Posts by guitarist1977

Quote from Sorrelity

What profile should I use? I'm not sure what you mean by reamp.

You can use any of the factory profiles. Just tell us what you have used. reamping is sending recorded dry sound back to your Kemper input (I use alternative input) and recording from master as you usually do. Look at the manual it is well described there.

Quote from Sorrelity

I'm probably gonna look into buying a better strat, what would you recommend for a steve ray Vaughn type sound?

Don't rush. First check what is wrong. Your start could be perfectly fine. For SRV tone I'd recommend 13th gauge strings

Quote from Sorrelity

What strat do you use? I don't think my strat is very good, it sounds nothing like yours when I'm playing clean or with any effects added. It just sounds like any other electric I have. It sounds very digital when I switch to the neck pickups as well which I really hate about it.

I use Mexican Strat (don't remember the exact model). The only thing that I changed were pickups. I put Suhr ML into the bridge and neck positions. But as far as I remember the stock pickups were not all that bad.

Obvious things to check on the guitar:
1. pickups height. It should not be too close. My neck pickup is actually very low.
2. Put a fresh set of strings. Old strings can sound muddy as hell.
3. Check if the tone pots are working properly.
4. If you have volume knob down put it to max and see if it will change the sound.
5. If you have long guitar cable or bad guitar cable it can drop highs significantly.
6. Check the model of your guitar (there is a serial number and you can contact fender to get the model name). Check what others are saying about this specific model.
7. If you use light gauge of strings consider going for a heavier strings. It has almost nothing to do with a britness but the tone is thinner. I use 10th.
8. Take your guitar and go to any guitar store in a neighborhood to check if it sounds good in a real tube amp. Or download demo version of the Positive Grid Bias. Check whether it sounds the same as Kemper. If it is sounds the same the problem is with the guitar.

With Kemper you may want to reset settings. At least try to check if you have Pure Cabinet turned on. What profiles do you use?

Quote from Sorrelity

Other than that for my own use or live playing, kemper goes into my giant speaker. Either way they both sound the same.

What is this giant speaker. Make, model.

Here is me noodling on the start neck pickup with 2 different profiles.

Quote from Sorrelity

I know a heck of a lot of the tone comes from the playing, but it's mainly the gear that creates the tone in my opinion.

Well I've been there. It is not that simple. Tone comes from the all the nuances of your playing. The gear just emphasizes it. The more I play the more I realize that whatever gear I play I get the same tone with a slightly different character.

The same with all musicians. Eric Johnson sometime uses Marshall Plexi and Tube Driver or sometimes Dumble amp. But his signature tone is still the same. Andy Timmons on the recording of Resolution it is mainly Marshall Plexi with Tube Driver in the front. But live he uses MesaBoogie Lone Star with BB Preamp. Sill the same tone, slightly different character. Allan Holdsworth has been playing different amps at the different times of his career. But his signature tone is still there. I can go on and go on.

Quote from Sorrelity

I have headphones going into my kemper. I just find that every profile I use sounds very digital and almost muffled down sort of.

Headphones can be a problem. What kind of headphones do you use?

Quote from Sorrelity

I can upload a few clips of me playing and maybe you can see what I mean.

Please do. This will help a lot.

Concerning profiles sound mufled - please check that your pure cabinet settings. If it is enabled - turn it off and compare.

As for the tones, Muse use some kind of fuzz on both tracks. And if you look at the market for a fuzz pedal there are tones of them and all sound very different. Go through all fuzz pedals available on kemper and try to find the one that will put you closer to the Muse sound.

As for Eric Johnson tone - it is a holy grail for many. First thing about his tone is the the way he picks notes and does vibrato. That contributes to the tone more than anything else. Second is his guitar - strat with quite bright pickups. And he does turn down tone knob on bridge pickup to about 5-6. Third, for his solo tones he usually uses Marshall Plexi amp with volumes turned up to 10, which brings up a lot of power tubes distortion and speakers distortion as well. And the last but not least he uses Tube Driver pedal which gives smooth reach and compressed tone. And of course don't forget about tons of delay (he usually have two delays set to about 300-450ms).

So if you want to get his tone - find Marhsall Plexi profile that was profiled with volumes on 10. Put a distortion pedal in front (we don't have tube driver in kemper but some other with high compression should work). Get a strat guitar, switch to bridge single coil pickup, play around with tone knob. And don't forget to add delay (i prefer tape delay). And now learn his picking and vibrato technique.

Same for me. "Cannot connect to Rig Exchange server"

Quote from spottydog10

My Kemper sounds great on it's own and in the mix - what am I doing wrong?
Worried of Liverpool.

Nothing. It is good that you like it. I do like my Kemper as well. The whole point of this is maybe we can make it sound even better

Quote from Michael_dk

Evidently, it doesn't matter to a lot of people - but to some people, it might.

Also, say it was a bug in the firmware - and it was fixed. Maybe a lot of different rigs that were previously deemed to thin-sounding would all of a sudden be just the ticket. (Conversely, maybe some of the rigs that previously were considered great could become too thick - but see the following paragraph).

I see this as the "Low Frequency Correction" that Kemper introduced some time ago - there was an "inadequacy" in the profiling which meant that low frequencies weren't being represented faithfully. This was corrected (with an option to keep the old "setting". If the community is too eager to shut down threads such as this, that kind of stuff wouldn't be remedied. Ultimately, it's to the good of the product and hence the company (and us).

The reason to use a "scientific" method is to remove expectation bias - science don't lie, but our hearing does sometimes expecting a profile to sound nice and full will turn our attention to what "fullness" there is - and exaggerate it in our perception. Then after a time, we might notice something amiss, but at that time we might blame it on the monitor, the headphones, a bug in the firmware, whatever. Or just conclude that our tastes have changed

You are right in your view that "if it sounds good, it is good" - but guitarist1977 is ALSO right

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Exactly this. Just to clarify - I am not trying to say that Kemper is bad at profiling. It is good. But what if we can make it even better? Maybe there is a bug in profiling? And if it is fixed then whatever sounded good for you will sound even better.
The whole point of this community I believe is to help people and make product better.

Quote from alwainwright

. I'm not sure what this means. If I don't hear it, I don't hear it. I can accept that the Kemper is missing the 2nd harmonic. But if I can't hear it anyway, what difference does it make? Educate me.

The missing harmonics add to the body of the sound and how it is perceived. In certain cases it sounds good in isolation but in the mix it does not. Then you have to EQ it to sound better.

Quote from gitarretyp

I think there's a bit of a nomenclature problem in this thread. The first harmonic is the fundamental, F. The second harmonic is 2F, the third is 3F, and so forth.

Quote from digbob

use your ears
all measuring etc is misleading
if the sound is right for our ears
theres no problem
all other doesn't matter
my 2 cents

I disagree. Measurements is scientific based proof. Hearing is very subjective.

I am not a novice here. My work is related to DSP and as a hobby i build tube amps. And one of the test we do when constructing the amps is feeding the sine wave into the amp and look at the harmonics. The reason - hearing can be misleading. But the waveform and spectrum clearly shows what is going on.

Quote from gitarretyp

I think there's a bit of a nomenclature problem in this thread. The first harmonic is the fundamental, F. The second harmonic is 2F, the third is 3F, and so forth. The even harmonics are generally attributed to adding body or fullness to sound, while odd orders are often referred to as harsh and inharmonic. Even harmonics tend to be the prominent distortion content present in hifi tube amplifiers, which is partly why they are often referred to as sounding smooth compared to solid state, whose distortion spectrum is often dominated by odd order harmonics.

Looking carefully at Guitarist1977's tests, it's not just the second harmonic that is suppressed but all of the even harmonics are barely visible. I love my kemper, but these tests are quite simple to perform and the results are consistent across multiple profiles and users.

You are right. It is 2nd harmonic (and all even harmonics that are missing). I just followed the title of the thread.

I did the same test with my BIAS Desktop and it produces 1st harmonic on all modeled amplifiers.

This 2 images are from Kemper (two different profiles). Sine wave is at 300 HZ

[Blocked Image: http://s31.postimg.org/q8rhhvc7f/Screen_Shot_2016_04_22_at_1_32_37_PM.png]

[Blocked Image: http://s31.postimg.org/cp61yf8uj/Screen_Shot_2016_04_22_at_1_34_09_PM.png]

This images are for BIAS Amp two different amp models. Sine wave at 300HZ

[Blocked Image: http://s31.postimg.org/p2iw5byiz/Screen_Shot_2016_04_22_at_1_35_22_PM.png]

[Blocked Image: http://s31.postimg.org/486jni45n/Screen_Shot_2016_04_22_at_1_36_12_PM.png]

Quote from deadpan

How does one test this? I would be curious to compare.

This test of course is not perfect. But what I did, I set up sine wave generator in Logic Pro, sent this signal to Kemper input. At the same time I was capturing signal from Kemper output and recording it. Then I did spectrum analysis in Logic.

I did a brief check this morning with different profiles. I have not tried to compare them to original amp. However I see that 1st harmonic is not present in the resulting signal.

Quote from norburybrook

Yes,, but my point was if you can't hear a difference to the original amp then you won't have a problem with the profiled sound.

Here is the thing. It all depends on how you listen to it. There are lots of factors:
- profile in isolation or in the mix. it happens even with the real amps. something that sounds good alone does not sound good in the mix. certain frequencies can be masked in the mix making midrange more prominent and then you can hear the difference you never heard in the profile in isolation.
- volume level. certain frequencies are perceived differently at different volume level.
Hearing is very subjective

I am not saying that Kemper does bad job at profiling. I am just interested how different the result from the real amp.

Very interesting topic. Will try to check this with my amp.

But I disagree with statement "If it sounds good - it is good". It all depends on how do you listen. Profile may sound great in isolation, but in the mix it will loose bite or definition or thickness.

As for the first harmonic - it is an octave of the main pitch and lack of 1st harmonic will probably won't change the sound too much. However it affects the thickness of the sound and that can be heard in the mix.

Here are my thoughts:

1. I had PureCab set to 3 initially. After playing around with settings and resets somehow it got it set to 7 - which is too much. Disabling PureCab improves the tone significantly. For me. Others may like it but I guess it is not my cup of tea.
2. Fletcher-Munson of course plays its role, but it is not as significant as people usually say. I long time ago looked at those graphs and calculated approximate EQ settings for different volume levels to compensate. Those EQ settings are not too extreme. According to the graphs - low frequencies are affected more then highs.
3. Another phenomenon of human ear. If you listen to the profiles with lots of highs for about 2-3 minutes your ears get adjusted to the highs and reduce sensitivity to highs. Then if you instantly switch to profile with less highs they will sound like there are no highs at all. It is better to take a pause for 2 minutes wait till ears will restore sensitivity to highs and listed again.
4.One more thing - I judge this profile in isolation. However the proper way to judge them is in the mix.
5.It all depends on the monitors. My next exercise is to measure the real frequency response of the monitors I have (Alto TS212). Will make another post once I get more information.

I will set this thread as SOLVED for now.

Thanks a lot for your help and opinions. I will keep positing updates here as I get my way through the profiles.

Quote from Guidorist

Guys, I think this is just the matter of taste if you like this high trebles or not, I personally don't like them because a guitar speaker doesn't have these either.
so for me the XTC is the perfect choice for all rock guitar sounds:
[media]https://www.soundcloud.com/gui…rofiles-of-the-bognar-xtc[media/]
but for some metal sounds you prefer the 5xx0:
[media]https://www.soundcloud.com/gui…-profiles-of-the-pvy-5xx0[media/]
but the XTC is Not muffled at all it just has another characte, that's all

I agree - I listed to them one more time and definitely they are not muffled. Less hight frequencies then on the others, but it is a matter of personal taste. I edited my previous post so that future readers won't get incorrect understanding that the profiles are bad.

this is what guys like Scott Henderson, Mike Landau, Robben Ford, Eric Johnson do

Holdsworth also does that

the idea is that less treble hits the first stage which is before tone stack

this is helps to achieve smooth lead tone