Natural Reverb tone with High Gain???

    Hi All,


    This is one thing I am struggling with the Kemper - I LOVE to add a touch of reverb to high gain tones to give them a bit more 'width' and it adds something, that just make me play better than when using a dry amp tone.


    But, for the life of me, I can't dial in a natural sounding reverb - things seem to very quickly become too artificial or ott...


    Do I need to pay more attention to the other parameters than Mix and Time? I know I should go back and read the manual again, but hoping a few people can chime in with some quick tips to start sculpting better reverb sounds with high gain profiles.


    I do jam using headphones 95% of the time, and the headphone space is off - should I turn this on to assist? Or just completely separate?


    Cheers,


    -Tonerider

    hi.


    what I like to do to get a room reverb is:

    • set the Reverb to Large Room
    • set Mix to 100%
    • Del+Rev Balance 0%, Damping, Predelay 0ms, Bandwidth 0.0, Frequency 0, Ducking 0, Volume 0
    • now set the basic length of the reverb with Time
    • if you want to have a brighter or duller reverb, use the Frequency parameter with the Bandwith being > 0
    • dial in the color of the reverb you want, use dampen to shape the decay
    • set Predelay to 80-ish
    • turn Mix to 0%
    • slowly turn up Mix while playing, the idea being that something is gone from the sound when you disable the reverb slot, but without it souding overly reverb-ish

    You can also try a very short, single-repeat delay (between 10-100ms). Or add the Micropitch effect post-amp with less extreme settings. Or a combination of both. They need to be after the amp to create the slight doubling effect.


    Those are tricks you will see a lot of high-gain metal types using in their live rigs from the 1980's through today. For example, John Petrucci of Dream Theater adds a 7-10ms delay and Eddie Van Halen has around a 25-50ms delay. They will often use that in stereo and one side will be longer than the other so, although it works okay in mono it's better with a stereo setup.


    J