Climbing out of the rabbit hole...

I finally made it out! I've never spent so much time and energy over the last forty years chasing the ever elusive way to produce guitar tone as I have in the past thirteen months. So many factors in the signal chain contribute to the final result and then you have the physical space to contend with, flooring, walls, ceiling, room size, proximity of the speaker cabinet to surfaces and yourself, when you jump into the hole with these factors and a plethora of speakers options to consider and/or try it can overwhelm you, and with me it did.

I was at a point two weeks ago to liquidate it all and go back with an amp head and 112 cabinet, no modeling amp's such as I've had since 2000, just a two channel amp, reverb and delay pedals, done. I was ready to move forward when time allowed, which fortunately for me it didn't, it would have been a big mistake. I happened to meet a guy whose band went clean stage a few years ago, modelers straight to the board, FOH and to individual monitors for each person and he uses studio monitors at home, "everything sounded great" were his words.

I told him what monitoring solutions I had tried, which are many, but wasn't having any luck and he told me he hadn't ran his modeler any other way other than those mentioned above in the years since he went in this direction until recently. He needed a speaker to play through like an amp for something he was doing so he took the powered monitor from the band he used and plugged directly into it but he told me no matter what he did in the settings it didn't sound nearly as good as going through the board, which is what these units excel at, you wouldn't see so many touring musicians and studios with Kempers if that wasn't the case.

I sat down with my Kemper and rethought what I really wanted or needed, my conclusion was a versatile combo amp. The Kemper has way more available than I'll ever use and has the best sounding amp's on tap that I've ever played, I just had to come to terms with the mode of amplifying the sound.

So I started from scratch again, took the unit back to factory settings, os is up to date, and only changed three things in settings, remote from jumping five profiles at a time to one, low cut around 78hz and high cut around 14,000hz.

I loaded my Eminence em12 into my opened back cabinet, had my TC Bam200 set flat according to the settings recommended on the forum and went to the first factory profile. This time around I adjusted the overall tone changes needed for this speaker on the Bam200 instead of the monitor output section of the Kemper, I admittedly had not tried this before.

Well, it sounded really, really good, and felt really good. I started going through the factory presets and lots of them were stellar, I had the same experience with the collection's 1, 2 & 3 folder (I think that's right, the one with samples of different artists). And the different amp's sound reasonably close, not as close as studio monitors but again, really good sound and feel on many profiles. I haven't even touched my purchased profile packs yet (around 950 profiles) and honesty if this was my first go around I probably wouldn't have bought them.

So I'm settled with this approach, I spent a couple of hours Tuesday with one profile, it barely breaks up, roll the guitar volume back a hair and cleans up nicely, add a drive and it sounds great, four or five profiles of different types of amp's that respond like this one and I could cover anything my heart desires.

Now I only have one more thing on the agenda, I want a stereo setup, just for my own enjoyment. A Seymour Duncan Powerstage 700 is next on the list, I need the eq it offers, build a matching second 112 cabinet and get another em12 speaker, but for now peace has returned to my world.....no more rabbit holes!

Quote from V8guitar

The key is keep it simple and understanding what monitoring works for you. Most people agree the FOH sound and sound in your DAw is amazing, its reproducing a great sound through monitor tends to be the challenge.

You know for four years I didn't worry about finding a monitoring solution. My wife bought me the Kemper in 2017, I have a Mustang III at home so when I received the profiler I unboxed it, sat it on a table and plugged it into the effects return of the amp and just played, now that's simple. I didn't even get into the settings until last summer when I started putting my rig together. This statement holds up well, ignorance is bliss.

Quote from Steve5478

Great news.

So what are your settings on the BAM now ?

Will yo try those ones with Kones or have you sent them back ?

These are the settings for the em12, reduce the Bass a little and add quite a bit of Treble, neither setting change would have been helpful with the Kone, it would have made the tone a little ear piecing. The recommendations I found on the forum for a flat response was Bass @ 10 o'clock, Middle @ 4 o'clock and Treble @ 11 o'clock. I keep the Gain @ 10 o'clock and leave the Monitor out volume at the factory setting of -12.0db. You are probably close to performance level when you hit 9 o'clock on the Master, my ears can't take it anymore, at least in the house.

For me the settings are very interactive with one another in the Kemper, Low & High Cut especially, just a little up or down on either one affects not only the overall tone but the feel as you play. Move one a smidge and the other needs moved a little to find a sweet spot again. That's the only thing I've found on the Kemper that irritates me, not adjusting settings to find that sweet spot but the jump numerically that the Low & High Cuts make with each touch of the knob, and I do mean touch, not twist! They are so sensitive, especially the High Cut, it would be great if the software could be adjusted so that you had to turn the knob quite a bit further to make small adjustments, but after five years of owning the Kemper that's kind of nit picking on my part, for the first four years I didn't realize it had this shortcoming

The Kone's went on Reverb, someone who gets along with them will get a good deal now that the new Neo is out.