First off, thanks to all the people who gave me great advice from the last thread I posted prior to making my Kemper purchase. It really helped me!
I received my new powered head Kemper on Friday and as promised in my last thread, I already shot a couple of introduction videos that will end up on my Youtube channel soon in a Kemper Playlist. I want to create a video series that helps the beginner learn the Kemper as I am learning it sort of real time if that makes sense? Anyway, look for it soon on my YT channel and feel free to subscribe
https://www.youtube.com/user/VisionRecordingCt
Anyway, after updating the firmware to the latest version and downloading Rig Manager I was all set to try out some tones. I simply plugged in the main output into my powered studio monitors which are Focal Solo powered monitors with a 5.5" speaker. I must say that I was really amazed on how good a lot of the stock profiles sounded with little to no tweaking. I realize that the guitar, the speaks etc. have an effect on how the profile will ultimately sound as the profiles were created with a specific guitar, pickups etc. For my initial test I was using my Gibson Les Paul with standard pickups.
After scrolling through a bunch of profiles I decided to go out and purchase a few profiles from Michael Britt and Top Jimi as I have listened to their profiles online and they sounded amazing. I purchased the Dumble pack from Michal Britt and the Marshall pack from Top Jimi. I will say that those profiles sounded absolutely amazing! I could not believe that I was getting this kind of amazing tone coming out of my monitors with a 5.5" driver. The profiles needed almost no tweaking to get them to my taste. The only thing was there seemed to be too much reverb for my liking but just a simple twist of the mix knob on the river control on the Kemper and it sounded just right.
Now a lot of people especially on YT are always interested in hearing if the profile sounds "exact" to the real amp and I totally get that as that's the entire point of the Kemper right? For me however, I have no idea if the Dumble pack I purchased sounds just like a real Dumble as I have never played one and have have no way to tell. To me that really does no matter as all I know is that Dumble pack from Michael Britt sounded great to me. It certainly did not sound like a typical "modeler" like I have used in the past. It sounded like a real tube amp mic up in my studio. Very impressive.
Next step is to plug the Kemper into a guitar cab and check out the merged profiles and see what kind of tone I can get. Thus far I am really impressed with the Kemper. I backed up all my profiles on my HD and Im thinking about purging a lot of the ones as I don't need 435 profiles thats for sure. Most I will never use. I'll probably only end up with 10 profiles that will cover all my needs.
Stay tuned for more Kemper updates!