Kemper in a live Situation

    Hello!


    I use the Kemper since 4 weeks now! I'm very impressed about the great sound, because i always have been veeeery fucked up by modeling amps, even
    when everybody got crazy about this stuff. For example I tested the Axe FX 2 for a week and sent it back to G66, because i didn't like it.


    But the Kemper is a complete different kind of gear! It really sounds like the great amps. Not all presets, but at least the amp factory stuff blew me away!



    So i tried to play it live on stage yesterday. The result was a very new experience in need of getting used to. I switched between different rigs which i figured out
    in my studio at home but i was a little bit unhappy with balancing the volumes on stage! The floor monitor was a very expensive piece of gear, but for now i'm far away from the feeling i had
    when i was playing a real amp! The sound sometimes was hard to play. the clean sounds for example sounded very great when playing only guitar. But when the vocals, keys and
    bass joined the monitor, all i had left were the high frequencies with no balls!


    Before i buy my own monitoring i really need good advises to come closer to a comfortable stage situation!


    Thanks to everybody for your help!


    Cheers!

    It took a little time for me to tweak my Kemper rigs before using them in a live situation as well. I tweaked and listened to my amp rigs using studio monitors, studio headphones, custom ear molds, fx loop input on combo amp, powered Mackie p.a. speaker, and even rented a rehearsal room for 2 hours to listen through a p.a. Granted, this is probably more than most people have access to on a regular basis.


    What I found was that the rigs always sounded slightly different and I wanted to tweak them accordingly. I decided to start eliminating some of the variables by using fewer amp rigs, limiting myself to about 10 that I liked the best. Then if the tones were similar, i.e. medium gain or high gain, I would find the cabinet profile I liked the best and the same cabinet profile for different rigs when I could. When the entire rig changes, sometimes there are eq curve differences and it takes about 15-20 seconds for your ears to adjust and in the meantime, it sounds "weird".


    When I play live, we use in-ear monitors, so it's a pretty flat, even response except for the midrange bump in the resonant frequencies of the molds themselves. So between the ear monitor signal I get and tweaking to a powered p.a. speaker at home and limiting my work to as few amp rigs that I need to get by, I was able to get some great basic sounds. I eventually got an Atomic Reactor FRFR tube powered wedge and I've been using that to tweak sounds at home and for stage monitoring at smaller gigs where I don't have ear monitors. The problem with being dependent on floor wedges in most monitor systems is that the eq's are carved up heavily to keep vocal mics from feeding back, which murders from the Kemper.


    If you can work diligently through the initial tweaking process and get a decent FRFR powered speaker, you can dial up some pretty amazing tones that are consistent from night to night and get even better as time goes by as you fine tune in the live environment.