Longterm Test
A few months’ gigging, recording and everything that goes with it – welcome to Guitarist’s longterm test report
Becoming a dad is great, but it undoubtedly comes with side-effects on your ability to make music, especially if you’re a bit of a night-owl, as I am. Back in the days before our daughter was born, if I fancied doing some recording in the evening, I’d go up to the music room in the loft, crank up the amps and make merry until neighbourly relations were under threat. If I wound things up by about 10pm, no one complained, giving me a good two or three hours of fun. However, with the advent of a sleepy little one, turning up a valve amp after 7pm isn’t really a goer. That’s not impacted my playing so much, as there are plenty of ways to practise quietly, but it has impacted my home recordings. Previously, I’d mic my Dr Z up with an SM57 and get reasonably loud to achieve the recorded electric tone I wanted. Now, it’s much trickier to get really good quality down on a recording without waking our slumbering infant up.
So I began thinking about some of the best ways to get really good sounds down silently.
The good news is that you’re spoilt for choice these days. I’ve already enjoyed using Line 6’s Helix LT live on stage for a Brian Eno retrospective in Bristol, but I’ve not yet managed to use a Kemper profiling amp for any serious projects. Determined to remedy this, I spoke to Thomas Wendt of Kemper at NAMM and he very obligingly suggested I should hang on to our recently reviewed Kemper Stage to put it through its paces in a long-term test.
As many of you will know, Kemper’s technology is a little different to other modelling amps, being officially termed a ‘profiling’ amplifier. In essence, Kemper’s technology involves running a test signal through any amp, then analysing the return to create a detailed digital model or ‘profile’ of that amp’s voice, which sounds extremely authentic. Kemper has built up an archive of thousands of such profiles, including some of the most sought-after vintage and boutique amps in the world. Kemper put it more impressively in the press release calling the Stage “a multi-effects powerhouse and state-of-the-art guitar amplifier, featuring Kemper’s unique Profiling technology for capturing the sonic DNA of any guitar amp...”
High Profile
As you’d expect, Kemper’s products come ready loaded with a phalanx of great amp profiles on board ready to use – you can add to these as you please by doing your own profiling or by downloading any of the zillions of profiles (including cabinets and effects as well as amps) made by an army of dedicated Kemper users.
The new Stage version of the Kemper profiler follows the lead of Line 6’s broadly comparable Helix and the Fractal Audio AX8 in putting the whole gubbins into a pedalboard-style chassis rather than a head, to facilitate easier use as a performance tool. Its sleek form factor and understated styling have already drawn me in a bit, so it was a quietly excited Guitarist editor who loaded the Kemper Stage into his car to take home and use as the tonal heart of his home recording setup for the next few months.
Back at home, I fire it up and have the obligatory blind-ignorant poke-about through the presets and controls. I should be more methodical and patient, I know. It’s not as instantly intuitive as the Helix, but I’d been warned about this by other users and advised to push past the initial learning curve to the tonal riches that lay beyond. After 10 minutes of hit-and-miss knob-twiddling and buttonpressing I’m beginning to see how the Stage is laid out – but I’m also getting inklings of just how powerful and deeply configurable this thing is. It’s clear that I’m not going to be able to do more than very lightly scratch the surface of its capabilities until I educate myself a bit further – and that the inevitable RTFM (read the fucking manual) moment has arrived with this device, a bit sooner than usual, but with the promise of some very powerful capabilities beckoning me onward.
It takes about 30 seconds to download the manual onto my Mac. I gulp slightly when I see it’s 297 pages long. However, a quick skim reveals I won’t need to absorb anything like that amount of detail to start working effectively with it, which is encouraging. The Stage has plenty of I/O options on the back of the unit, so getting sounds out of it and into my 32-track Tascam digital portastudio should be no problem. For now though, it’s time to put down the guitar and become a student of the Kemper so I can unleash some of its most epic sounds on my recordings as soon as possible… without waking the baby.
“Kemper has built up an archive of thousands of profiles, including some of the most sought-after vintage and boutique amps in the world”