Posts by alerich

Quote from Ruefus

Alex Lifeson owns one of the most gigantic one-guitar sounds ever.

Alex had the luxury of playing with one of the most prolific bass players on the planet.

That would be my advice to the OP. It's a mixture of creating a bigger sound stage but also the bass player stepping up to the plate. ZZ Top is another great example. Dusty Hill may not have been Geddy Lee but his playing was a lot more ferocious that you might think if you really listen. He understood his role in the band. Also, it's one thing to play in a three piece band from the start and entirely another thing to play is a four piece band that suddenly becomes a three piece. You don't miss something that was never there.

Quote from V8guitar

The Kemper has killed my amp GAS

Boy, it stopped mine dead in its tracks. They began gathering dust literally the evening I got my Kemper. I waited a few months so get out of the 'honeymoon phase' (which has never ended, by the way) and proceeded to sell off most of my amps. Still have a mountain of pedals but those are a bigger pain to sell. May dump them as a lot.

Of course, I then went on a guitar buying spree. Every sword cuts in both directions, I suppose.

Quote from RosboneMako

I was talking to a buddy and we were reminiscing about when we started out, were broke, and had no gear. Where was this stuff then? Kids these days , they have it so easy

We do indeed live in an era of plentiful inexpensive guitars of very good quality but there's also the flip side of the good old days (before the 'vintage' guitar craze started). My first guitar was some awful JC Penney thing. My first 'good' guitar was a 1966 sunburst Gibson Melody Maker with one single coil bridge pickup. I bought that guitar and a very clean Silverface Fender Champ for $150 in the summer of 1980. Adjusted for inflation that's about $600 or so in 2023 dollars.

Quote from BayouTexan

I do believe I will enjoy LP, but I lowered my hopes hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

I think HW captured the essence of Liquid Profiling when he said it would be a 'game changer for authenticity'. Granted, everything for HW is a game changer until the next game changer comes along but that statement captured it. It will allow the tone controls to respond more like the amp's actual controls. This can be very useful if you are into an amp like the Vox AC30 with its Cut control. Having something like that for your AC30 profiles is a big deal. Amps with peculiar controls that can be mimiced by tone stack modeling will be very handy. If you're more of a Marshall / Soldano / Friedman guy (like me) with their more or less conventional tone stacks I think it's less of a big deal. As they stated, the Marshall tone stack is not very effective in the first place. Having something that mimics it is not a game changer. If you are an amp tone control jockey you're probably going to like this.

Quote from Ruefus

There is an argument to *not* turn the unit on and off ChatGPT completely ignored and its called thermal cycling.

The process of a device moving through hot (on) and cold states (off), is one of the biggest areas that causes failure in electronics. This is one reason why servers can (and do) run 24/7 with no issues. Even if they're not currently active.

I leave my desktop PC running 24/7 (on a UPS) with an occasional restart or reboot to allow Windows to do a little housekeeping. When I power up my Kemper for the day I leave it on all day and power it down when I go to bed. If I gigged with the Kemper it would be on a UPS.

I never really thought about this since I play so loud. I did a little test with the remote footswitches versus various other foot pedal switches that I have available. The Kemper footswitches seem to be similar in noise level. I can see how that might be an issue in a quiet environment. Your remote foot switches are probably operating normally. Please do not spray WD40 into the switches or get it near any sort of electronics or musical equipment.

Quote from Kahuna59

I've never heard of a tune-o-matic collapsing. Is that a thing? Must have taken some heavy hits.

It's a somewhat common occurrence on guitars with a sharper neck angle and the tailpiece set really low or flush with the body. I've read about it for years but this is the first one I have actually seen. The pic is not of my bridges, just an example of the phenomenon.

Quote from V8guitar

..and is it as good as you remember?

Oh, yeah. I think I traded it away when I went back to playing Les Pauls. It had a recent refret. We put on a new nut, pickups (JB/Jazz), pickup rings, switch, pull-pull volume pots, no load tone pot and a new bridge (original had collapsed). It's like brand new.

Not my newest guitar but far and away my favorite. I bought this 1984 Ferrari Red Gibson Explorer new in May 1984. I played it about six years and traded it away. Over the years I really regretted doing so. Thirty one years later it showed up for service in a guitar shop in the town I lived in back then. The shop owner texted me about it and I asked about buying it back. The owner agreed to sell and got my old friend back.

Very nice!

I would give the factory profiles a thorough test drive first and see if any sound like they are what you are looking for. Maybe download a few profiles of amps that interest you from the Rig Exchange. Also don't forget the Legends packs in the download area. I never found many factory or free profiles I liked but your tastes may be different.

I have purchased dozens of profile packs from a bunch of commercial profilers. Even that can be like playing roulette. Most of them were demoed and deleted. The only profiles I really use are MBritt. I'm a high gain type of guy. If I had to stop using his Crank N Go pack I would just sell my Kemper.

Quote from Nikos

And before I forget..

All the guys saying "I don't need this".

Yeah ok. We will see.

1. Profile through RM. Handy but I don't make profiles often. I don't need this.
2. Profile Marketplace in RM. I don't need this.
3. Android Support. Even though I am an Android guy and this has been a long time coming and will be useful to many I don't need this.
4. USB Audio. Another feature long overdue that will help many but I don't need this.
5. Liquid Profiling (accurate tone stack with EQ and gain staging). On the surface this sounds like more of that "amp in the room" voodoo to me. The Kemper in its current form meets or exceeds all of my needs as a guitarist. The last big game changer was the Kemper Kone, Kemper Kabinet(s) and speaker imprints. A wonderful feature that... (wait for it) I had no use for.

Quote from dderose

Would you all agree that the Kemper Power Cab produces the best sound compared to the other FRFRs and PAs out there?

I don't think we all agree on much of anything.

Quote from HowardBrown

I went with a pair of the Yamaha CBR10 passive speakers, they should arrive sometime tomorrow.

Those look like a good choice. I have never been disappointed with Yamaha gear. I would wager that a set of those with a powered Kemper will yield very similar results to running the monitor out to a set of DXR10s like I do. I was very surprised at how well a 10" 2 way monitor performs in this application. Good luck and I hope it turns out well for you.

Quote from lbieber

Truth is that I spend ~80% of my time playing electric unplugged. I concentrate on the instrument.

I don't do that much day to day but I always do that when I am checking out a new guitar. I like to sit with it unplugged and get a sense of how it plays and feels without an amp distracting me. It bugs the crap out of me when a salesman walks up and says "You can plug that in if you want" like I hadn't already figured that out.

I'm gonna go with the folks who have said that the Kemper may not be a great choice for the OP. He has already put substantially more legwork into this than I would have early on. I traded my Boogie JP-2C for a Kemper powered toaster, remote and bag about four years ago. Tried it with the factory profiles through a 4x12 guitar cab and said "Well, I can get my money back out of it". Went online and bought a few commercial profile packs (MBritt) and said "This has potential". Bought a Yamaha DXR10 and I was hooked. Bought another DXR10 a week later to provide a wider sound sound stage (I was used to a Soldano Hot Rod 50 and two Soldano 4x12 cabs) and four years later the honeymoon continues.

No one piece of gear is right for everyone. It may be time to move on. I am in awe of your tenacity with this. It far exceeds anything I am capable of.

Quote from stormhenge

For the record: Fender would have a great case that the designs for nearly every high gain amp ever built was stolen from them.

Actually, they wouldn't. Leo started out just copying generic amp designs from RCA, GE and Western Electric. He had to license certain aspects of his circuits from AT&T. Look at a tube chart from one of his early amps. You'll see the licensing notices printed on them. Marshall's early amps were copies of Fender amps that were difficult to get and pricey in England. If Leo could have sued Jim Marshall he would have but he didn't own the circuit designs in the first place.

Quote from Ruefus

What stops people from uploading paid profiles now? How would a performance be any different?

It’s ALL subjective. The idea is to provide some tools to cull it down.

The banner at the top of the Rig Exchange mentions 'your own creations' or 'your own rigs' three different places. I thought that the implication was pretty self explanatory. I haven't tried uploading profiles that I did not create myself so I don't really know if there are any safeguards against it nor am I about to test it.

It is all subjective. On paper it's a great idea until you try to quantify how input from one anonymous group of Kemper users on one side of the room is somehow more relevant than input from another anonymous group of Kemper users on the other side of the room. I just fail to see how adding more purely subjective tools helps un-muddy the water.

Quote from Ruefus

I also think a Performance Exchange would be welcome. Then you could get both song and artist specific choices.

That would be fun but there's a catch. They could only be assembled from free user profiles. That would be difficult to police. I don't see a performance exchange coming to a venue near you any time soon.

I've read through this thread but I don't think there's really a workable solution. 5 star system. Download counter. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. It's all too subjective. There is one profile in the RE that is uber popular. Way more downloads than anything else. Bunches of Kemper users swear by it. The name escapes me at the moment but I took it for a test drive once and said 'meh'. Really popular but wasn't for me.

This reminds me about going into the guitar forums asking for recommendations on speakers or guitar pickups.

My Kemper did something similar back in the summer of 2021 during a firmware update but pressing Exit and rebooting cleared the issue. It only did it one time. After pressing Exit it rebooted and all was well and the new firmware showed installed. Kemper support suggested that it may have been a memory buffer issue during the update. They should get back to you pretty promptly. Always make a backup before any firmware updates in case they go awry and you need to do a factory reset.

Did you make the Tonex captures with a microphone or with the amp output connected directly to the Tonex Capture device? If it was direct then you have cut the one big variable (cab miking) out of the equation. I think the quality of mic(s), outboard gear and miking technique is what separates really good Kemper profiles from just average Kemper profiles. Most of my profiles I have made of my own amps sound ok but I never use them. I'm simply sticking a SM57 in front of the cab straight in to the Kemper. Since the Tonex Capture can eliminate that and seems to do it quite well the Kemper is then able to make a faithful profile from that capture. That's my guess.

It would be interesting to compare direct and miked captures on the Tonex of the same amp.