Hello all
This is going to be a fairly long post but I am hoping that for those struggling with the quality of the Kemper or disenfranchised after a prolonged period of ownership or even feeling the draw for some tubey goodness it will aid in some way. It has been a frustrating, fun and almost extremely regrettable month of product testing and I thought I would share my story in the hope it helps somebody.
Please be mindful that this is not a slight on Kemper, any individual or product provider but is my personal experience and nothing more.
Background
I have owned the powered rack version of the Kemper since October 2017 and I have used this at least 3 times a week since purchase. It was to be used in my home studio and live replacing my Marshall JVM410h which, whilst a fantastic amp, was heating the room to almost tropical temperatures and back breaking when trying to negotiate stairs.
Additional to this I have owned modelers for most of my guitar playing days. I was never a tube snob or even a tube owner, that was until I bought my first tube amp almost 15 years into playing. I am familiar with modelers from all manufactures apart from the Axe as during researching the latest and greatest the Axe forum was littered with arrogance individuals, bullying and 1984 style post editing so I was not at all interested. With something as complex as a modeler you need a good community around you and coming from the JVM forums that is what I am used too.
Plugging in for the first time
I remember pulling the trigger on a powered Kemper, foot pedal and DXR10, nearly £3000 of equipment. I was nervous it would be another Line6 or Boss “this is amazing” moment to only find the honeymoon period left as quickly as it began. It arrived, plugged it in and the JVM quickly became a part of my amp history especially when I first took the Kemper to rehearsal, the weight difference was huge and the lack of feedback and control over my sound was just outstanding.
How I use the Kemper
In the studio I reamp a lot of my guitars to allow me to get ideas down quickly, keep the inspiration and edit my guitar parts later to tighten up the performance. I use a host of Choptones and Deadlight profiles when recording and mainly Marshall profiles.
Live and in rehearsal I ran the Kemper through a 4x12 GT-75 loaded Marshall stack. I used Choptones JCM800ZW DI profiles exclusively live.
Why are we here?
Well I have loved my affair with the Kemper, about two or three months ago I started to become very unhappy with the product. Why you may ask? Well there are a few factors:
- Due to the increased popularity of the Kemper over my 4 years of ownership I have noticed a LOT of new features and an almost “spoilt brat” attitude towards these requests. Some of these requests look to be taking the product down a road of complexity I did not want to be a part off, and the simplicity of the product was becoming an obsolete concept.
- With that in mind I noticed a host of updates being produced that appear to be unfinished which in my mind was moving away from the old “you will get it when it works” to an almost pandering to the masses approach and releasing things too early. The Kemper is becoming like other products on the market, when you have an issue you have to scroll through a vast array of parameters attempting to find a solution, an hour passes and you have lost inspiration. I used to always say that if the Kemper sounds bad its you, and it always was, now that is not the case and I started to miss the simplicity of an amp.
- The sound quality has changed and before anyone states that subjective, I do understand that is the case. So to ensure I wasn’t having a moment I reverted back to a few old recordings and as I have used the same profiles since I purchased the product it was easy to cross reference. After doing some cross comparison I found the profiles I used 4 years ago had more body, the same profiles in the current software version sounded fizzy and undefined when in a mix. I had to cut a host of frequencies to remove the underlying fizzy sound.
- I never wanted to say anything too negative about the product as most is subjective, but I am going to have to point out one area that is truly dreadful in my experience. Rig Manager has to be the most unintuitive and buggy software controller I have every experienced. Hark back to the days before the editor section was added this thing was stable, never crashed and was the center of my recording world. Come to today with its built-in editor and the slew of updates that appear and it loses communication every x amount of changes, constantly warns of corrupt profiles, does not save performances so you loss your work and has absolutely no intuitive folder management features (cant drag a folder to a new location etc.). Multiple factory resets later and it just continues to happen again and again.
I understand that this is not the same experience for everyone but I came to the conclusion that the product is no longer suited to my personal needs and been developed to a point it is more of a distraction than anything else.
So what’s the new world?
After posing some questions on the forum and through some research I decided to satisfy my curiosity. I own a Marshall Silver Jubilee so I purchased a Torpedo Reload which would allow me to crank the Marshall and record at low volume. This would be used in conjunction with the Wall of Sound IR product from Two Notes for speaker emulation.
How did this compare to the Kemper?
Night and day! The sound was in your face, raw and more than anything I could feel the bounce from the strings and that tube amp\player relationship that I could never get from the Kemper. This was such a positive experience that I purchased a JVM too and started to record with that and WOW that was an experience. I started my search for an AFD100 and a JCM800 2203.
Then I noticed something I had not considered. Where the hell in my small studio can I store all these amps, I had cables all over the room, the heat increased, and the mess was awful with pedals under my feet. Not really considered how much the Kemper kept my space tidy……but its about sound quality not aesthetics I told myself.
Hello eBay!
So I had two weeks to decide if I wanted to keep the Reload, after 7 days I put my Kemper on eBay and set myself up in the new yet old world of recording. I was so committed it was out of my rack and in its original box ready to be shipped.
I spent the next few days getting my studio set up and tailoring my sounds with my new amps. I decided as I was 13 days into a 14 day return policy of the Reload I would test again to ensure I wasn’t making a mistake.
Is the new\old world that good?
Before the return period expired I record sections of a new song with the Silver Jubilee, JVM and then the Kemper and I was still adamant that there was such a tone difference that I had made the right decision. The JVM and Jubilee required zero EQ to sit in the outside of a LPF but the Kemper just needed so much EQ work to make space and remove the fizz. Then in the back of my mind I remember reading a lot about how people did not like MBritt profilers but the people defending said they are better at volume and for recording as that’s when they come alive.
Taking the advice of people with more experience than myself I loaded up every MBritt Marshall profile and completed a recording, leveled them out and bam! It was still terrible, no definition, too much bass and not cutting through the mix but not fizzy (this is personal taste and not a slight on Michaels good work). Now there is one thing I personally love about MBritt profiles that I feel sets him apart from other profilers and that is the lack of boost pedals in his profiles. His amp profiles sound like an amp, react like an amp and a host of other profilers seem to think the more gain added, the more boosting they put in front the more it will sound great but to me the more you boost the less of the actual amp I am hearing.
So whilst I was disappointed I was not defeated so I cracked open my OwnHammer IRs, added my trusty Marshall 4x12 to MBritts JCM800 and Silver Jubilee profiles and the thing sprung to life. Next to the JVM recordings it sounded fuller, less cutting through the mix but the difference in sound was more personal preference than quality. The more I recorded the more I really liked the MBritt profiles.
