With respect to the profiling process and overly distorted/noisy amps

Sometimes amps are distorted. Like out of control distorted. This is especially true for some styles of music.

When you sometimes set amps with pedals in front for that kind of tone (think HM-2s running into cranked Marshalls or something), this creates a lot of hiss and noise.

When we try and profile an amp set this way, the profiler tells us this amp is too noisy, reduce the gain.

It would be great if we could be allowed to profile an amp set this way. After all, if I was recording the real amp with a miced up cab, it would not tell me, "Sorry bro, but your gain is too much".

Granted, too much gain can make a tone tiny. Still, this limitation is not practical vis-a-vis real world use of an amp.

Taking this further, it appears that the gain is not a problem in itself. The problem is the amount of hiss and noise from the amp.

I recently put a profile up on the rig exchange where the amp was boosted with a very interesting pedal. I could profile it despite significant gain and noise.

Now yesterday, I was trying to make a dual amp profile. Think of two seriously distorted amps with a pedal in front. The tone was freaking amazing. Nothing tiny, nothing like a fizzy mess. I worked hard on it.

So I started the profiling process and... "Too noisy"... Tried some alterations... "Too noisy"... Messed with other things... "Too noisy"...

When I finally managed to profile, the gain was somewhere around 3 o'clock and nothing like the tone I was working on. Quite disappointing as I shut everything down.

It occurred to me that the problem might not have been one noisy amp by itself. It might have been the noise from two amps together that was troubling the Kemper. Of course, it is also entirely possible that if you have some crazily dialled amp, you could not profile it either because of the amount of noise.

In this regard, it is very common practice on stage or even in studio situations to have a noise gate in the loop or as an FX insert. Of course, this renders profiling impossible due to the technology used.

In that regard, it would be great if Mr CK could think of some way to accommodate a noise gate within the profiling process if required. When my guitar is running through an amp with a well-dialled noise gate, I do not perceive some horrible change in response. It would be wonderful if the Kemper would allow this as it would allow us to profile heavily distorted amps as well.

Quote from ckemper

The noise is for sure caused by the high gain.
Try to profile with less gain, then bring the gain back up on the profile.

Hi, Mr CK. Thanks for the input. I actually found out that the inordinate amount of noise is caused by connecting two amps from a single device. It appears to be a common problem for a lot of guys with dual amps even if they are not profiling. The solution is to get some kind of device that grounds one output but not the other, from what I learnt. No cashola, but I will try to get that done in the near future.

Quote from Per

From what I can tell the Kemper acts like a totally pure "ideal" amp with zero noise, meaning unlike with a real amp where all sorts of little issues with the circuit can result in 50/60hz hums and so on with the Kemper if you put in a totally quiet signal you'll get out a totally quiet signal.

This means that even if you could profile a noisy amp the result isn't going to be like your noisy amp. There could be quite a lot of the signal that gets lost, imagine subtracting that baseline noise from your amp, you could end up with virtually nothing but a telephone like sound!

Now having said this when you profile the Kemper records a loop of the background noise for your A/B comparison, it would be cool if the Kemper had the option to store this loop with the profile even if it makes the profile a lot larger, because sometimes you just want your noisy messy craziness. Or at least if it had the option to "add frequency of loop content" back in to the profile rather than treating it as horribleness that any sane engineer would be desperate to get rid of, then at least the overall sound would match a lot closer.

I agree, Per! I love profiling an amp and then demoing it on the Kemper. None of that extraneous noise... I love it!

Quote from MrMangofresh

Hm, I seem to recall that there IS a rather normal amount of "background noise" on my KPA profiles, at least with high gain.
This depends of course on the amps profiles, stomps etc. used. Am I imagining things?

Turn up the noise gate. There should be no noise at all.

Quote from ashtweth

Sorry bro, but your gain is too much
Love it....AJ was that a dual amp profile with ADT?

Ash

Can't use ADT while profiling, Ash. This was two amps routed into the Kemper. Could profile each amp separately. But when I tried to profile them together, I kept getting repeated notifications that there was too much noise.

As mentioned, this could be due to some kind of ground loop. Need to invest in something to ground one side of the signal I am sending to the amps.

Quote from Awesome_Elvis

interesting.

I tried to do a direct profile of a one knob fuzz I had and I couldn't get it to work right. First it was too noisy then it asked me if there was a gate. No gate bro. When I finally got a profile of it, it sounded so bad I cringed a couple times and made a stink face. Then if I tried to refine it it just got worse.

Garbled and dying is how would describe it. As if the sound was saying, kill me...
Or like Frankenstein looking in the mirror asking , what am I? Why was I created? Lol

Lol... Yeah, that's why we really need to be able to dial down background noise like we could with any amp using a simple pedal. It just doesn't make sense to prevent us from creating profiles because a sound is "too distorted".

No such thing in my book!