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I'm pretty new to Kemper, about 2 months.
I've been profiling a lot, trying to get better at it, and have made some decent profiles. I'm currently using a Suhr Reactive Load box to profile silently. My setup is pretty straightforward:
Guitar -> Kemper front input
Kemper direct send -> front of amp
Amp speaker out -> Suhr Reactive Load
Suhr Line out -> Helix Return, and
Helix 1/4" mono out -> Kemper Return Input
In my Helix Path, I have the Return input followed by an OwnHammer IR -> 1/4" Helix out which feeds the Kemper Return input.
Works great.
I am making "merged" profiles, first profiling just the amp by turning the IR off in the Helix to make a Direct Amp profile. Then I turn the IR on, and make a Studio profile. Then merge them.
This works really well.
But dang, refining the profiles when doing a bunch at a time is really time consuming and somewhat error prone. I have found that what you play during refining makes a pretty big difference in the accuracy of the profile. I have found this is ESPECIALLY true of cleaner and light-crunch/crunch amp settings. It's really difficult to get accurate amp break-up in the profile, that is present in the reference amp. Chords sound fine, but single notes sound clean in the profile, whereas they are a little crunchy in the reference amp and it's not accurate. If it turn up the gain a little bit to get the break-up, then chords sound too gainy and other things aren't quite right.
One question - and one suggestion:
Question: What am I doing wrong? I'm totally open to suggestions and thanks in advance for any expert advice.
Suggestion for Kemper Firmware Update: Why not include a few pre-recorded guitar dry signals from the Kemper experts within the Kemper itself to "refine" the profile automatically after the normal profiling UFO sounds and feed that automatically into the Kemper to automatically refine it? If what you play affects the profile, and it sure seems like it does, it seems like the smart folks at Kemper could come up with a few appropriate dry guitar sequences to feed the "refining process" automatically from a few standard selections. This would make the Kemper profiling completely automated and maybe eliminate the manual refining process, take the human error out of the refining process, and relegate refining manually as optional, and at the same time increase the accuracy of the resulting Kemper profiles, making it a better product.
Easier, more accurate, and totally automated = win, win, win
This would have saved me a ton of time today while profiling a clean, 4 crunch settings, and 4 high gain settings, twice each (direct and studio), and then merging. A lot of the time, was re-doing the refining process over and over until I had a reasonably accurate profile in comparison to the reference amp. And for the clean and the 4 crunch profiles, I still wasn't completely happy with them. The high gain profiles seem much easier to dial in through refining, than clean and crunch. I think I spent 6 hours on this today at least. I think that time could have been reduced to maybe an hour or two instead with automated refining using "Kemper recommend" guitar refining sequences pre-reccorded inside the Kemper.
Is that just me, or do other people experience this too? Again, it's not the chords that don't sound right, but more single notes and light touch playing, especially with the light crunch and crunch settings such that the break-up is not very accurate under some conditions.
Thanks for any feedback!