Not possible with the KPA?

    Quote from chopsfromhell

    That's why I posted my isolated guitar tracks, so you could have a good listen without anything else in the way. Far from it that I'm claiming the guitar tones in use, or the playing, are supposed to be spot on. Wasn't my intention. Honestly I live in the middle of nowhere and have extremely limited experience with the the actual amps profiled, so I'm not finding this all that surprising. What I am saying is that the Kemper is close enough for my purposes, and I am once again having a blast playing guitar since I bought it. There are plenty of more talented, more experienced players out there using the Kemper than myself, that is for sure. Perhaps they get better results as well. Just thought I'd share some of what I've been up to and share some of my exuberance for the Kemper. May post some more when I get some time. Thanks for the compliments on the playing, much appreciated!

    Are you the legendary Chops From Hell guy? I have some of your old videos!


    These isolated track you've posted are awesome.

    Why are we still discussing this? SonicExporer is not willing to use the kemper as it was designed to be used. It's a profiler not a modeler. If you want to use it to it's full potential to get YOUR sound out of it, start profiling YOUR amps. Searching something you want in other peoples profiles is bound to fail.
    The kemper's capability to change the core tone of a profile is limited. And it's designed to be. No matter what you do on the device, it won't change the core tone of a profile. If you can't find what you want in other profiles, do your own. If you don't want to do that, you should have bought something else. If making your own profiles is to much work, it's not the device for you.

    Quote from SonicExporer

    BTW, for some of these songs we've been discussing I actually have the original guitar tracks, as well as the rest of the song minus guitars, and believe me, the KPA is not getting there. Some of this I know is a mic effect matter. Which is one reason why I reached out to see if there are profiles maybe I haven't located yet. It remains unclear where the issue is, lack of profiles, inability for KPA to profile, etc.

    Then the best chance of getting these tones into kemper without profiling real amps is perhaps matching these original guitar tracks and then profiling the matches. There are a few ways to do this; it would be easiest if you just used an Axe Fx for the eq match and then profiled the Axe -- or do the same with Bias FX professional VST.

    Quote from ColdFrixion

    You can mic amps all day long and the result won't sound like the guitar stems to Rainbow In The Dark without a bit of mixing.

    ... which is why I said:

    Quote from Monkey_Man

    ... but I haven't, as Sonic has, actually mic'd the period-authentic amps and mixed that tone...

    Agreed, of course, '80s Bro'.

    Food for thought.... I once watched an interview with Nuno Bettencourt about the time he got to meet his idol "Eddie Van Halen" at a soundcheck. They chatted for a while and Eddie offered Nuno his guitar to try! Nuno goes on to explain that he thought "This is it, after all these years, and all the gear he'd played through, he was finally gonna sound 'just like Eddie'"! Was really disappointed to realise that he just sounded like himself! Tone being in the hands of the player creating it!

    Quote from NorthShaun

    Food for thought.... I once watched an interview with Nuno Bettencourt about the time he got to meet his idol "Eddie Van Halen" at a soundcheck. They chatted for a while and Eddie offered Nuno his guitar to try! Nuno goes on to explain that he thought "This is it, after all these years, and all the gear he'd played through, he was finally gonna sound 'just like Eddie'"! Was really disappointed to realise that he just sounded like himself! Tone being in the hands of the played creating it!

    There's some merit to that.. but taken in an absolute sense, then why buy a kemper at all? Should sound the same through a cheap little crate combo..


    Meaning: I also do not think the issue with Sonic is his playing not matching the DIO guitarist.

    Quote from Dimi84

    There's some merit to that.. but taken in an absolute sense, then why buy a kemper at all? Should sound the same through a cheap little crate combo..
    Meaning: I also do not think the issue with Sonic is his playing not matching the DIO guitarist.

    I think most people buy the kemper for convenience. If given the chance, space and budget i think most of us would choose to own all the Tube heads the kemper emulates. For 99% of people though, that's not practical. The Kemper is the closest aproximation to having them in person.
    And from my experience EVH would still sound like himself through a crate combo. There are Videos and Clinics of Paul Gilbert and Eric Johnson playing through "cheap" loaner amps. You could still very well recognize their core tone.


    Gain Structure specifically (and in the fine nuances we are talking about here) has so many variables. Pickups, pickup height, setup, pick attack, strings, even the picks i use vary the sound quiet drastically. All those factors are out of the kempers controll. When i recorded my last EP, we made a Profile of a VHT Pitbull. We recorded the whole day with it. Next day, same guitar, same studio, everything was left from the day before, There where differences in the newly recorded parts from the ones from the day before. Fresh strings and and new pick helped a bit. After two hours the Tone was back to where it was. Turned out the heater failed. The room cooled down from 23 Celsius to 18 degrees. After two hours the room was back to 23 degrees and this seemed to change something about how my guitar sounded.
    The point is, I doubt you'd ever be able to 100% recreate a tone you had on another day. There are always slight variations. Let alone a sound from 2 decades ago played on completely different gear by a different person.

    As a studio engineer i had trouble replicating even the tones i did day before....without touching any mics/or settings.....must have been air humitidy...idnk :)
    Anyway...replicating a tone in the same studio, with the same gear, is hard enough as it is. One kick to a mic stand and you can start recording all over.


    And here were talking about replicating a post recording engineerd...and dubbed track right?
    Getting something functional..no problem...but something that would survive a/B comparison?
    Id say "good luck" even doing that with the exact same gear that was used in those days!


    I guess the point where you can ask yourself if the KPA can replicate it, is the point where you were succesfull in replicating it with conventional gear, and then start profiling that perticular chain, or parts of it.


    I have no clue of the KPA can capture driven power amps correctly, but there must be more measureable ways then trying to making this point based on a track with so many variabels irrelevant to that specific point.

    Job Posthuma you are bang on the money,we had the same gear set up in a studio for a year to record an album and it sounded different every day of the week
    with no stands kicked over, same personel same everything,different days different vibes its one of the mysteries of life.

    Quote from domsch1988

    I think most people buy the kemper for convenience. If given the chance, space and budget i think most of us would choose to own all the Tube heads the kemper emulates. For 99% of people though, that's not practical. The Kemper is the closest aproximation to having them in person.And from my experience EVH would still sound like himself through a crate combo. There are Videos and Clinics of Paul Gilbert and Eric Johnson playing through "cheap" loaner amps. You could still very well recognize their core tone.


    Gain Structure specifically (and in the fine nuances we are talking about here) has so many variables. Pickups, pickup height, setup, pick attack, strings, even the picks i use vary the sound quiet drastically. All those factors are out of the kempers controll. When i recorded my last EP, we made a Profile of a VHT Pitbull. We recorded the whole day with it. Next day, same guitar, same studio, everything was left from the day before, There where differences in the newly recorded parts from the ones from the day before. Fresh strings and and new pick helped a bit. After two hours the Tone was back to where it was. Turned out the heater failed. The room cooled down from 23 Celsius to 18 degrees. After two hours the room was back to 23 degrees and this seemed to change something about how my guitar sounded.
    The point is, I doubt you'd ever be able to 100% recreate a tone you had on another day. There are always slight variations. Let alone a sound from 2 decades ago played on completely different gear by a different person.

    "EVH would sound like himself through the crate combo". Of course in the sense of vibrato, techniques, touch, you could hear Van Halen is playing, or at least someone who can emulate him close enough.


    This does show how big of a variable one's playing is in the final perceived product. But it doesn't mean that the kemper is the same to a Harley Benton emulation pedal. Van Halen himself would go to great lengths for tiny amp mods -- even a minute difference in feel, he'd care about.


    Now I highly doubt that when it comes to this particular issue at hand this tone the OP is after, as heard in the recordings, is a matter of "hands". It's not that difficult to emulate playing these riffs very close and then record them. The causal factor of "hands" seems relatively small to me, especially for someone experienced in this type of playing.


    Then when it comes to pickups, guitars, other variables.. OP is already very close to the tools originally used for these recordings. If a difference in room temperature could be a reason he's failing to get the tones... I don't know. I would be very, very, very surprised.


    The differences he perceives between kemper profiles and the tones he is after are quite big it seems to me. You may never be able to reproduce a tone 100% but he should be able to get much closer than now, and by that I mean in regards to the tonal contribution of the kemper itself.


    Without profiling real amps I can only say that tone match using Axe fx/bias fx and then profiling either would be the best bet. It doesn't really matter that much what post-production trickery has been used, even, if going this way.


    If anyone has an axe fx at hand, and some isolated guitar tracks with such tones... Try tone matching them. You will get damn close with a humbucking guitar.

    I get where you're coming from. Since i have not listened to the reference on my studio setup, i'll give that a go later today. Until now i'm failing to hear what OP is missing or not able to get. Maybe, on a better setup i'm able to get the Problem.
    But, in the end, my point stands. He bought a profiler. He is able to produce the sounds with "real" gear. I'm failing to understand his Problem to do a Profile himself. In the end, that's what the kemper is for. Maybe the Kemper is capable of producing what he wants, but no other Person did it in their Profiles. Maybe he has specific "Taste" or hears things others can't or don't want to.

    @domsch1988 I agree that profiling the tones one already has is the best way to resolve this. Most of profiles I use are mine. It's not that commercial ones are bad; it's just that tone tends to be such a "metaphysically subjective" thing.. and I know what I want from my amps. Post tweaking profiles rarely work as I want it to -- and yes, the kemper is not for that anyway.


    Unfortunately in OPs case profiling his amps as he says is not possible.


    That's why I'm talking about eq matching and then profiling that.. Otherwise, since he used to be getting the tones he likes from his amps, that'd be the way to go, no question. Without doing so a device like the axe fx may work much better for him, where he can construct tones in a more "traditional" modelling way. Axe Fx is also much more powerful when it comes "post production"-like adjustment to one's guitar tone than the Kemper.

    i had a go at this tone a while back...using a soldano profile...no post eq and its a single track..i usually quad track guitars so i think i could have gotten it very close...hope thats helpful



    External Content soundcloud.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    Thanks, mdeeRocks! I will post some more tracks when I can. I'm surely not deserving of the adjective in use, but yeah I started chopsfromhell.com back in 1998. I continue to tend to the storefront which is still up and running, but life has taken me into business unrelated to any musical endeavors, unfortunately, for the last decade or so. I'm hoping to getting back to focusing on new instructional material at CFH sometime in the future. Wish the technology available now was around then!



    Sorry, back on topic...


    I was thinking the OP should consider profiling his gear and going into business. I you had a go at it, that would finally answer the questions at hand. If there were the possibility of monetary compensation for your efforts maybe it would justify the work. I would definitely be a customer.

    @ColdFrixion - Are you able to recreate this tone and it's gain structure with analogue gear, a real amp?



    If so, please post a recording. Then post a reamp through a profile of said gear so everyone can compare directly and hear the Kempers shortcomings, and Christoph can maybe do something about it.

    Below is a quick EQ match of ancientmariner's Mr. Scary intro. Both were reduced to mono to put them on an equal footing. Ideally, you want the target track to sound as close to the reference as possible prior to EQ matching and I had no control over that, but all things considered I think the result shows what EQ can do:


    External Content soundcloud.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.


    External Content soundcloud.com
    Content embedded from external sources will not be displayed without your consent.
    Through the activation of external content, you agree that personal data may be transferred to third party platforms. We have provided more information on this in our privacy policy.

    Guys, sincere thanks to those of you trying to constructively contribute, in advice or clips. But that said, please give me the benefit of the doubt when I say (again) that I am well aware of what is involved in the studio production and gear, that I'm absolutely not hearing things, and that I've tried almost everything I can think of (within reason) to get the KPA there. And no I'm not a troll or out to hinder in any way the KPA or it's reputation. If fact, I've made a few feature suggestions to try and improve the device, none of which I would be doing if I had any nefarious intentions.


    As for me profiling my own gear, I'll explain this again for those who don't know the history (or simply choose to keep trying to stir arguments): :Right away something didn't sound right to my ears with most profiles for the types of tones I was after. So I decided to try profiling a test amp just to see if maybe my KPA was borked. My try at profiling was an abysmal failure. To make a long story short, the KPA could not profile the amp well at all, and that is how, after much wasted time & effort, I learned about the limitations of profiling the preamp/power stage saturation. I then went on a crazy long trial & error binge seeking out profiles again. I figure after 5 years and hoards of KPA's the sound has got to be out there, right? Still failure. Which brings me to now. So why am I not profiling my vintage rigs? Because it would require me renting a U-haul, driving clear across town and dragging all the stuff out of storage, and then taking up valuable studio time, as well as me having to hunt down a few specific pieces of studio gear. And then if ANYTHING went wrong it could derail the entire project as I can't have this setup sit in the studio for weeks as I try to resolve/repair something. Plus, profiling is an art I am just not confident with yet. Further, and more importantly, given my experience with utter failure at profiling one amp already, combined with the fact I have yet to hear even ONE clip done with the KPA that sounds like the real tones I'm after, I am not about to take all that risk. Yet anyway. Which is why I am asking for somebody to demonstrate the KPA can get these tones. If I get a few different users providing factual proof then I am willing to consider the likely nightmarish path of profiling my own gear. But otherwise I would be a complete fool to go that path at this time given the facts, circumstances and history involved.


    So again, all I am simply seeking is the help of forum members to share a demonstration of these kinds of tones using the KPA, and sharing of what was done to achieve them.


    As to the Dio track in particular, that is just a LesPaul into an SD-1 into a JCM800, some simple pass filtering, compression, and a classic inverted carving trick on one of the two tracks to get a wider stereo image. There is no rocket science there. In fact, one forum member posted earlier (IIRC) the tracks alone. You can take one of those tracks (that is supposed to represent the "full" guitar sound) and use it for reference. Take any KPA tone you can find in the universe which you think sounds like the Dio tone, add some pass filtering from the studio EQ inside the KPA (probably around 200hz give or take) and then do some quick post processing with compression and maybe a little EQ tweaking. And it's just three chords to play. Seriously, I challenge anybody on this forum to match that tone. Please do. Demonstrate it can be done. Nothing I've heard indicates this is possible, and I'm not talking about a 100% dead match, just something that sounds 90% similar and REAL.


    It is most important to realize thus far there has still been nothing demonstrated that gets the types of tones I'm referring to.

    Sonic

    Quote from Per

    @ColdFrixion - Are you able to recreate this tone and it's gain structure with analogue gear, a real amp?



    If so, please post a recording. Then post a reamp through a profile of said gear so everyone can compare directly and hear the Kempers shortcomings, and Christoph can maybe do something about it.

    AMEN, WELL SAID.