Profiling with or without cabinet

    Hi guys, I am thinking of purchasing a Kemper so I have a few questions in mind lately.
    One concerns the profiling process, when done with cab and without cab. Here are the questions:


    1) when you profile the standard way, that is with a mic'd cab, you capture the final tone of the entire rig. Now say that I connect to a non-FRFR speaker (i.e. a normal guitar cab) and I deactivate the cab sim...how does the kemper subtract cab + mic from the captured tone? It should have information also of the cab and mic alone, to remove that, no? Is it - somehow - included in the profiling phase, or does it just remove some typical cab + mic response?


    2) quite the opposite question: when you profile the direct sound, that is instead of a mic'd cab you record right the out of your preamp (you can, right?), do you tell your kemper that's what you're doing, in the profiling process? So that nothing is subtracted later when the cab sim is off?


    thanks a lot!

    You can't tell the profiler about all this.


    The KPA works very accurate as "great sound in -> great sound out" and "shit in -> shit out".


    No need for a KPA to check the results - simple do like this:


    a) Record your favorite tube amp, cab with your favorite mic/placement
    b) Listen to this recording - via your studio monitors, IE, active monitors ....
    This is exactly what you would get when you profile the same setup.


    And this is also what your audience will get - or what will be recorded for your next CD.


    The monitor-out is "just for you" = get's either the same signal as your main outs (for FRFR monitors) - or a compensated signal more suitable for guitar speakers.
    (Yes, this is always a compromise)


    It's NOT possible to capture the sound of ALL amps/cabs and recreate them via ONE guitar speaker - to get the signal of ALL amps/cabs you need an FRFR monitor.
    (try playing your recording - or any recording of your favorite guitar players via your guitar cabinet - to simulate this).


    You could just profile your preamps - and then use your real tube power amps and real cabinet - this will work great too - but then your need to mic your real cabinet for the PA /recording.

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    Edited 2 times, last by Armin ().

    Thanks!
    I get your points, on the second one you told me exactly what I expected, on the first one however I might not have been fully clear.
    I certainly did not mean that I want to get all type of sounds (including different cabs' sonical footprints) on a non FRFR speaker.
    I meant rather that - as far as I understand - a profile capture the footprint of the whole rig, but removes cab and mic emulation a posteriori based on heuristics, with no actual profiling of the cab and mic used.
    And this is IMO suboptimal, even funny that Kemper would do so much to capture sounds perfectly and would settle for an imprecise removal of cab and mic, when I would expect that profiling the cab and mic alone would give enough info to accurately remove it from the full profile when performing on a guitar cab.

    Hey Laimon,


    welcome here :)


    When the Profiler excludes the cab portion it's just an extimation, even tho a good (and very musical) one.


    It's worth mentioning that the reason why most modellers fail in sounding like a real tube amp is that they fail in reproducing the interaction between the power amp and the cab. The Profiler excels at doing exactly this.
    This to mean that there's not only a cab to exclude, since the interaction between amp and cab doesn't just sound like "amp+cab".


    Also, when using a profile of an amp with no cab, leave cab simulation on: the whole profile sounds like it should, excluding the cab would attemptively subtract something which is not there.


    HTH :)

    Hi Gianfranco,


    thanks for the explanation, in fact your last sentence fully answers one of my original questions.
    Regarding the interaction amp + cab, it's for me hard to say if the two can ever be split completely and their interaction recreated at a later time, but of course if this interaction is a factor the Kemper must capture this whereas modellers like the Axe Fx - not modelling the whole but single parts - can not ;)

    That's why cab separation can't be perfect: because the "interaction" part can't be predicted or isolated. If you take a profile and change the cab it's impossible for the Profiler to know how the new cab (in the real world) would have interacted with the power section.
    Again, the interaction (when you don't profile the whole rig in a fow) is just a (very musical) attempt.


    You can look at it this way: a high-end modeller offers many "realistic" amps and cabs, but fails in rendering their non-linear (unpredictable) interaction. The Profiler, OTOH, wonderfully renders such interaction, at the cost of missing its perfection when you switch cab/amp.


    :)