1 Year with the Kemper

    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 8| ). 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 :D ). 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?

    Great post! And glad you didn't return it immediately. :)
    Guess I was more lucky than you. When I got mine, I already had decent monitors and great headphones. So I (except of my sore fingers) enjoyed the toaster from day 1. Hope you had a chance to upgrade headphones and monitors in the meantime. It's so worth the investment. :thumbup:


    Cheers
    Martin

    Quote from lightbox

    Great post! And glad you didn't return it immediately. :)
    Guess I was more lucky than you. When I got mine, I already had decent monitors and great headphones. So I (except of my sore fingers) enjoyed the toaster from day 1. Hope you had a chance to upgrade headphones and monitors in the meantime. It's so worth the investment. :thumbup:


    Cheers
    Martin

    Thank you! I actually updated my monitors to KRK Rokits 5 G3 - huge improvement and the KPA sounds better than ever! I´m really glad I didn´t send it back immediately :D

    I have come to rely on the ability of the Kemper to "WOW" me every time I play it.


    And when it does not "WOW" me, I know something went wrong somewhere.


    Yesterday, for instance, I was getting a very anemic sound from my KPA through my Presonus Firepod. I put the Headphones to the KPA and it sounded awesome. Presonus: dull.


    So I figured out, finally, how to hook my RME Ladyface up, and it sounded very similar to the KPA once I had the volumes the same. Normalizing volumes is necessary in order to do a fair comparison.


    So I went back to the Presonus, and in setting up it's levels again, it sounded like the RME. That is, Great! So I was wondering where I went wrong.


    I figured out I had a knob set wrong. It goes from "Recording<->Playback and mixes in-between and if you have it too far away from "Recording" cause you were trying to play back music, it gets anemic. So I have to have that knob set right.


    Once the KPA didn't sound right. I did a cold reset, and it was "WOW" again.


    In short, the Kemper should sound AWESOME and if it doesn't, it's something else. Poor guitar, poor headphones, poor levels, sometimes even within the Kemper!

    Quote from db9091

    I have come to rely on the ability of the Kemper to "WOW" me every time I play it.

    This is incredibly accurate! Everytime I play one of my favourite profiles I´m just sitting there thinking "dammit, this sound SO GOOD". I just don´t get used to having so many brilliant tones right infront of me.

    Thank you for posting this, Hannes :)


    I definitely feel you.
    I've always thought that buying "better" gear (even tho we should agree on what's actually "better") is an investment nevertheless, even when we can't apparently perceive differences when comparing our current gear. Because when you get exposed to a better sound you grow up. Often we realize our growth only when looking back. This is my experience anyway :)


    I belong to those who have not been floored by the Profiler at first hearing. But I'm well aware it has been giving a great contribution to my artistic, technical and professional growth.
    And that's why I've always been willing to invest in gear (not talking about GAS here) even when I realized that much cheaper stuff would have worked nevertheless.


    :)

    Quote from viabcroce

    Because when you get exposed to a better sound you grow up. Often we realize our growth only when looking back. This is my experience anyway :)

    Yeah, I think this is extremely accurate! Its absolutly incredible to realize something like this and being able to look back.

    Great to read your story!


    I never expect factory presets to sound great - so my expectations were low - and I owned and loved the AxeFx II in that days.


    Bought the KPA just for "peace of mind" to prove for myself that the AxeFx sounds better.


    And was disappointed ;)


    After profiling my '57 Deluxe and comparing the sound with the Tweed Deluxe in the AxeFx II - I was blown away.


    I reported my journey in the AxeFx forum (pros and cons) - this was one of the longest threads in the forum at that time....


    ... until my final statement - "I keep the KPA and just sold the AxeFx II" ..


    .... then that thread was deleted.


    I love the KPA since then - every day a little bit more.

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    Thats also a quite interesting story there. Especially the part where they deleted your thread just because you made a rather rational descision :D

    Cool story, Hannes_ITS. I'm lucky to have never experienced issues with the quality of Kemper sound, but I haven't gigged with it yet. If you just trawl through the forums, you'll see there are a lot of people that feel the KPA doesn't sound good through the PA in the bar or through their cabinet. It's just a learning experience, I figure. Find the right tools to go with the Kemper. Remember, the weakest link in your signal chain is always the weakest piece of gear, which can utterly detract from your tone.

    For me it was just not knowing what good tone sounds like and not having good monitors that ruined my KPA for me (in the first few weeks). If I would have had both - knowledge and gear - I probably would have loved it right from the start.

    I have to agree with this.
    When you have many variables in a sound, it's actually hard to say where's the problem (if any). I'm quite sure that most people among those who did/do not like the Profiler have experienced some issues in the settings or in the overall chain (rig).
    It's like when listening and evaluating to a hi-fi system: few people think they're actually listening to a source, a player, a preamp, a power amp, power cables, cabs, cabs placement and a room. Each of these elements affects the sound, for good or bad, to a larger extent than people seem to usually realize.


    :)