When I first got the kemper, I struggled with dialing in sounds that I was happy with. I was still very new to audio terminology, hardware, software, and training my ear for actually good tone. I've always loved awesome, crushing high gain sounds, and I could have told you what was a good tone, but I had a much harder time discerning amazing tone from tone that was really aggressive and full of gain, but really was kind of shitty in the end. Going from only playing a Line 6 Spider Valve mkii growing up, straight to the kemper was a huge jump with a big learning curve. At some point I started to get tones I liked more out of the Kemper, sometime around the time I turned my definition to 10. (LOL) I am using a Headrush 108 FRFR speaker, and I always thought that the tones sounded very muffled, very muddy, and with no clarity or cut to them, especially for high gain. I would on a ENGL profile, or a Mesa profile, or a Diezel profile, and it sounded like the recorded sound of turning a Dual Rectifier on, keeping the volume at 1 so it was barely producing sound, and turning the gain to 10, and playing that, and then once it was recorded, listening to that sound amplified to listenable volumes. If you can imagine doing that with a tube amp. Like NOTHING like what a guitar amp actually sounds like.
So I eventually solved this problem by compensating with a shit ton of definition, a shit ton of treble, and a shit ton of presence, and putting one of the 3 "Metal Equalizers" in the FX loop.
Now at this point, I feel like I'm about 3/4 of the way to good tone. It is very clear, and very very aggressive, and it sounds good to the untrained ear. But I know, that its far from perfect. My tones have a shit ton of crunch, but they sound a little bit artificial, a little "Boss Metal Zone" ish, just a little bit, they arent terrible. That is probably partly from the Equalizer in the FX loop, and partly from the extreme definition. Every other amp parameter is basically at stock. Bias is at 0, pick is at zero, clarity is at zero, pure cab is at zero, direct mix is at zero, tube shape is at 3.3, compressor is at zero, sagging is at zero.
I guess I struggle to get a good balance between no muddy, flubby, muffled-ness in my tone, with enough aggressive gain and punch with high mids, treble, and presence, balanced with not sounding too artificial and fake. When I watch videos of my favorite guitarists demoing my favorite tones, from a mic'd amp, which is supposedly what the kemper should sound like, it just has such a more organic crunch, like its actually a much cleaner sound, way less noise, (and I dont mean noise youd kill with a gate) but for example if they hit a power chord or tremolo pick the low E string, it has so much clarity , like I can hear the note so much better, yet its still insanely aggressive and dripping with gain. I'm not talking about modern metal tones, where it sounds like neutered high gain distortion, I'm talking about more like super aggressive thrash and death metal tones.
I have tried backing off the gain. It helps a little bit. I think my ears get trained to one thing and then its hard for me to comprehend a better tone when I'm playing it.
I also notice that if someone else plays my guitar I get a much better feel for the tone than I do when I'm playing, which is partly psychological and partly where I am sitting in relation to my FRFR speaker. I also notice that with this FRFR, the "sweet spot" is very small, and the sound completely changes with by inches of movement or angle to the speaker. Like I basically have to have it pointing directly at my head to hear the "true" tone, otherwise if I am off to the side it is a little bit ambiguous, slightly.
Maybe my problem is that I twist the knobs too much. Maybe I need to be more subtle, and have a finer, more finesse type of care for listening to the tones and realizing "oh that actually sounds pretty good" instead of, no, it needs a shit ton more presence. I dont know. just my observations
