For every person who says loudly how easy it is to put a microphone in front of an amp and get a great tone quick, there are several of us who know he's lying. And in the case of the Kemper Profiling amp, you need several ingredients:
A Great amp
A Great cab
A good mic (note I didn't say great, it helps but it's optional)
A great ear
Patience
Two rooms (one for the miked amp/cab, one for you and your Kemper and monitor system)
Why don't you need a great mic? Or an expensive preamp? Or several of each?
It's never going to hurt, but think of it like playing guitar. If you have a guy with the most expensive guitar in the world and he's been playing for a week and another guy is a seasoned professional with years of experience and he's playing a $99 Chinese Strat copy, it's not hard to figure out who is going to sound better.
Everyone has their preferences, but the #1 mic you'll find in every recording studio is an SM57. They are cheap, they are on a million recordings. They also sound like CRAP if you don't get good placement. A real common place to start is halfway up on a speaker, where the dust cap edge starts. If you have a cab where you can't see the speaker, use a flashlight. Start with the microphone there, a few inches away from the grill cloth, pointed straight at the speaker.
A Great amp
A Great cab
A good mic (note I didn't say great, it helps but it's optional)
A great ear
Patience
Two rooms (one for the miked amp/cab, one for you and your Kemper and monitor system)
Why don't you need a great mic? Or an expensive preamp? Or several of each?
It's never going to hurt, but think of it like playing guitar. If you have a guy with the most expensive guitar in the world and he's been playing for a week and another guy is a seasoned professional with years of experience and he's playing a $99 Chinese Strat copy, it's not hard to figure out who is going to sound better.
Everyone has their preferences, but the #1 mic you'll find in every recording studio is an SM57. They are cheap, they are on a million recordings. They also sound like CRAP if you don't get good placement. A real common place to start is halfway up on a speaker, where the dust cap edge starts. If you have a cab where you can't see the speaker, use a flashlight. Start with the microphone there, a few inches away from the grill cloth, pointed straight at the speaker.
As you move towards the edge of the speaker, the tone gets warmer/less highs. It gets crispier the closer to center you get. If you want a deeper low end, put the mic closer. If you want less low end, pull it back a little bit. This is called the proximity effect and it can be exploited in your profiles.
I'll go into more detail the deeper this blog goes, but suffice to say, if you're doing profiles at home - experiment! Just be sure if you do something crazy, you can duplicate it if you strike gold. It's an awful feeling to get a killer tone and forget how you did it. Nobody likes to reinvent the wheel.
I'll go into more detail the deeper this blog goes, but suffice to say, if you're doing profiles at home - experiment! Just be sure if you do something crazy, you can duplicate it if you strike gold. It's an awful feeling to get a killer tone and forget how you did it. Nobody likes to reinvent the wheel.