Welcome, GT!
I wrote a few ideas about his but deleted them; sorry mate - I'm at loss to explain this.
Hey guys,
Been using my kemper for about 2 months now and have really enjoyed it. Although I have noticed that when I use certain types of OD pedals in front of the kemper i get a substantial volume boost instead of a gain boost. I'm trying to understand why that is and what steps i can take to overcome this. I have played around with the clean-sens with not much luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
*Using mostly clean profiles of an AC30 or DC30 that I own/profiled myself and can A/B.
This could simply be on account of the signal being boosted by the pedal and could even happen with a tube or solid state amp. If your pedal has a level control, you should turn that down to match the level of the Kemper when the pedal is not on.
I noticed for me it depends on the setting of the gain of the profile and what pedal I use. Not many of my pedals will actually increase the volume by any ,or a lot, or at all, just increase in saturation.
However...
I have a earthquaker devices Acapulco Gold, and no matter what the gain is set to on the profile, this pedal always makes everything louder.
Chairs!
Edit: as far as what to do about it, there is little that can done outside the realm of choosing a more discreet setup and approach to the sound you need. I had a black arts tone works destroyer dual fuzz and I loved the one side that was either on or off, no volume, with a clean profile but I had to dial the clean sense all the way to get it not to clip.
I asked myself if having this particular sound was so imperative that I had to work around everything else and compromise a lot of fundamental basic operations in order to maintain the functionality of my setup. In the end the answer was no and so I moved on from there. It's good to experiment and come to conclusion on your own as it is part of the quest.
Hope this helps!
Have you tried putting the pedal in the effects loop and then assigning the effects loop to a Stomp slot, i.e. before the amp stack? That way your actual input level into the KPA will be the same with the pedal on or off, so the clean sens shouldn't need to be adjust. Then, if you still find a jump in volume, you could always put an EQ in the Stomp next in line with a gain cut to compensate, and just activate the two together to achieve unity gain.
I am really intrigued by the Acapulco Gold but I'd be reassured to hear whether you could get the thing to play nice with the KPA before dropping the money on one...
I found too that some pedals are just too hot (fulltone 2b for example). I just moved on to something else.
