Posts by brithedark

So is it no longer possible to get the free sample pack? was hoping to try them. got a few albums that it might be cool on

Did this ever get sorted out for you. I am having the same issue now. Driving me nuts. And I have checked rig integrity.

Thanks for the replies so far. As far as the mixer. I have thought about it. For me I'm just trying to keep the signal path as clean as possible. Right now I have cab mics running straight into an xlr bay which hard patches into API or focusrite pres. I can't afford a mega quality mixer and would like to use the pews I have as the profiling source.

On a phone between sessions. Will study both your answers better in a little bit. M

Interesting about the speaker patch bay. I kinda did this. My ISO booths contain 4X12s. Each cab has 4 diff speakers. Each speaker has a 57 and condenser. There is a bay outside the booths and a wall of amp heads. There are banana plugs you can patch any head into any combination of speakers depending impedance

I might have posted this some time ago. But maybe you can help me come up with a better workflow. I KNOW other larger studios deal with this.

My studio has 3 rooms, plus 2 iso booths with pre-miced 4x12s. Guys will bring heads in, we patch them to a cab. The mics are hardwired to preamps, and the preamps feed a Pro Tools HD rig.

My dilemma is this: When we find a tone we dig, there's no good way to Profile the amp@ I don't use a console. Sometimes, a guitar player will play a DI signal in the control room, and we feed the amps/cabs with reamp boxes in the far rooms. If they have a ton of pedals, they stand in the far room near the iso booths and plug straight into the amps (I always tap somewhere though, for a DI feed).

If I want to A/B the sound of the Profile being taken, vs the mic feed, its a bit of a nightmare. Much of the time, I have guitar player and Kemper in control room. The guitar player plugs into the Kemper. DI out feeds a preamp into Pro Tools track 1. Main Kemper out feeds track 2. Amp mic is track 3. I feed the Pro Tools DI track to the far room amp heads. I tap off the output of the track 3, amp mic and run it into the Kemper return. All this is running thru the Pro Tools mix engine, for better or worse. Don't know how else to practically do it. We Profile thru the Pro Tools mixer, not ideal.

The only other way is to drag the Kemper into the far room and monitor in headphones, and do all the mic taps and such without going thru Pro Tools as much. BUT monitoring thru headphones does not help much. I need to hear how its coming thru the monitors.

My goal is to get the sound clients hear and approve coming thru my monitors, to get that inside the Kemper so they don't need to bring their amps back for the same sound again. I know its possible. I'm just hoping for a simpler method that doesn't take as much time/routing to set up. Always seems like something doesn't quite work at the end of a session when everyone's tired.

Am I making sense here? I imagine larger studios wish to/actually do Profile from the control room. And the amps are probably far away. So how do YOU/THEY do it?

The big thing with netbooks, someone mentioned before, some may not run the software. So I have to be careful which Craigslist Jem I pick. I'd rather not set up the virtual machine on this computer. I DO have it running on my MBpro but again, its not the most practical idea, esp at 230AM in the middle of a session when it would be helpful to scroll through a librarian instead of twiddle.

I do like the "external" computer idea better. Because here, I''ve got 2 screens running during a session. It would help to not have the lib buried under my PT and sampler screens.

You mean running parallels on my 10.6.8 machine?

I realize 10.6.8 is old. I'd like to not give the impression I'm some old fuddy duddy who hates those thar computer thingies. I have 6 macs running on the property, and have been been a mac user since the early 90s.

It just so happens that the main machine in my largest studio is running 10.6.8, and that's where the kemper lives. Moving to 10.7 requires me upgrading plugins and such which would interfere/introduce potential crashes to the system that is my main money maker. I've got a 10.8 drive as a test drive out here, but I'm in the middle of several large projects that need plugins that won't work prop there... So 10.7+ is a few months away for me minimum. It'll happen one day when things slow enough here to thoroughly test stuff. Guess that's a good prob to have, except when you're trying to thumb thru one of 300 samples you've already taken for clients rrrrrrr.

I'm partiality disabled, and carrying things can be problematic. So rather than drag my mb pro out to the studio, or drag the kemper home to make tweaks, I was hoping for the lightest, least chance of me dropping something/wrecking something solution. A windows netbook seems like the smallest footprint (can't justify a MacBook Air to run one program) and easiest on the finances. I've used parallels on my mb pro but it's cumbersome. I wish there was an iPad solution. But for now....

Hey, A guy can ask can't he? Thanks all for the responses

Many of us studio owners are still on 10.6.8 and moving off it would be incredibly problematic. This means the new Mac Rig Manager still won't help. We're either forced to buy Netbooks or some other gizmo just to use Rig Manager. I can't imagine its that hard to write a USB driver for 10.6.8. Kemper, is there ANY chance?

I'm sure it complicates matters using Pro Tools as my main mixer. In my universe, it was simple to wire the rooms such that in each room there is a patch bay. Those patch bays accept mic feeds. Then they tie directly into the preamps in the control room. The preamp outs go into the pro tools 192 interfaces. There's no easy way to analog tap off the preamp outs. I could make a new patch bay matrix …

Doing it thru Pro Tools… I've set it up to where the signal routing is correct. It's just that the profiles don't turn out quite right. Small wonder considering all the processing involved.

I'm also trying to maintain the cleanest path for my mic signals into the PT interface… So I was hesitant to run the preamp outs thru a patch bay or tapping matrix.

Am I correct in saying that the biggest part of the puzzle is getting my preamp outs run into the profiler? Are all the inputs on the Profiler balanced (except the front gtr input)? My patch bays are all balanced. Just making sure I am not trying to plug a TRS connector into a jack looking for a TS signal.

So I've used my Kemper probably on 300-400 sessions already. Tones blast out of radio/computers/iphones. It's fantastic. I've convinced probably 40-50 bands that they NEED one But I have a conundrum. It's complicated so bear with me. And HELP if you can.

In my studio, it's REALLY hard to sample amps because of wiring complexities. It's a 4 room setup. Control, Middle Room, Far Room, Amp Room. Bands typically load amps into the amp room and they stand either in the Control Room or the Far Room. Sometimes the heads end up in the control room, with speaker cable runs to the amp room.

Typically, a guitarist sits in control room with me. We plug him straight into a Great River preamp. That goes straight into Pro Tools. Many times, we send a properly adjusted signal DURING TRACKING from Pro Tools to one of the amps in the amp room. Why? I want the cleanest DI signal available for reamping. Sometimes I will use a direct box, with the 1/4" split going straight to the head, and the XLR signal going to the Great River.

Using a real world example, a guy came in to track. We had his head in the control room. Head fed the cab 4 rooms away via 100' gigantic speaker cable. He plugged into a DI box, which sent XLR to Great River to Pro Tools, and the DI Box 1/4" tap fed the head. In this case, his tone was pretty pure. The cab was miked up with a 57 and tube mic, and those mics ran into some API 3124 preamps into Pro Tools. The sound was HUGE and we loved it. It took a while to dial it in. But we loved it. At the end of the night, the goal was to capture THAT sound with the Kemper. Whilst patching things together the way I thought it should be (basically had to set up a Pro Tools IO loop where the software had to get involved sending and returning signals). Needless to say, the profiles didn't work well.

I have had success if we just load the amp into a main room. Drag the Kemper into the room. Unhook a rack of preamps and hook EVERYTHING up in that room. But then I need to monitor thru a headphone amp in that room. Not ideal for making profile ab comparisons. Plus it's a drag to unwire all that stuff. With this method, we never get to hear the amp in context. And I cannot mix multiple mics into one feed into the Kemper. In my above example, we would've sampled the amps in the amp room, without benefit of being in the control room to hear how it blended with mix/ which speakers to use etc.

Am I trying to do something it's not meant to do? Lots of bigger studios than mine use this thing. And I'm sure sampling is the last thing on their mind when loading in 8 amps and picking which ones work with mix. Once things are dialed in, miked up and sent to recorders, THEN you'd sample that amazing tone you developed right? Or am I thinking of things wrong? I see videos where the bands are standing in the control room A/Bing the profile. I cannot for the life of me figure out the workflow to get this done, without routing a million things thru pro tools. I will admit, I don't have a gigantic multi bus analog console. I've no need for it since all my rooms are hard wired into 32 boutique-ish preamps and mixing is done thru Pro Tools mixer.

What easy step am I missing? I want to be able to sample client amps so we don't have to reinvent the wheel every album or session.