Lessons

Lesson Info

Overview and Kemper Introduction

We're talking about today is his guitars and how to record guitars and how to make profiles out of guitars and what our profiles well, basically we're talking about this device called the camper profiling and the fire and it's a lot of people get confused they think that it's like a digital amp modeler like um you buy it, you plug in and you know, it's like maybe something like a line six were like an axe effects that people are familiar with where you are basically just they have a bunch of different amps simulators inside of there that you can plug into it's kind of like a target or something, but this isn't this isn't that device what this device is that I like to reference drum samples? I did a class on drums sampling yesterday and I talked about how to record guitars and make our I'm sorry how to record drums and make samples out of your drums and were essentially doing the exact same thing with these guitar tones we're gonna be making gets hard towns and we're going to be saving ...

and profiling those guitar tones into a temper so that at any time down the road I can recall that exact same guitar sound sounds kind of like magic it kind of is and it's a crazy thing so let's get started who my my name is sam pura iona studio called the panda studios I started recording audio in two thousand three I've been an engineer for almost ah doing records I guess eleven years now are eleven, twelve years now, so basically I went I graduated from high school when I was eighteen years old I went tio expressions college for digital arts and I learned sound ards it was I wanted to follow my passion of playing guitar and I wanted tio make my career involved with audio so that's how I got started with recording and basically I started in my bedroom at my mom's house built a little studio in the garage there and continue to move like maybe we're not on the sixth version the studios so onwards some material that every recorded that you're probably familiar with one of the big bands is spent called story so far I did two hours with them later soil dirt and what you don't see another big band called state champs the finer things both those bands are warped tour right now so I would highly recommend checking him out basement is a really cool banned from the u k we didn't know him called color me and kindness that album is probably one of my most consistently referenced guitar tones bands come to me and they say, hey man, I want that type of guitar town that that record is amazing that guitar tone is perfect so sort of paraphrase the camper it helps me achieve the ability to recall guitar tones and that's a cool thing so that's why I got into the camper but moving on I also used to be in a band called heavy lo uh I made multiple records with them before I started playing with him extremely heavy band very spastic and crazy s o those that kind of develop my heavy guitar sound and my um but big rock guitar aesthetic that is heavily referenced after that I made some records with a band called suffocate lionheart and those were two very big hardcore metal albums that I did also recently have done this band myron long that's probably one of my favorite guitar tones that I got on some new albums it's very clean tone and it's I like to say it's the cleanest heaviest town that I've recorded in a while so let's move on where do I record audio? Well my studio is called panda studios and everyone always asked me why is it the pants studios uh it's because I used to watch the baby panda webcam when I was in high school or when I was in college and I cited in my studio after that baby pandas so I just called man studio so anyway uh we're located in fremont, california that's like twenty minutes from oakland twenty minutes in san jose very convenient area so if you're ever in the bay area please stop by please come be friends. We welcome visitors and we want people to come by and visiting the best rants. So anyway, is the current location is the sixth location we built this studio in two thousand nine. We literally built all the walls, all the treatment, everything from the ground up. So here's a couple pictures in my studio, uh, that's me and my assistant, ryan uh was my new desk that actually dalton over there? He just built these my facility manager and he built this new death so that I have basically all my gear in front of you like a console. So that's really cool also there's some eleven, seventy six compressors. Ah, that my friend mike from horrible sent to us. And we built those as well also below that are some tramps that we built, all of them there's a drum bella it's really cool and information. So yeah, that's ah, look at the studio. If you wantto participate and be best friends like I like to be best friends with everyone you can follow me on any social media. Twitter, instagram, at sandra and at the studio is that at the panda studios, so let's get into this today's format and what we're talking about way have three segments the first segment which we're currently in is going to be all about the camper and it's all going to be about the signal flow in and out of the camper and just talking about how we how understanding this device and so that you can wrap your head around this also talk about the guitar setup that we have going in here and how we're actually going to make some guitar tones, so then we'll take a break and then we're going to capture and creating profiles, so I'll get into actually playing guitar, actually recording, getting sound making profiles of that and showing you how similar and are almost identical, the tone coming from the real amp and the campers version of that amp is then after that we'll take a break. The last in third segment will be me revamping a few sessions that I have through the camper so that you can see how similar some of these qatar john sound the's sessions that I made I'm I made profiles of the towns that we had recorded and will demonstrate the exact same profile, so it will be a pretty cool thing so let's get into this the camper how did I learn about the camper? Uh was recording span state chance and I had my friend jeff come by and bring his camper, which is actually this exact one hey sold this one to me and he basically my introduction to the camper in life was that I had assumed it was this metal amplifier and I think a lot of people are under that the same assumption and it's not it's not that it's basically a profile it's it's making snapshots of your profiles of your guitar tones and it's saving it so he was like, you have to try this and I want to bring it up and I want you to run your signal through it and I want you here and I was like, ok, great, so he came in yelling out and I set up my orange champ just ran a basic mike on it and it was very impressive it sounded very, very similar if not a little bit better on dh what I mean by better well, when we when we worked with guitars usually we're wanting to increase brightness without it sounding harsh and we're also trying to make our bottom of our guitar nice and thick but not floppy and ah, the camper its disadvantages I would say ah, is that when we do make models it loses a little bit of bottom and it gains a little bit of top but that's kind of an advantage actually, so uh that was my experience with it I basically picked it up for my friend jeff I got a couple of really good friends who they were nice enough to help me out getting started on mark lewis being a great guy and also aol levy they both have the campers and they basically just give me a quick run through on everything and ever since then it's been a lot of fun as so the one thing we need to really discuss about the camper is that it's everything that we're doing today is a little bit more advanced than the basic starting off with recording its are um recording stars one of most complicated things you it's so impossible to get such a great sound consistently and it takes a lot of experience and a lot of determination and a lot of patients and ah a lot of people don't have that so they will do things where the setups and mike's they'll make some profiles and will be unhappy with them and they'll naturally assume it's the camper the camper it sucks it's doesn't sound good but my point is is that crap in is crap out and or like I like to say clowns in vehicles clowns out well hey clouds not funny so anyways if you put you're only going to get is good of the sound as you're putting it in simple is that so I'm really going to go over today how to get a good guitar town the basics of guitar town so that we can make sure that we get a basic good guitar tone going into this camper so we know how to accurately use this camper the next thing to really talk about is that there's profiles that you can purchase online and there's also free profiles that come with this amplifier when you purchase it it's a down the thing to have a very cool website and database for you to upload profiles share be really good france's very cool like community that's developing and it's ah it's a brand new things like this this was I believe was only developed in two thousand eleven so it's still really new and really fresh and later saying a lot of the the community that is really responding well to its metal and ah a lot of people don't really understand that it is it's really gotta clean the tires it's really good amid detain like mid gain talent so I'm really going toe try to demonstrate that today and, uh help you understand that down running other profiles and doing that it's it has its advantages but a lot of people also then again get disappoint and say all this profile soak spoke doesn't sound good it's like well that's someone's telling that sounded good in his situation that he made so the real advantage of having a camper is if you are someone like me who makes guitar turns every single day of your life records fans and has bands come in saying I want to do a tone exactly like this record that you did I have an advantage of saving time and being able to recall these things and utilize this tool so why not embrace it so now let's get into, uh the camper gonna grab guitar um I think I need to get a camera on me and let's start playing around and a question so far we do all right we're doing good cool all right, pull the session here and get some talent and all right, we're good so here's the camper basically the first thing that we need to pull up is the tuner it's got a really cool tuner I want to hear but I really like the fact that the tuner is, um it's a level it's a handy looking tuner it looks nice it's actually pretty accurate sooner so I don't mind using this tuner whatsoever it's cool. Just get the same to all right cool. So now we're going to go into the browser so basically here's the basic overview of this entire amplifier foy just start with their tuner now we're in our browsing mode. So basically this is where all our profiles or stayed this entire camper it's got a usb input so that you can export profiles and import profiles. It also has a usb cable input so that you can eventually hook it up if you have a mac it doesn't work currently but if you have a pc it does currently work where you can hook it up to your computer and organize all your profiles and renamed its death so unfortunately the mac guy so I don't have that option it's okay amber please get on that thank you anyways so we the basic overview of this is that I can scroll through all these different going to scroll through all these different rigs and you'll notice things lights kind of change here on what it is is that these basic knobs here is that it's like a normal amp you got gain yet your base you have made you got trouble in your presence that's pretty much it so let's kind of listen to a few profiles that I've made here this is my dexter amp it's ah green day modified james champy yeah so if we keep scrolling through your I got like that's a base ones these are all just different bands and different profiles we make whenever we record it ours so the really cool advantages is once you actually recorded profile these become you can do whatever you want with these knobs so if you recorded an app that has a little too much gain you can decrease the games that was like plan in orange right now kind of decreased again so having the ability to further get into the tone that you've captured and being able it's like it's like a new tool like a new form of the q and a compressor and all that stuff like you have all that in here and it's really cool so that's the overview of the basic browsing aspects of it the next thing is is that if we go up here we have a noise gate where you could basically the noise gets really handed many secrets how intense it is just really easy now we go into the stop blocks section it's really cool because they have a bunch of different stop boxes and what I mean by that is that if we start profile are browsing through your we got water pedals we got phasers we got everything that you would expect to find in something like a line six and five multi effect one of the coolest things about the stop mark section is this has this auto load but in here we're going to start going through and hearing each one as you browse it so it's like the quickest way to demo any pedal or effect ever so I'm kind of just demonstrate that so once we choose something like let's go to a two screen right here that's fun green tube screamer yeah all right so what you get into there you don't have your options for your pedal so you get back to your amp and then you get back to your pedals eso basically in here I got I'm gonna start the drive pretty low let's set the talent that all that kind of volume that's off that's on me so it's cool that we have a bunch of options with that the next aspect to get into is the amplifier and stack section so and it was these have these cool and so you just turn the whole thing off also, it should be noted that you can control this entire thing with the pedal. I haven't uh I don't have a paddle for that. I do everything because I just have this city on the desk and that's right with it like that. So if you wanted to use this live, it has this mode called perform where you could basically let all your profiles and create like a set list, and you, khun, do all that. I don't really know much about it because I'm not a power guy, but if you're interested in that look that up so back teo, the amp fire towns so we can really get into modifying how the amplifier sounds that we profiled. So if we go in here, we have these knobs like definition power, sagging pick so I can increase like the pick attack, for example, and then power sagon is this really interesting thing where it kind of it's almost like I'm compressor you, khun you gotta you gotta it's more it's. Hard to explain. But it's, basically, like making your amplifier your sustained feel more natural, like a big amplifier. Then if we go to the next page on here, you have a clarity one. I really like that now, because you can just add more clarity. The next one is to shape that's a cool when it's basically it's, allowing you to kind of adjust this profile of your pre amp tubes. So it's basically kind of adjusting the saturation of it. So, um, the next one that we have in here is eso were basically adjusting the amplifier aspect of the chain when you when you profile on and it spits out these three things which are apt fire e q and cabinet. So you can it's basically, ma is profiling the amplifier profile in the cabinet and it's giving you the options of the basically q. What is really convenient is that whatever amp you profile, you can swap the cabinets and that's, one of the coolest unique features where other people's profiles. Maybe they have really cool amps, but not the coolest cab. And you can swap out the cabin change that. So basically in here, if I click on cabinet, we got it's giving me like options like low shift high shift it's kind like abebe sonic maximize er and basically in here you can just start choosing different cabinets if you wanted to be like ok, well let's just take this other cabinet um and again this is this is has this really cool auto load mode so I could be swapping cabinets on the fly right now bob can it sounds great cool just swapped the cabinet and change the cat that we reflect into using the secretary had the same ones started but now we're talking to a different cabinet in school so that's a really cool, unique feature the other one is that just, you know, the basically you can turn it off, turn it on the nasdaq so that basically covers this stack aspect. The next one is that it also has an effects units so that you have your basic delay, you got reverb, you have chorus and stuff and it gives you all these knobs for it so you can control your course model rate and intensity and then your delays, feedback and mix and also the river in time and mix. So, uh what what I felt fine really cool too is that you can run just any line signal into the camper so let's say that I wanted tio put my vocals through, uh some river, but someone agonies this, and it has a stereo out an s o I could send a mano, settle in and get a cool stereo out. So it's, a really cool, unique device and there's. A lot of you can get really complicated with it, but I find that my best approach with it is really just kind of keeping it simple on planet safe. I really just profile a much different amps. I'll swap some cabs. Well, maybe just use, um, mods, some cues in, like, stop boxing cues or a couple of boost pedals, or some like that. Really, just a normal kind of apparatus that I'm treated like an amp.