Making Guitars Sound Good: Kemper Profiler
Trying to record and reproduce a good guitar sound, like all things sound related, is so much more complicated and difficult. I’ve tried every guitar amp sim/plugin under the sun, and to my ears and limits of my capabilities none of them ever sounds quite like the real thing. Every now and again I would get lucky and with enough EQ work get something I could live with.
Typically for real recording, I would record real amps in a recording studio, but that is very expensive, very time consuming and given the constraints of the studio there just isn’t time to explore. You really have to go in there with a very good idea or at least a plan of attack when getting anything done in the studio, very little time or tolerance for dottering about.
I made the decision to save up for a Kemper Profiler which is a pretty simple device in principle: you take a guitar amplifier, speaker cabinet, put a microphone in front of said speaker cabinet then hook the Kemper up to to the amp, and plug the microphone into the back of the unit, plug your ears or go into the next county, and let the Kemper zap signals through the amp, cabinet and captured by the mic. You can then save all of that data and sitting quietly in your loft style apartment with neighbors snug in their beds, you can blast in your headphones a JCM 800, perfectly mic’d and not be evicted the next morning.
That’s really the thing. Guitar amps are loud, and they only sound good loud (and by “loud” i mean some value of loud, greater than normal conversation decibel level) and when you are listening to a record that has really good guitar tones you are hearing more than just the guitar and amp/cabinet combo. What you are hearing is all of that combined with the microphone(s) used, the room that it was all in and the thousands of variables that go into creating the guitar tone you end up hearing.
That’s why, and this is just my opinion, guitar sims and modelers just don’t cut it. Yes, many are even modeling microphones and room characteristics, but the second you start adding some distortion, things go pear shaped. The sounds become inarticulate, fizzy, harsh and to combat that you have to do a ton of EQ shaping on that sound. I’ve come to believe that if you just start with a good sound to start with then you don’t have to do a lot of modifications after the fact.
Oh yeah and there are lots of good impulse responses out there, but even to my ears many of those just fail the realism test, and playing when using an IR is just has this kind of “fake” feeling to it. When you play a guitar with a nice tube amp, there’s a feeling to it, that “push pull” quality you get from the tubes and the speakers moving the air around.
The first thing I noticed when i hooked up my Kemper was that the guitar tone i heard was what I feel when playing through a real amp, there was no harshness, which is the first thing I always notice with amp sims, there’s always this harshness, this artificial “forwardness” to the sound.
The profiles I use have a very analog quality to them in that they are more rounded sounding, nothing stuck out, the tones were just all very well balanced. I wanted to put this to the test so I dug up a song I had been working on for a project. This project is a collection of songs I simply call “Loud” because it has lots of guitars. This was a good test because it has a bunch of clean guitar parts and then concludes with louder guitars, and not just a standard guitar (which for me is a Gibson SG) but also has a baritone guitar part along with bass guitar (I have a Fender p-bass and a Fender telecaster baritone).
With all of that going on it gave me a chance to really put the Kemper through a bunch of tests, and I have to say it came through with flying colors. I managed to find profiles from the TAD collection and the STL Tones Kris Crummet collection of profiles and took the original DI tracks I recorded and fed them back into the Kemper and then just recorded the output of the Kemper straight into Pro Tools via my Lynx Aurora 8 converter.
I did some minor EQ (using the Plugin Alliance SSL 4000J channel strip) and just a bit of compression as well, on each guitar track. Below is an MP3 I made from just doing this bit of testing:
I’m not suggesting that this is the pinnacle of guitar recording and mixing but given my past results with guitars, outside of actual amps recorded at studios like Q Division, this is a pretty significant step forward.
I am still learning mixing and how to work with guitars and drums and everything else, but when you have a good sound to start with, which the Kemper is providing, it makes mixing so much easier and requires much less fuss and bother.
