Posts by clschroeder

Hello!

I'm thinking about doing a custom guitar build and would love some input on pickup selection.

I have always loved the look and feel of telecasters, but have never really been a fan of the 'twangy' tone you get from them.
I know there are a lot of factors that go into the physics system that is a guitar - wood, hardware, electronics, etc.

The body I am lookin at is a 1 piece mahogany w/ a maple cap. I'm thinking of pairing this with an Indian Rosewood Neck.
Unsure of what to do for the nut or fret wire at the moment - still deciding.
For the bridge - I was going to do one with individual saddles - not the typical 3 saddle fender bridge.

With the above mentioned options - I think it should sound quite a bit different from your standard Tele.
But I'm curious as to what I should do for the pickups.
This is going to have the standard two single coil routes.

Looking for something rich/full/warm - not bright/chimey/twangy.
Would love to hear if any of you have recommendations.

I recently purchased some commercial profiles (review of these in the commercial profile forum, if you are curious).
Last night I deleted all of the stock profiles and loaded in the new profiles I purchased.

My question is 2 part -

A) How would I go about renaming the profiles - I assume (hope) this is done in the Rig Manager software?
I would rather name the amps what their actual names are - not the pseudo name (that I assume is used for legality).

B) How do you organize your profiles?
Do you label them by amp, by style, by song, etc?
I know there are probably not any 'best practices' - just curious how everyone else has their Kemper set up.
Who knows... You might have a cool setup, and I might want to also have a cool setup

Quote from FreakOfNature

Nice review! Just out of curiosity can you give details about your rig? Are you using them primarily for recording or are you using them live as well? Guitar Cab or FRFR?

I bought the Kemper for my home studio - its the unpowered rack version.
So right now, I'm not using any cabinets or anything like that. Its going straight into my DAW for recording.

I tested all of these sounds out with my ESP Eclipse (LP-Style (Maple on Mahogany, with a Maple Neck, Ebony Fretboard, and loaded with active EMGs)).
Ran the Kemper directly into my Apogee Duet and tracked in Logic Pro X.

Obviously the speaker / cab setup will add some kind of coloration to the tone, so I can't speak to how these will perform live.
If they are anything near the recorded tone, I would be a happy camper.

Is that something that a lot of people run into - the profile used for recording not translating well into a live setting? I'm pretty new to Kemper.

Quote from patrick2099

Chop Tones is one of the vendors I definitely haven't given a fair chance to. Maybe next time he's running a sale, I'll grab a couple.

Grab some - you wont regret it. And again, their 'Essentials' packs are the price of a decent fast food cheeseburger...
Its nice to not break the bank over getting some really high end profiles.

Quote from Eltzejupp

The carvin vai pack

That is probably one of the only packs that I didn't demo.
I have an immense amount of respect for Vai, but I've never been a huge fan of his tone.
But - this is just my personal taste.
Maybe I'll give the demo a listen.

I've had my Kemper now for ~2 weeks.
Most of this honeymoon has been spent digging through the Rig Exchange to find the perfect tone.
I was able to find a handful of really great rigs for free, and even made a few decent recordings with them - but honestly, none of these profiles really hit the spot for me.

I have done a lot of research over the past week on commercial rigs.
I demo'd most of the free rigs from the popular names that you hear about in the forums - some of them were good, some not.
One of the names that had a couple really nice profiles was ChopTones - so I decided to check out their site and see what else they had to offer.

To give a little back story - I primarily play heavier music, so finding a good high gain amp has been a priority for me.
I do occasionally dabble with some more mellow / ambient writing, so having a nice clean tone would be a 'nice to have'.

After listening to a bunch of their demo tracks / videos, I decided to pick up the following profiles:

Mesa Boogie - IIC+
Mesa Boogie - Mk IV
Mesa Boogie - Mk V
Mesa Boogie - Dual Rectifier
Fender - Bassman
Fender - Twin

On the above list, I have only owned the Dual Rectifier, and have played through the Fenders in person.
The rest of the amps, are ones that I've heard of, or seen, but never had a chance to play.
With that said, I would not be able to give a side-by-side comparison and comment on the accuracy of these profiles.
However, I am happy to report that I am blown away by the quality of these profiles.

I purchased the 'Essentials' pack for each of the amps mentioned above.
These packs come with ~10 profiles capturing a variety of characteristics of the amp (for roughly $11 USD per pack).
They do offer much larger packs (for more money), however I didn't feel it necessary to have more profiles of the same amp (for my use).

Out of all of the profiles, the amps that really have the spotlight in my opinion are the IIC+, the Mk V, and the Bassman.
Both the IIC+ and the Mk V can hit the entire spectrum from clean to heavy.
The Bassman with a touch of reverb and delay is just beautiful.

I would highly recommend ChopTones to anyone looking for really high quality profiles for their Kemper.
I will certainly be buying from them again - thinking about picking up their Engl profiles next!

I just wanted to share my experience with anyone who has been on the fence.
Would also love to hear your experience, or any profiles from their collection that you'd recommend.

Look for something with spdif.

You'll see a few posts down on the forum where I have a thread about reamping.
I use the Apogee Duet - which is a fantastic interface if you don't need many ins/outs - it has phenomenal converters and decent pres built in.
The problem is that it doesn't have spdif connections. Now - this isn't a deal breaker, but routing signal flow in their software has proven far from easy - in fact, I still haven't figured out how to use this for reamping yet.

Anything larger than the 2in/2out mini interface craze should support what you are trying to do.
Consider how you want to record - do you want just the final tone, or do you plan on rigging up some effects and want your tracks separated out to make life easy when it comes to mixing?

Apogee, Universal Audio, and RME would be companies I would pay attention to.
They will all have fantastic interfaces.

I appreciate the reply - any info you can share would be appreciated.
Using the Duet for this isnt as easy as I thought it would be.

I'm definitely going to be looking at a more robust interface in the future - unfortunately, I spent all of my lunch money on the Kemper (and I don't regret it)
Would love to find a solution in the meantime.

Giving this a quick bump, if that is acceptable.
Hoping someone here has experience reamping with the Apogee Duet.

I've played around a bit more, and I think the issue is possibly with the routing of the output signal.
I have been unable to find a place in the Maestro software to specify the main monitor outs as being output 1 or output 2.

Did some searching on the forum last night and it looked like someone has faced a similar issue in the past, resolved it, but was unable to speak to the solution.
So unfortunately that didn't provide much help for the issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all for the input!

I dug into the Rig Manager today and found some great tones.
Thanks for the Sinmix suggestion - I found a nice 6505 tone that worked out well for one of my tracks.

In other news - I think I'm addicted to the Kemper.

Hey guys!

Just got my Kemper this past week, and I've been dying to freshen up the tones on some of my recordings!
These were all made using various plugins (mostly LePou with a handful of impulse responses). These didn't sound terrible, but I'm going to bet the Kemper can do better.

So..
I watched a few YouTube tutorials this morning, but I can't seem to get this working.
Hoping someone can help me get this straightened out.

This is what I've got setup so far:

Kemper Output
Left Main XLR Out on Kemper to XLR Input 1 on Duet.
I set the Kemper's Main Output to 'Master Mono'.
The volume on the master out is a decent audible level.

Kemper Input
1/4" Left Out on Duet to 1/4" Return Input on Kemper.
I set the Kemper's Input Source to 'Return Input Reamp'.
The output volume on the Duet is a decent audible level.

Logic Setup
Track One: This has my direct recorded guitar - output is set to 'Output 1'.
Track Two: This is enabled for recording, and is set to Input 1.

Now.. I don't think audio is making it out to the Kemper.
I can hear the audio from Track 1, but when recording, nothing is captured on Track 2.

If I try to record straight from the Kemper, without the reamp setup - I can record just fine.
So... Trying to figure out how to get audio from Logic, into the Kemper, and back into Logic again.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hello!

I recently purchased my 'forever' amp - of course, I'm talking about the Kemper!
I've spent the last 2 days playing around with the stock rigs and have been pretty blown away with what you get 'out of the box'.

Last night I decided to download the Rig Manager to explore some new tones. Honestly, it was a bit overwhelming - over 13,000 rigs - where do you start?!

I'm reaching out on the forums to see if anyone could offer some recommendations to help me find some specific tones.
I understand that there are a lot of variables that come into play with achieving a specific tone - I'm simply looking for a good starting point.

Below are some songs that really capture some of the sounds I am looking for in the spectrum of clean to heavy.
I've included a YouTube link (hopefully that is cool) should any of you be curious and interested in helping.
Note - I am not opposed to purchasing commercial rigs.

Cleaner Sounds
Opeth - Windowpane - YouTube (this clean tone is gorgeous)
Plini - Every Piece Matters - YouTube (intro and lead)
Tesseract - Of Matter - YouTube (spacey intro lead part)

Heavier Sounds
Parkway Drive - Dark Days - YouTube
Northlane - Dispossession - YouTube
Shokran - Pray the Martyr - YouTube (both clean and heavy stuff)

Again, not trying to be spoon fed - just looking for some suggestions if you all have any.
Thanks for your time!

EDIT:
I did some research, and found that most of the above are running Mesa Dual Rec or Peavy 6505s for the heavy stuff.
There were also some search results that mentioned Framus Cobra, Diezel Herbert, Marshall Bluesbeaker, Mesa Mark V.
Would love to hear if any of you have good Mesa / Peavy profiles you'd recommend.
Thanks