Difference between revisions of "Kemper KPA Creating a Profile"

Revision as of 01:46, 8 February 2016

The heart and soul of the Kemper is its profiling process. It is the source for all the profiles you can play; whether they ship as factory, are posted in the Rig Exchange, or are available for commercial purchase. You don't truly experience its voodoo until you actually profile a real amp or modeler and find how precise the Kemper gets without even beginning to tweak.

While the process of creating a profile is fairly straightforward, the number of types of profiles and merging process has made the concept slightly more confusing.

Hardware Setup

The hardware setup is simple.

1. Connect the Kemper's Direct Out/Send output to the input of your real rig, such as your first pedal in the pedalboard, or your amp's guitar input. If you have a noise gate, it should be disabled - you may want to simply remove it from your signal chain.
2. Connect the output of your real rig (typically a mic or mic preamp or possibly a DAW to the Return input of the KPA, preferably using the balanced XLR. The Kemper will not provide phantom power to a mic, so you'll have to supply such with a mic preamp, phantom power box, or possibly running the mic through your DAW interface, if it has inputs that have phantom power.

The profiling process will not capture effects, such as modulation, reverb, delay; even if they're simply natural to the room you're profiling in. It's best to remove these from the signal chain or otherwise minimize them. If you want them, you can apply them in the KPA rig's effects blocks, external effects processors in the effects loop, or via DAW post-processing when recording. The cab profile will reflect phasing issues due to close-mic'ing and multi-mic'ing, just as the real rig does.

The profiling process is not affected by latency. If you have gear that adds latency, the resulting profile still sounds the same and responds instantly. Don't be afraid to route through your DAW for comp, EQ, or similar processing before sending back to the KPA.

Profile Process

Before beginning the profiling process, it's wise to select a rig that is as similar as possible to the rig you are profiling. You will often have the same stomp and post effects as you want in the new rig, and some of the tags may match as well, not requiring to be altered in the new profile. This doesn't affect the result of the profiling process, but can save you time finalizing the rig.

The profile process is very simple:

1. Switch to Profiling Mode
2. Press the soft button to start Profiling
3. Choose whether there is a cab as part of the signal chain or not (this can even be auto-detected)
4. Press Profile - the Kemper will start sending 3 weird signals through the real rig
5. Refine the resulting profile - the first thing I do after making a profile is choosing refine and playing some large chords and low palm mutes. This gets the frequency response closer to the original often.
6. Make some small tweaks - it's best to compare the created profile vs. the reference rig right now before anything changes to affect the tone of the real rig.
7. Store the rig - press Store and go through the saving dialogs to create a new rig based on the profile. This guides you through the rig, amp, and cab tags. I prefer to skip this part at this time, or use quick, small abbreviated text that you can fill in later. Don't get bogged down spinning the soft knobs - you can type it out with a keyboard later. See Tagging. For names, I like to go ahead and type out a somewhat meaningful name, just in case I can't edit it immediately. See Naming.

Technically, that's all that needs to be done; but I like to take it a little further:

• Tweak the rig more - before storing the rig, you cannot access the full Amplifier and Cabinet profile settings. After storing, you may want to make further tweaks here. While the new rig should sound virtually identical to the real rig, you may find some slight tweaks can help improve things that sounded poor in the original rig, such as reducing mic phasing (using Pure Cab), fattening up the tone (by lowering Definition), or altering the low and high resonances of the cab (low and high shift in the Cab profile). You could also improve the sound of the distortion tone with pre-EQ or a boost pedal. Or some precise post-EQ to really get a nice, full sound.
• Revisit tags and rig name in Rig Manager, quickly typing in the correct tags for all possible parameters.

Profile Types

Here's a list of the different kinds of profiles you create:

• Studio - a set of amp and cab profiles created using the traditional profiling process
• Direct Amp (often called a DI Profile) - an amp profile created by taking the feed from a DI box connected to the speaker output of an amp (with the speaker cab or a load box connected after the DI box) - this process does not create a corresponding cab profile
• Merged - a set of amp and cab profiles resulting from merging the cab profile of a Studio profile with a Direct Amp profile. This kind of profile faithfully recreates the sound of the amp attached to the profiled cab while the Cab block is disabled, allowing dual output for live situations
• Direct Output or Preamp Profile - can be a set of amp and cab profiles or just an amp profile after FW 3.0. This is a profile of an amp pre-amp, returning the output of the pre-amp (often the effects loop send) to the KPA.

Studio and Merged profiles contain both amp and cab profiles, while Direct Amp and Direct Output/Preamp profiles only have an amp profile.

The only difference in the profiling process is selecting No Cab on the first page of the profiling dialog. The rest of the difference depends on what the real rig consists of. Merged profiles additionally are put through the merging process.

Merging

Naming

Tagging