1 Year with the Kemper - my personal, highly subjective and probably not very entertaining report.
Nearly a year ago I got my Kemper. I can still remember the day (sunny, holidays, about 23°C). It was a friday and about 11am when my friendly post-woman brought me the most amazing piece of gear I ever laid hands on. Of course I opened the pack carefully and brought my new baby into the world. "Welcome little friend, this is your home now" (wow this sounds actually pretty creepy ). Instantly started reading the manual and fired it up for the first time. Such a beauty. Green display, green LED´s. Like a toaster from space. Or something from the alien-movies. Installed the latest firmware, uploaded all of the rigs that I downloaded in the weeks before the KPA´s arrival and...... I was really really really not impressed. Chezuz, how could something this expensive, this fantastic sound so shitty? I saw a lot of videos from fluff or Ola who achieved insane tones with this beast and here I was sitting hearing a bad tone that sounded horrible (through my 50$ headphones that weren´t made for studio use....go figure). I tried all of ola´s rigs, all of fluffs rigs and all of Keith´s rigs. I tried all those metal rigs I got from the forums and everything was just HORRIBLE!!!! I was angry and disappointed. How could I have spent 1550€ for something that sounded THAT BAD????
If you´re a Kemper owner who had the same kind of experience then you already know what my 2 (biggest) mistakes were:
1. I didn´t know good tone yet
2. 50$ HEADPHONES!!!!!
When the first wave of "oh my god, I hate myself for buying this" passed I started tweaking rigs. Turns out tweaking rigs will lead to tones that you actually can enjoy (uuuuuuuhhhhh duuuuuuuuuuh). Naturally I used Ola´s rectifier rig to tweak it (with my 50$ headphones....) and when I found a tone that was good I recorded it and listened to it. Not that bad actually. (In retrospect: that tone was NOT GOOD, not at all. Wow that sounded just BAD what I did there.)
And thus began a journey of learning about great tone, recording etc. and complete and utter profile addiction.
So after a while I discovered that using monitors was WAY better and I actually enjoyed playing with the Kemper when using monitors. (My shitty 20$ monitors). My monitors weren´t good and I realized that so I had to upgrade - bought myself some decent 3" monitors and suddenly everything sounded better. But still - I absolutly didn´t understand good tone. The tones I had back then had basically no mids and treble, presence and bass at about 10. Which sounds horrible but I didn´t know better and I liked the sound. I realized that these kind of tones don´t really work for recording music. I had to learn about good tone and I had the best tool for that right here, in front of me. So I started learning.
I listened to tons of records and just focused on the guitar sound, recorded tons of samples and just compared everything. The Kemper forum helped a lot too. This whole community is so helpful and full of great people who know a lot about this. It´s amazing to be a part of it!
After I while I got used to good sound and started to actually hearing when a profile was good and useful and when it was absolutly unusable for me. This is still blowing my mind. If you would have asked me to help you mic your amp for studio recordings to achieve a good tone - I would have said yes and completely ruined your record. Now the situation is 180° different. I know good tone now, I understand what guitar tones work for my kind of music. I´m still light years away from understanding it as good as the producers I love but I´m at a level where every tone I would pick for an album would actually sound good on it. Thats a insane achievement for someone who has/had no friends in the industry and no chance to learn about it by observing friends or pros. For that I can not thank you enough, Kemper. This is amazing!
During that time I also learned a lot about production, guitar techniques, recording techniques etc. etc. - I always wanted to learn about that but I never felt confident enough. The KPA helped a lot!
Recently I recorded my deubt album with the KPA and the sound turned out amazing!!!! And I knew it would. I picked the tones for guitars and bass and I knew how it would turn out. This is still just blowing my mind.
So one year after I got the Kemper I know so much more about tone about recording about production about gear and I´m a much better guitarist(because when you have a kemper you play much more ). I got to know a lot of great people though my kemper, the kemper forum and everything else and I have a killer tone on my own record (which was obviously the main reason for buying it).
I love this piece of gear and I´m sure I will love it for the rest of my guitarist-days.
If you actually read through all of this then thank you and I hope it was worth your time. Did you actually have a similar experience, or am I the only one who had such an amazing time within my first year?