Kemper has evolved the KPA firmware over the years and has expanded and improved the capabilities of its system. In 2023, a major update was made available: it includes the addition of “Liquid Profiling”, a feature that drastically improves the results obtained when adjusting the gain and configuring the tone controls of the profiles.

Kemper profiles basics

In the first part, we presented and discussed the three types of profiles that can be used with the Kemper: studio profiles, amplifier profiles and merged profiles. Whatever the approach used – and whether in the end you use a studio profile, a simple amp profile on which you have configured an IR or a cab coming from another profile or even a merged profile -, the Kemper sound is based on two main blocks: the “amplifier” block and the “cabinet” block. The amplifier block brings together a large number of parameters to adjust and refine the sound obtained, starting with the classic bass, medium, treble, gain and presence controls. It is this set of parameters that is generally used to configure the digital equivalent of an amplifier’s “tone stack”.

The generic tone stack

For ten years (quite a long time in the digital world!!), the Kemper had a single and unique tone stack, which can be described as a generic -or universal- tone stack: the frequencies and bass, mid and treble adjustment ranges are predefined and act similarly, regardless of which amp is captured and active in the amplifier block… (sometimes viewed as or referred to as a “mixing” console tone controls). Similarly, the gain control uses the full gain range available on the Kemper. This tone stack let you adjust the profile sounds effectively, provided you do not steer away too far from the original profile: adjustments of -1 / -1.5 and +1 / +1.5 on the bass/mid/treble and a gain adjustment will generally give quite good results and will allow you to configure the profile according to your tastes, your guitar pickups and your tuning…. An approach that can be completed -if needed- by using more advanced parameters available from the amplifier block and by adding and adjusting overdrives and boosts before this same amplifier block…

A standard Kemper profiles, with default settings, as captured

If more extreme settings can be applied and can -in certain cases- yeld to interesting and usable results, the sound obtained no longer really matches the captured model and the original characteristics of the sound produced by the original amp. The Kemper profile will deviate from the authentic sound of the amp and the sound of the profile probably could not have been achieved on the real amp without significantly reprocessing the amp’s output or without applying significant corrections (EQ , compressor,…)*…

Due to these limitations or to -let’s say- this “behavior”, the user community and profile creators have had the tendency to consider that modifications made to profiles should remain moderate, in order to maintain the authenticity and the balance of the captured tone. Incidentally, this led Kemper owners to use profiles in a rather static way, pushing them into capturing and accumulating multiple combinations of settings, to obtain several authentic “snapshots” of a given amp (captures of “sweet spots” , captures with boosts and overdrives….)….

On the opposite, users of traditional modelers leverage simulations that attempt to reproduce the sound of a given amp and which also try to reproduce the range of settings and behavior of the original tone stack: in this case, it is up to the end user to dial and adjust their own sound, using the different controls available to them (with more or less realism and fidelity to the original amp model…).

*Note: this may shock the most purists and those who attach great importance to the fidelity to the original sound obtained with the KPA, but that aspect may not necessarily be so serious or so annoying: if you get the sound that serve your purpose, it doesn’t really matter – in my opinion – whether you got that sound using settings that are “realistic” or not…. : the processing techniques -EQ, compression, etc.-applied during recording for example do not necessarily bother with this type of consideration, but rather give priority to artistic and sound choices, for example during the mixing phases where you may need to slightly adjust the guitar tone to best fit the context….  Still, we -guitar players and tone geeks- like authenticity when turning knobs …. 🙂

Liquid Profiling

Kemper’s proposal with Liquid Profiling is to evolve this aspect and add a modeling type approach to that of profiling: users are now able to configure the profile of a captured amp with a tone stack modeled by Kemper, this modeling being based on a given amp or series of amps. This tone stack associated with the Kemper profile modifies :

  • the available gain range
  • impacts the behavior of the presence control 
  • add a parameter affecting the clarity of the sound by defining a value for the bright cap. 
  • and -maybe the most important- provides a specific set of settings for the frequencies affected by the bass, midrange and treble controls

All of these with adjustment ranges that are more faithful to the original amplifier. The main idea being this is that now, by adjusting these controls, we get a resulting tone that is much more closer and much more faithful to the original amp: the user is now able to configure his profile in a more realistic way, by using the full range of the different settings available, similar to the approach proposed by the classic modelers.

The Kemper tone stacks are positioned in the global tone chain using one of the two available locations: “pre” for older amp designs and “post” for modern amps, where the tone stack is positioned between the pre-amp and the power amp sections. And finally note that for a given tone stack, the set of available controls may be different: for example the midrange control may not be present (case of a Fender, as in the screenshot below) or -as another example- a specific “cut” control may become available (specific control in the case of a Vox AC30):

“Fan D’Lux” : no middle or presence control

“Voice Ace 30” : no middle, specific cut control available

During capture, the KPA recognizes the gain level of the amplifier and positions the gain of the model obtained, through the “gain” and “generic gain” parameters of the Kemper. When an amp profile is selected (below a PV 5150), the range and behavior of the gain control is enhanced and refined.

Gain and Generic Gain settings

Liquid Profiling, for its first version, has made an impressive number of “classic” amplifier models available :

Available tone stacks in Rig Manager

This list also includes a “Mebo Duel Rect Red” model, 4 “Sold” models and a “P.V. 5150” model.

“Liquid” capture and results

There are two main ways to enable Liquid Profiling with the Kemper:

  • you can create a new Liquid profile with the amp configured “all at noon” or configured on a sweet spot, by selecting the amp model from the list of available amps at capture time and by copying the captured amp settings into the profile settings (gain, bass, mids, treble)
  • you can associate and ‘burn-in’ a tonestack on an existing -standard- profile. This is a configuration of the tonestack after the original capture was made.

The Kemper documentation provides a set of interesting tips for creating these captures and describes possible strategies for configuring the source amplifier in this context : sensitivity and potentiometer settings, gain adjustment, etc..…

I found the results very convincing and the implementation very successful: I had the opportunity to test some models available through the Rig Pack section of the Rig Manager and to experiment directly with captures of my own Peavey 6505 on which I configured a Kemper “Pea V 5150” tone stack (in clean, crunch and lead configurations). In my case, I mostly use direct captures from the amplifier – because I find them more precise than “studio” or full rig captures-. I typically complete these profiles by leveraging IRs from my collections and add -quite often- one of the -excellent!!- overdrive simulations available on the Kemper (a 808 or a precision drive for example). The simulated tone stack of the 5150 seemed very realistic to me, and the gain setting was much more in line with the possibilities and the actual rendering of the amp. The configuration of these parameters on the amplifier block now allows you to very significantly modify the balance and the type of sound and you can therefore use your Kemper in the same way as a conventional modeler, such as the Helix, or almost, since the raw material remains the underlying profile… We are now able to dial our own sound from the profile used, in a much more flexible and wider way than with conventional Kemper profiles. This allows for much more freedom and much better tuning to the sound provided by the selected IR or cab…. : users can pick a cab, an amp, an overdrive and other effects if neede, and have the possibility of configuring the amp in a very fine and very realistic way: gain level, bass, mids, treble , presence, clarity/brilliance…. A real revolution for Kemper users, used to lightly touch their profiles to maintain the original balance. Of course, users remain dependent on the quality of the underlying profile used …. And note also that all of the other Kemper advanced parameters can still be used with these liquid profiles, to further tweak the tone and the feel … (parameters such as definition, sag, compression, bias, etc…).

You can also have fun in transforming an amp into another amp, or -more exactly- in applying a tonestack of your choice to a different amp: you can for example apply a Mesa tonestack to a Marshall amp, or a Fender tonestack to a Soldano amp…. : everything is possible and the user if free to experiment !

To illustrate the approach and the results, I picked up some videos on Liquid Profiling, in addition to this blog post:

Conclusion

By combining the capture approach with the modeling approach, Kemper continues to innovate and offers, through Liquid Profiling, a major and successful evolution for the Kemper Profiling Amplifier . We get a solution that combines the best of both worlds – profiling and modeling – and which allows us to preserve the original character of the captured sound while offering greater flexibility to configure our own sound on top of it. I will add that the digital clone obtained this way is – in my opinion – more flexible and much easier to tame than the original amp. Still,  the overall experience remains dependent on the quality of the profile captured, according to the good old principle of garbage-in, garbage-out….

More than 10 years after its launch, the Kemper is making its revolution and remains among the most complete and successful solutions for obtaining a wide variety of guitar sounds with very high levels of quality. If you were put off by the prospect of stacking thousands of profiles and by the difficulty of composing your own sound recipe, you may now be pleasantly surprised by the possibilities and the results offered by this new approach.