The Kemper Profiling Amp

Now, after spending much time creating a pedalboard with a whole host of stompbox effects controlled via a dedicated looper pedal, I have done the obvious thing most gear heads do after a few months and have packed it all in for something else! This time it is the infamous Kemper Profiling Amp –

After realising the sale of quite a few of my analog gear could finally fund this digital behemoth, and after my band giving me an advance on some studio gear I was trading with them I decided to go shopping. Surprisingly my posts on social media with my blatantly lowball offer of £800 got a response, and not only that but at my asking price. The Kemper comes in two form-factors, one is the recent rackmount version, but the other is the slightly odd “toaster” or “lunchbox” version, as it is known. I was after the former, and offered the latter – but at that price I thought “why not?”

For those not familiar with this rather space-age looking piece of kit, the Kemper basically “steals” the sound of any amp setup, using a process called “profiling”, where the profiler sends a variety of signals (including you playing your guitar) through an amp in order to recreate the exact sound. Amazingly this can not only accurately replicate most amps, but appears to be able to seperate the sound of both the amp itself and the speaker cabinet the sound is profiled through – Kemper do describe the process on their site – it appears to be some kind of extremely complex version of convolution sampling on multiple levels – but so far I’ve just been telling people it “uses witchcraft and satanic magic in order to steal your amp’s soul”. The specific technology and techniques are sadly proprietary, so perhaps we can just settle with that for now anyway.

As it stands I have so far set it up using a “live” rig, with a power amp and physical speaker cab output, while disabling the cab simulation on the Kemper itself (obviously you don’t need to simulate a cab while using a real one). Loading up a Peavey 5150 profile and having a quick tweak, I have to admit the sound out of the box is phenomenal, and I look forward to experimenting properly with it. The Laney IRT Studio pictured beneath, while hardly a boutique bit of kit, will likely be my first “experiment” in profiling, and I will be posting a tutorial and video on how this process is achieved, and how successful I am.

As a side note, this purchase actually hearken’s back to one of my older posts – as the Behringer FCB1010 MIDI pedal can also be used to control the Kemper. Additionally it seems there is a dedicated UnO chip available for the Kemper, so I have ordered one and will post later with a tutorial on installing and setting this up (apparently it is far simpler than the standard UnO with Amplitube).

The Hotone Heart Attack

I’ll have to admit I’ve got caught up a bit recently in the trend of mini amps – arguably popularised by Orange’s Tiny Terror, the idea of a small form factor, low wattage guitar amp has evidently captured a lot of guitarists’ imaginations. With both Peavey and Mesa miniaturising some of their flagship amps this was clearly becoming a popular choice amongst the high-gain crew.
My current main amp is one of these – the 15w Laney IRT Studio, which despite it’s relatively low power I found more than capable of knocking out gig-level volume and being incredibly versatile.

While taking a step back in terms of versatility as well as size, another range of amps that caught my eye recently was Hotone’s range of nano heads – specifically the high-gain model known as the Heart Attack.

This is an incredibly small 5W transistor head that is supposedly modelled in terms of sound after a Mesa Dual Rectifier – certainly a bold claim there! In terms of features it has gain and master volume controls as well as a 3-band EQ. On the back it has cab output with a surprisingly wide range of 16 to 4 ohm output, as well as the extremely welcome addition of a dedicated FX Loop – to me this was the game-changer as it allowed the use of my Decimator G-String (yeah it’s a terrible name) noise gate as well as a host of other FX which are more effective in the loop. There is also a headphone output and aux input on the back, although I haven’t had need to use either of these yet.

So, can it djent? Have a listen –

As can be seen here there’s certainly a lot of gain on offer! In fact I found it impossible, even with the gain knob on 0, to get a “clean tone”. The tamest sound it would make was akin to a gritty, bluesy tone. Of course this won’t deter the high gain fans, and in terms of crunch I can say I was extremely impressed. The EQ also offered a good, wide range on all 3 bands, so while it’s a bit of a one-trick pony in the gain department, the simple EQ added a level of versatility which allowed a great deal of wiggle room within the heavier genres.

In terms of volume it’s what you’d expect from a 5w transistor amp – not much really, although certainly more than loud enough for jamming in your bedroom or recording. If you band just needs one live tone, however, the FX Loop output also allows you to connect to an additional power amp, so if paired with something like EHX’s Magnum 44 pocket power amp, could very much be a gig-worthy bit of kit for those who play heavy but travel light. If Hotone were to create a dual-channel amp, combining this with one of their cleaner offerings and a more powerful output section while retaining a comparably small form factor, that could certainly be a product live musicians could also get their teeth into!

Going Digital – getting to know the GLD-80

After my first stint at my new job at Bradford University and being essentially dropped headfirst into their hectic graduation ceremonies at the end of the year, I emerged fairly confident in my abilities, yet somewhat unimpressed with the technology we were using at the time – specifically the ancient Yamaha analog mixing desk we were using to run the sound from. While the lighting desk is equally ancient, it does the job rather well in conjunction with hired LED lighting we use from the stage side, but the audio desk caused some issues. Most notably with feedback and keeping the fairly under-powered front of house system under control.

With this in mind I was overjoyed to be asked how this might be improved, and I suggested investing in a more modern digital desk. Originally, thinking about budget constraints I suggested the cheap but fully-featured Behringer X32. However as it transpired we were in the running for something higher end – enter the Allen and Heath GLD-80;

While most of my experience at uni with digital desks was with the venerable Yamaha LS9, this is much the same principles of operation, but very different in practice.

The first major difference and one of the newer advances that has me firmly in the digital desk camp these days, is the use of a digital stage box – we actually got 2 of these with the desk, both the large GLD AR2412 (a 24in/12out affair) and the smaller GLD-AR84 (8in/4out). These allow the engineer to do away with cumbersome analog multicore cables and run their entire audio digitally via a single CAT5 cable. This is supposedly limited to runs of around 70 metres, however I was delighted to take a chance with our great hall’s existing network patch bays (it’s a pretty long distance to the stage) and was both impressed and relieved to see this work out of the box.

Another recent development common to most digital desks is remote control via tablets, specifically the iPad. As you may notice the above screenshot shows an iPad box, and this actually came free with the desk as a promotion. While it’s an older model when used simply for controlling it’s a really handy bit of kit. Simply connect a router to the desk and download their GLD Remote app, connect to the router’s network and access the desk remotely. We found even with a cheap domestic router it worked at pretty impressive distances, with a solid connection even from the back of the great hall stage. This solves a fundamental setup issue for us, as our desk is situated right at the top of the hall in a projection booth, which is far from ideal for audio applications.

GUI of the GLD Remote app for iPad – showing channel settings with EQ controls.

While there’s probably far too much stuff to go into regarding both the GLD and digital desks in general to fit into one short blog post (I could go on all day about the effects, dynamics and EQ sections removing the previous need for a whole host of external rack gear), one absolute killer feature of digital desks is the ability to recall scenes. For example previously setting up a band with an analog desk meant if the headliners soundchecked first, you would pretty much have to get out a pen and paper in order to remember specific settings – once support bands came and went your desk was likely not set anywhere near that lovely sound you got for the main act in the soundcheck. With most digital desks instead of having a physical cue sheet and tediously adjusting settings back you simply save the current state of the desk as a “scene” in the internal memory, then recall that scene to exactly where you wanted it at the touch of a button.

While there aren’t really multiple full setups occuring in our graduation ceremonies, after soundchecking the day before my manager asked what we needed to do in order to set up every year – I simply said “go to this menu, and select this scene – the desk will set itself up for graduation”. Needless to say the look on his face showed that he approved of this purchase!

New (really old) Guitar Cabs

I keep an eye out for bargains a lot of the time, despite currently having ridiculously low income right now. One place I’d actually popped on in order to sell a load of gear is Musician’s Mart NE – a facebook group where musicians can exchange gear without the rape that is ebay’s seller fees. It’s also a great place to pick up the occasional bargain if you’re shrewd enough.

Quite an interesting one popped up today – a lad in the area was selling a pair of 2×12″ Carlsboro cabs. They were advertised as old PA cabs at first but it seemed after a few people talked about it they were in fact guitar cabs. This piqued my interest, especially since my band may need a few new cabs for our practice rooms and the price had dropped to a mere £20. OK, they looked pretty battered but I thought the guy is only 20mins down the road and he’s practically giving them away – so I asked if he knew what cones were in there. He replied “celestions” which for £20 was good enough for me to scrounge a lift off Palmer and pick em up. Here they are;

They look kinda knackered to say the least, but the majority of damage was a bit of rips and a load of dust on the tolex. They seemed solid enough. After that I decided to open em up and see what was inside cab no.1!

So this was kind of weird, no branded covers on the speakers so I have no idea what they are! They did however have a code on them, which I decided to google –

This guide I found seemed to identify them as a “pre-Rola” Celestion G12H, so the lad was indeed right about the Celestions. The date is actually quite specific, with “DG30” translating to a manufacturing date of July 20th, 1971 – 42 years old! Another post on the Marshall forums also said that the T1217 “pre-rola” greenbacks were actually quite rare as well, so a good buy! Unfortunately after testing the cab only one of the speakers appeared to work – I’m going to have a better look at the soldering but since the lad claimed he used these speakers for a bass cab once I can see what might have screwed it! At least one of them works though so that’s cool.

The next cab I couldn’t get the back off! The screws holding it on were unfortunately rather old and rusted so without the aid of a drill to bore them out I could only pull back the panel as far as I could to get a look inside –

Well I can already tell these bad boys are greenbacks! Let’s dangle the phone in and see what the spec is..

So there we go! Seems to be wired in parallel so that’s a 60w, 8ohm cab. These speakers also look to be in significantly better nick than the ones housed in their sibling. Just to be sure I fired up the Laney VC50 and plugged in the cab. Both speakers worked this time, sounded really nice too!

There were some issues with the jack input however so will do a quick resoldering job on that. also I think I may keep the cab and re-tolex the outside as well as adding some fresh new screws to the back panels.

Anyway this just goes to show that if you know your gear you can find some great stuff for cheap. Most people tend to see knackered looking old cabs and not think about the actual speakers which reside inside them. This shows if you know your stuff you might pick up an absolute bargain!

Random Acts – Recording Live Opera at the Hatton Gallery

Last week’s recording session with composer Agustin Fernandez went great – but that didn’t stop me approaching today with a certain level of trepidation. At our previous opera recording session, whilst trying to work around an entire orchestra’s other commitments, we decided to record both a live set at Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery; a public exhibition of the piece, then on the same night to adjourn to a large recital room in Newcastle University in order to record excerpts from the full, 15-minute performance which could be edited down and used for the Channel 4 short animation piece.

On the plus side, this time I’d economised on luggage. Although I still wielded the sackbarrow of doom, it was nowhere near as hard moving it up to newcastle this time, and I also arrived an hour early, just to be on the safe side.

The Hatton Gallery, our first venue, is a very nice acoustic space – certainly not the kind of space you’d want to record a rock band in, but for classical music the reverberant character of our gallery room seemed great. We discussed the placement of the musicians and I set about placing microphones –

The Hatton Gallery performance area.

Another angle, showing the skylight above the performance area.

The first issue was where to set myself up – thankfully there were two sets of large pillars either side of the hall, so I managed to borrow what appeared to be the perfect piece of furniture for doing my job (even had holes cut for my cables!) and hid myself out of sight. For my recording rig I used my ADK/Scan 8600SB laptop, along with a Scarlett 18i6 USB audio interface and a Profire 2626 in analog standalone mode to provide extra preamps for the Scarlett. After getting this set up it was simply a case of securing the cables.

My audio recording gear, set up hidden behind some pillars.

Or so I thought. As it turned out there were some creative elements I hadn’t yet been informed of. Apparently the soprano and bass singers were required to move about onstage – it had been implied that they would have a relatively fixed position with some movement, but when I realised quite how far the soloists would be moving across the stage I had a slight panic. First I set up the AKG C414 mics up at either corner of the stage, pointing across the area the singers would be traversing diagonally. I also set the mics to “hypercardioid” mode which made them a lot more directional. The idea was to at least specifically cover the area with some kind of mic and hopefully maintain some balance.
Thankfully, we also managed to source some radio mics from the Uni’s Culture Lab. Which solved the problem.
Or so I thought. Once the performance started we had some issues, and the soprano’s radio mic didn’t work correctly! We did have some nice recordings of the bass singer but Bonnie’s voice was only picked up on the far mics I placed earlier!

Shot of the live performance, with some of Lyn’s handmade dress in the foreground.

Thankfully, my plan worked and when listening back the mics did indeed pick up a good deal of Bonnie’s performance. Which was just as well, since due to time constraints despite the fact there was a second performance later on, I had to pack my mics down between these and leg it over to the Uni building where the recital suite awaited.

Agustin conducting the orchestral section and choir.

The recital suite was an interesting room, far dryer in character than the Hatton Gallery; a wood-panelled hall with huge curtained windows at one end. I was a little jealous in a way, because my own college at Teesside was entirely modern and had none of the class or charm this old building had.

The Recital room at Newcastle University.

Of course there was something far more grand in there too – a grand! A Steinway grand piano, to be precise. I completely suck at piano, but at the same time I had to have a quick tinkle on the keys purely because these things are worth a fortune. Sounded amazing too, but It was short-lived as I was on a strict schedule to get things set up in time for performers arriving from the Hatton Gallery.

                                           The Steinway Grand Piano in the recital room.

In due time the performers arrived, just as I was finishing setting up the mics – or so I thought. Seems there was some absolutely crazy electrical interference in the area of the room I had chosen to place the quartet – so several of the mics needed to be moved until this interference was minimised. Thankfully moving everyone about a bit we got some good gain levels and did a few passes at each of the sections.

                                Panoramic shot of the recital room recording session.

After that we all cracked open a few bottle of champagne and toasted a job well done. Although personally I hate champagne, it would be remiss of me to not partake after such a busy night’s work! I have to say it was quite the experience. Certainly working with the musicians was a joy and Agustin was (unsurprisingly) very professional. It’s often quite daunting working with musicians who have a working background that differs from yours, so it’s a nice surprise to work with someone like Agustin and realise you are for the most part on the same page when it comes to recording. I dread to think what everyone first thought when a sweaty, bearded metaller turned up in combat shorts with a sackbarrow in tow, but thankfully people’s warmth and friendliness assured me that I’d at least convinced them that this odd little hobbit actually knew what he was doing! Cheers!

Dory Gets Her Head Shaved

So this Sunday I’m doing a freebie for a friend – her name is Dory Dronsfeld and she’s shaving off the dreadlocks she’s had for ever in order to raise money for charity. This is the final event in a “family fun day”, also raising money for charity, at the Dolphin Centre in Darlington. As they had some announcements to do from the stage as well as a few acoustic acts I offered to provide the PA. It turned out on arrival there was already a more powerful PA in the room! But it seems the council want money for all the add-ons so we used my little Peavey system anyway;

Dory being made bereft of dreads for charity. Have a click for zoom on the panoramic goodness!

Probably the highlight of the music was the extremely talented Anthony Davison – who unfortunately played later on as a lot of people were leaving. Still, I hadn’t seen the guy play live in years, since the days of him playing 10-minute long solos behind his head to “Sweet Home Alabama” – so I can say this was a definite improvement! Some beautiful work on the nylon-stringed guitar. We were also treated to his brother Chris playing some more rock-oriented stuff (including a cover of QOTSA’s “no one knows”) and OCR keyboardist Steven Palmer on his Ukelele (including a cover of “Gangster’s Paradise” – I shit you not).

To cap the day off there was a raffle, and although I didn’t win anything initially, fate must have been smiling – my friend Karl won a £10 butcher’s voucher. Unfortunately, Karl is a vegetarian! So on his way out he gave it to my girlfriend, and we had epic steak time! Cheers Karl, you are a gentleman and a scholar.

New MIDI interface

It’s a bit late in the day for my Independent Study – which is due in shortly – but I finally recieved my 4in/4out MIDI interface today (apologies for the atrocious quality of my camera.. this applies retroactively to all my photos actually);

Now this thing cost around £27 imported from good old China. The build quality is excellent with a sturdy metal box, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to M-audio’s far, far more expensive Midisport interfaces. What it bears an exact resemblance to is the Prodipe midi interface, which at around £42 is clearly a bit more outlay for a marginally different logo printed on the side.
That aside, performance seems fine in the basic tests I ran. The reason this is a good investment for anyone controlling a whole band via MIDI is the multiple inputs. More importantly it’s the named multiple inputs – MIDI is a protocol as old as I am so unsurprisingly even your cheap £4 USB midi converters do the job for most applications. The problem when you’re putting them into Cubase or Pro Tools is that they all come up with the same device name, at a gig this is a problem because for troubleshooting purposes you really, really want to know which port is your drums and which is your guitar pedal. Since this interface has 4 inputs all named by port, you know exactly what’s plugged in where. Moreover it is far better constructed in a rugged metal case, and you have less USB cables to worry about too. After testing it I’d certainly add it to the spec of any band setup using all software with a PC.

Live Band Practice – Tool – “Sober” Cover.

So after a bit of messing on and a couple of band practices we got a cover of Tool’s “Sober” to a listenable standard and recorded the session;

We used Amplitube/Superior and ran it all through Cubase, the results were actually pretty decent, although the drum sensitivity needs some work and the guitar tone could do with a bit more beef. Possibly a second guitar line would sort this. The vocal dynamic processing turned out rather well I thought since while I was still figuring out which pedals to hit I ended up moving my head about quite a lot. There were a few mess-ups (mainly on my part) but the end result was a pretty decent demo. We all agreed that at a gig we would most definitely have got away with it blasting out a PA system.

Second practice with the band

Getting bands that are available has proven something of a challenge, so in response to that I have formed my own Grunge covers band with a couple of friends to test out the gear in a live environment. It’s not looking like I’m going to get a band playing an actual gig in time so the next best thing is to test the gear in a similar environment.
 The first session we already had went quite well – more of a ‘setup’ session than anything else, it initially took a while to get going but setting up the drums for our drummer (who is left handed.. actually we’re all left handed!) required us to move the kit about a fair bit. Having said that, some cable issues aside it was relatively simple to get the kit swapped over and working fine through superior.

Once we had the kit set up the guitars once again worked quite easily – now I have a working method for the FCB1010 pedal’s MIDI configuration applying each preset we required to it’s own pedal in Amplitube was as easy as hitting the MIDI controller within the program and selecting a program change number. The only isse I need to address is which stompboxes turn on when selecting a preset – this implies I will need to either reprogram the FCB1010’s behaviour when moving about preset program change values, or simply settle on some solid presets for each pedal and decide my required stompbox settings when they are loaded.

To explain that in layman’s terms – when I switch to another preset, I might want say the tubescreamer pedal automatically engaged. If I leave it on in Amplitube, that’s fine and it will always load with the tubescreamer on as it’s initial state. The only problem is the stompbox pedals on the FCB1010 won’t reflect this until you hit the pedal a couple of times – thankfully you can tell the FCB1010 to engage certain stompbox lights when you turn on a preset, so in order to get accurate visual info about what pedals are on, I need to tell the FCB1010 directly what to turn on.

Moving onto the bass, it was incredibly simple – our bassist Lee specified a sound he’d like and we simply dialled it in like you would any other amp. We could technically do exactly the same MIDI control method as the guitars, but in this case the bass really didn’t require changing sound a great deal, as is often the case with live bassists. We have however decided to add a distortion pedal later to ‘beef up’ the solo sections of some songs.

I also tried routing vocal mics through Cubase and adding effects like reverb and compression. We had some issues getting the gain output levels right while still getting a nice recorded level but we persevered and it all worked admirably.

The whole session was then routed out via a secondary stereo group on the Profire 2626 to a mixing desk, then to some stage monitors which we used as a PA system. At first we had major problems with signal distortion but some tweaking the gain settings on the desk got us working just fine.

System stability was one thing I was curious about as although we were only practicing a few songs it gave a good opportunity to see how well the system works over long periods of time. Thankfully we had zero issues with the software, it was as solid as a rock throughout.

Setting up live software with a full band

Finally I got the opportunity to do some real objective work with a full band – this weekend I got Goy Boy McIlroy round to have a mess on with the gear and set up some sounds –

Glen being subjected to some form of Dave-based ritual.

At first we set up a few sounds – the band are very, very used to traditional analog gear and the drummer was especially wary of the electric kit, so it was interesting to see how well they took to the new tech and how musical the results were. Understandably the drums were the hardest to set up – requiring some shuffling around of the kit and some velocity settings to match Al’s playing style. Thankfully he responded really well to the mesh heads and although it will clearly take some practice to get used to the kit the results were promising. He seemed particuarly impressed at how easy it was to change the complete sound of the kit, for example using completely different cymbals at the touch of a button.

For bass and guitar I first introduced guitarist Goy to the FCB1010 control pedal. Once again as I’d already set up the MIDI values the actual use of this he found just as easy as any other guitar pedal and he was impressed with the versatility and how easy it was to add and manipulate effects. The downside to this is that he didn’t really get into the software MIDI side of things so I still think that many guitarists are going to either need a dedicated guitar tech, or have some prior production knowledge to set this up from scratch. Nevertheless he enjoyed playing with the various amps and effects within amplitube and the performance side went great. We tried to create some sounds based on his favourite acts too – we loaded in some samples of The Black Keys and BMRC, and although we weren’t too close to a true ‘soundalike’ tone, we got some sounds that he was very happy with.

The same pretty much applied to bass, with the exception that this time we used hardware stomp boxes for distortion and modulation, then fed those into Amplitube’s Ampeg bass plugin. Once again we got a pretty cool BMRC gritty bass tone relatively quickly and the bassist Glen seemed fairly impressed.

FCB1010 (guitar) and Glen's stompboxes (bass).

Once we had the basics down I also ran Dave’s vocal through a convolution reverb plugin for good measure and sent that out the main mix too. The results were surprisingly decent for a first practice, but Al clearly needed more time to get used to the electric drums. Goy on the other hand seemed to like every tone that came out of amplitube. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I’ll get time for another session with the band and we can get some live tracks recorded.