Sunday 28 August 2016

Exploring the KPA (1)



Having kept an eye on the Kemper Profiling Amp for a long time, I finally justified buying one - to use for Church worship and recording in early August. It came this week and after very little time to tinker with it, it had its first run this Sunday afternoon.

It was only keyboard and electric guitar today, due to others being away so it was a simple case of finding a tone that worked and setting up a couple of stomps for a couple of useful effects (delay and chorus in this case).

The go-to Morgan AC20 was the profile to use this time. I ended up tweaking it to make if a bit ore trebly as the keyboard sounds (and some loops) were taking up more of the lower frequencies. Because I was then hearing it solely through the same monitors as the vocals were using, it wasn't perfect but the sound was responsive to my playing, really smooth and will have sounded great out of the main speakers.

I used the loop feature for a bit on an intro which went fine - but I really need to get used to the multitasking with this.

At the end, I fiddled with a few other profiles and the toneHAWK profile of a Divided by 13 JRT 9/15 (EL84 mode) sounded a little better to my ears in the room. It's another Voxy amp and feels like a nicer version of the Laney Cub12 I have been using for some time.

So I got home and had some Kemper time. I set up a performance with some common effects in the 5 slots, but with slightly different gain settings and default stomps. I think things will sound even better next week, and I'll have the drums and bass to contend with then.

I also had a quick go at profiling the Laney. Half of my family were sleeping at the time, so I had to do it at a really low volume, and on <1W mode so I know the best of it wasn't captured. But it still was completely usable and recognisably the same amp sound.

The one point I haven't fully resolved is what to do for monitoring at church. I have the power amp but no appropriate cab to go through. I also don't have a great FRFR speaker to use solely for the guitar - and monitoring will be harder next week.

Current plan is to use the direct out from the Kemper into the effects loop return of the Laney, and try to make that work purely for monitoring purposes. But I have to wait until daytime now to hear how that sounds.