Kemper is not an amplifier and you shouldn't mess with the volume knob of your guitar when using a profile with distortion otherwise it will sound bad?
Also, when I do a pinch harmonic or try to sustain a vibrato, the sound dies unnaturally? Is this normal?
I use my guitar's volume knob all the time with the KPA to clean up the tone - just like you would with an amplifier.
If the sound is prematurely cutting out with your pinch harmonics or vibrato (or when letting a note/chord ring out), I'd guess that you have the noise gate on and it needs to be adjusted.
The profiler cleans up better than any real amp I know.
Look up the settings of your noise gate.
Thanks guys.
OK. Is there a "natural" noise gate besides the one one that you can activate or deactivate on the "stomps"?
Have you tried the Noise knob to the left of the stomps? It's pretty gentle.
the noise gate knob is hooked up to the Noise Gate on the Input section. It is actually more like a noise suppressor.
the effects 2:1 and 4:1 gates that can be assigned to stomp/effects slots are actually expanders.
the manual suggests setting the input Noise Gate to the lowest setting able to silence noise and hum with the strings muted, but keep in mind this may end up being quite high if you use a ton of gain and compression. I find in high-gain situations, it's best to let an expander do the brunt of the work, and just use the Noise Gate to clean up any remaining noise.
About sound dying: There is profiles/amps, that really do have that behaviour, tones are fading out too fast, (no noise gates used ...... I try using no noise gates at all) but that´s something that´s also happening with real amps. And there is profiles, that make it easy getting great sustain and natural feedback, may be it´s only part of the real amp that´s been profiled? Also important for sustain is your way of using the Kemper. If playing via headphones, there is no additional tone stimulation coming from speakers, something that´s always happening when playing real amps. That´s the reason why I suggested a sustainer option for the Kemper, to bring this thing also to us users.
In general a more distorted profile is more compressed so it's easier to have a certain level of sustain even at low volume levels.
Other profiles need to have some air moving your strings, so you have to arise the overall volume on your monito/cab.
Sometimes i find that, in order to have a more "liquid" sound, the parameter "compression" in the amp section helps a bit.
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a natural noise gate, their job is to cut off sound once the volume drops below a certain threshold, this inherently means a loss of sustain and unnatural decay. Expander style gates can improve on this by offering a separate release value (similar to a compressor) to try to mitigate this effect as much as possible, but at some point a threshold has to be met and the sound level will be dropped.
If you want natural amp sound then simply don't use a noise gate and approach the issue of noise from the perspective of reducing the causes of noise, such as better shielding, cabling, lower gain and compression levels, alternative song arrangement and improved technique to give you heavy sounds without the very high gain levels that typically result in unacceptable noise floor (and anyway tend to result in a fizzy light sound anyway due to excessive compression and lack of dynamics, especially transients that you claw back with a noise gate).
Just want to make this really clear - there are no traditional noise gates in the KPA. The Input Noise Gate is a noise suppressor - it uses signal analysis to detect noise and attempts to remove it from the signal while letting "pure signal" pass. of course it isn't perfect and will leave some artifacts, particularly at higher settings; and this is more clearly audible on heavily distorted/compressed rigs. The expanders are much more "transparent".
I hope this doesn't sound like I'm dogging the KPA input Noise Gate. I think it's amazing. But I usually set it at 2 or less, and use an expander for any additional noise suppression if needed.
Many profiles have way to much gain - and this leads to a lot of noise.
A great distorted sound - even for metal - does not need THIS much gain.
