User Manual

PROFILING AN AMP 41
 Profiling with eects in the recording chain
Many guitarists get their signature sound by combining distortion pedals, booster pedals and equalizers/
filters with a tube amp. If you want to do this, you can keep these in the signal chain during the profiling
process — they will all be accurately profiled as a part of the reference amp sound. However, there is one
exception: some distortion pedals use a special design that cannot be profiled accurately, for instance the
Tube Screamer.
If you do include your eects chain with your amp profile, but are not happy with the result, try again with-
out the distortion pedal. Remember, you can always use one of the modeled distortion pedals in the KPA
instead when building your rig.
Other eects should be bypassed during the profiling process because they will adversely aect the re-
sult, making it sound less natural and dierent to the original amp tone. These include: compressors, noise
gates, and time/modulation/reverb eects such as delay, reverb, chorus, and so on.
You might also run into trouble when profiling a sound in which both the pre- and power amps of the ref-
erence amplifier are driven into distortion. If the resulting profile sounds unsatisfying, try to reduce the vol-
ume of the power amp. This will make the result sound somewhat more transparent, without significantly
reducing the amount of distortion. The same is true for those modeling amps which oer a separate gain
control for pre- and power amp.
The KPA only allows for mono profiling. Stereo profiling is not currently supported, but really, how many
classic guitar amps feature true stereo circuitry, anyway?
Since the KPA sends its own test-tones into the reference amp during profiling, it should be obvious that
the sound of your guitar isn’t part of the result. The KPA is designed to react to any guitar in an identical
way to the reference amp that was profiled.
 Monitoring while taking profiles
The output of the reference amp can be monitored through the outputs of the KPA. This way, you can
switch between listening to the original reference amp signal and the profiled version using the soft but-
tons in the profiling mode. In fact, we recommend that in order to avoid any confusion between what you
are hearing and what the KPA is profiling, the reference amp should only be monitored using the KPA. To