Space Saver
Adam Goldsmith’s work takes him to some smaller studios this month, necessitating an amp-free setup
I’ve used a couple of projects I’ve had on this month to experiment with a new studio pedalboard setup. There are several great studios that I work in fairly regularly that aren’t the size of Abbey Road or AIR, and may only have a live room, control room and possibly one booth at most. Personally, I’m a real fan of these sized studios, but they do present the obvious problem of turning up guitar amps loud, or indeed having them at all. With budgets being increasingly tight in most businesses these days, sometimes studio space will be compromised slightly, and one of the first things to happen will be that I’m asked, ‘Could you DI instead of bringing an amp?’ I’ve tried various units over the years, but this month I’ve used my ‘gigging’ pedalboard into the front of a Kemper Profiler Stage, which – unusually for technology in my experience – immediately worked brilliantly.
The first sessions were a few days at legendary drummer Ralph Salmins’ studio ‘The Bunker’, just outside of London. Ralph has a fabulous-sounding Harrison desk that really adds to the guitar sound, but the basic setup is two rooms, with screens for the drums, so if there are two keys players, a drummer and an electric bass player also in the live room, as there were in this case, I opt to go DI as there’s not really room for amps. We were recording backing tracks for cabaret shows to be used around the world by a couple of different theatre companies (yes, live shows – remember them?). This meant there were many different styles of music involved, making the Kemper an ideal choice because you can obviously switch between a Marshall sound, a Fender sound, or whatever you need for the session.
I’d only owned the Kemper for a few days and had set up some basic amp sounds courtesy of Michael Britt, but hadn’t totally got to grips with the effects section, hence my decision to run the pedalboard into the input of the Kemper. This included my Line 6 HX Effects, which has every noise known to man onboard, so I didn’t get caught out not being able to achieve a sound in the session itself.
It turns out the Kemper takes pedals really well, especially my two go-to drive pedals, the enormous Origin Effects RevivalDrive and ye olde faithful Analog Man King Of Tone. I also own an Origin Effects Cali76 compressor and a Strymon Flint tremolo, both of which, in my opinion, are far superior to the onboard effects of the Kemper, so it was a real joy to accidentally achieve a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario. The Flint also contains a lovely subtle amp-style reverb as a nice bonus, so I ended up just using the Kemper for amps and pretty much everything else came from the external effects pedals. Up until very recently, DI units have really felt like a compromise to me, but I’m very happy we’re now at the stage where you can achieve a sound and feel that you can be proud of.
“There were many different styles of music involved in this session, making the Kemper an ideal choice as you can switch between sounds”