as follows:
Guitar – Wah – Tuner – FreqOut – TwinCity A/B/Y
The ABY goes output A to GTOD – JCM800 – Two Notes Reload
The ABY goes output B to Silver Jubilee – Two Notes Captor 16
Set to Y it all goes into Cubase running Wall of Sound with JCM800 Left and Silver Jubilee Right.
Now this is the rig I have been trying to build with the Kemper but no matter which profiles I used it always sounded muddy, fizzy, and far too bass heavy under the initial sound. After recording it took a lot of EQ and compression to marry the sounds together. I fired up the JCM800 first, hit a power chord and holy crap there it was, the thump in the chest, the bounce off the strings, the feel was just amazing. Now I already owned the Silver Jubilee and to be honest I just did not warm to it as it was too thick sounding, but it was a sound I wanted to love.
I then fired them both up, panned left and right, and it was just immaculate, inspirational, and big, just huge. The bass heavy thick sound of the Jubilee was offset by the JCM800’s brightness. Not only that apart from a low end roll off the guitars required absolutely no eq.
The Kemper has been powered off for about 2 months now and I decided to fire it up again tonight and profile the JCM800. It sounded better than any of the commercial profiles I have purchased but it still had that muddy, thick bassy underbelly that I did not like. I then played some commercial profiles and due to listening to the real deal for a few months they sounded dreadful. I switched to the JCM and the smile was back on my face.
I do not view the Kemper in a negative light, I see it the same way as I don’t like Fender amps but I would never say they were bad, just not to my taste. For me the Kemper is not to my taste and after 5 years (I think) of ownership it has been on eBay (no offers but let’s face it who’s buying at the moment) and it will hopefully sell soon enough.
A big consideration I will say for anyone taking this route is, Jesus Christ the attenuators sound fizzy on their own! It is one thing the Kemper does well for silent recording but the Two Notes Captor and Reload with a 100watt amp being attenuated and listened too only in studio monitors are very audible.
As requested and as a thank you to all who have helped me over the years I will post up a Dropbox link tomorrow in the free section to the JVM profiles. I am interested in what other people think of them as I was very happy with them. From memory I profiled 92 settings across all channels and gain stages.
Anyway I hope you are all safe and doing well. If you have any questions about my set-up feel free to ask.
Mike