WHY I STARTED USING A KEMPER PROFILER

Over the past 25 years I've accumulated a ton of amps with no desire to sell them– partly because vintage gear is a surprisingly solid investment, and partly because I’m a hoarder pretending to be a gear enthusiast. But even I’ll admit that my amp collection has gotten out of hand. It’s taking up the majority of space in my basement and I’m not sure how much more we can add to the pile before my house literally implodes.

Enter the Kemper Profiler. 

Simply put, the Kemper is a digital profiling device that emulates the sounds of classic amplifiers – a digital amp, in other words. A digital profile is designed to give you a snapshot of an amp in a specific setting, which means that if you always use your amp with the knobs and settings placed a certain way, you can hook it up to a Kemper while it’s in that specific mode and take a digital snapshot of that tone, creating a unique profile that you can access whenever you want. In this way, the Kemper is a freaking Godsend for touring musicians. Instead of traveling with multiple amps (risking damage both to the amps while they’re in transit and to yourself as you try to grapple with these behemoths), all you need is this one highly portable device: the Kemper.

Kemper actually sent me one of these to try out. Addison, being the forward-thinking bassist that he is, encouraged me to try it, but I was less enthusiastic, so a perfectly good digital profiler sat unused in the JHS filming room for about two years. During that time, I started seeing Kempers at sound checks for performers like Jimmy Eat World, Need to Breathe, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. 

What finally convinced me to give the Kemper a shot was a phenomenon called the “change function”. Basically, the change function is the point at which the pain of purchasing something (or, in my case, just using the thing I already owned) is less than the cost of not having it (again, in my case, the “cost” was my willingness to try a new device instead of using my tried-and-true tube amps). For me, the pain was 100% literal. I’m not sure how many of you have tried gigging with a Fender Bassman, but transporting it from one place to another is the definition of a Sisyphean task. Thus, the idea that I could replace that amp, at least part of the time, with a much more portable Kemper Profiler appealed to me and to my aching back.

Finally, I decided to profile all the amps in my collection. To do so, I collaborated with my good friend HW, better known as the Tone Junkie, who came and literally lived in my house for about a week to get the job done. We ended up with more than 580 separate profiles, which we’re planning to release incrementally over the next two years. The first set (“Josh’s Favorite Amps”) dropped in December 2022, and includes 70 profiles from amps like the Fender Blues Deluxe, the Vox AC30, and the Sovtek Mig 50. We’re even giving an amp profile pack away for free: the Milkman Loud is More Good. As a bonus, HW also created tone matched IR’s and patches if you’re a Line 6 Helix or HX Stomp digital modeler user.

I had multiple motivations for profiling so many amps, but here are my top three:

1. I wanted access to dozens of amps without the physical pain of lugging them around (and to give myself the option of selling a few–ahem, maybe a few dozen –in my personal collection so my wife can actually use our basement again). 

2. I work in a relatively small building with around 40 other employees. If I was jamming through a tube amp, that would make things completely miserable for everyone but me, but the Kemper gives me a comparable sound mix in a volume range that won’t make my employees revolt and burn down the building.

3. I wanted to give guitarists like you access to these fantastic sounds without shelling out thousands of dollars per amp.

I’d also like to take a moment here to clarify that endorsing the Kemper does not mean that I am turning my back on tube amps. I love tube amps. The greatest songs in rock ‘n’ roll history (so far) have been played on them. Are they super practical? No. Do they utterly rock? Heck yes. I– and, by extension, anyone –am allowed to like more than one thing. It’s okay. I don’t have to pick sides. There are situations where I will still use a tube amp– intimate, Jimi-Hendrix-style rock concerts being one of them –but the Kemper is an insanely useful tool to have at my disposal, and I’m happy to have it. 

So go to your local music store and check out the Kemper if you haven’t already. Try something new, and you’ll be a better musician for it.