Quote from Lokasenna
Different amps and distortion circuits will react to chords and palm mutes differently, and bursts of almost-static don't necessarily stimulate the amp in the same way.
Yeah, I guess the question is why the Kemper doesn't itself produce noises that "stimulate the amp in the same way". I mean, if it doesn't matter what guitar is used, it could have built-in guitar vamping that it uses to profile. I just don't understand why a human player has to be involved at all. The device knows better than we what it's looking for to configure its model.
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Quote from HappyKemper
Where did you hear about any internal amp models?
All digital amps use internal models. That's just the computer science term for a software simulation/representation of a real world thing/process.
Chris talks about the developing models in the interview you linked to:
Quote from Chris Kemper
simply too many interdependent parameters, and it would have taken ages to model just one or two dozen amps. As a basically lazy person I spent my time trying to find an automated method, rather than modeling amps by hand.
He defines "model" as virtual version of an amp:
Quote from Chris Kemper
By philosophy, “modeling” was used as a marketing term by some companies. It says: “Here is a valid virtual copy of a valuable original”.
He then defines "profiling" as (1) process of creating that virtual copy automatically and (2) the ability to then A/B it against the original:
Quote from Chris Kemper
Profiling is an automated approach for reaching a result that is probably too complex and multidimensional to achieve by ear. [..] Profiling, in our sense of the word, is a promise to create a virtual version of your original, but with the ability to qualify the results by a fair A/B comparison. You get what you want, and you can check what you have just got.
It doesn't necessarily make sense to talk about "models", plural. You can think of the code that simulates amps as the software model of an amp which is then configured by the profiling process. The different amp "models" in something like an AxeFX can be thought of in the same way.
As for Cliff's opinion about how Kemper works, I just googled the name and see that he's the creator of AxeFX. So I'd say there's a 99.99% chance that his guess is better than yours or mine, because he's smarter than you or I and knows more about simulating guitar amp than most people on Earth.