Kemper

Say „Kemper" and you think of a device that doesn't model a guitar amp — it "photographs" it. Behind the brand is German engineer Christoph Kemper, based in Bochum, a city at the heart of Germany's Ruhr coal-and-steel region, whose mining heritage is still honored today in the mining tower featured in the Kemper logo. Kemper started out in a completely different field: in the 1990s he co-founded Access Music and created the legendary Access Virus synthesizer — one of the most successful virtual-analog instruments in history, which helped define the sound of electronic music for over a decade. It wasn't until 2006, after nearly 15 years working on sound synthesis, that Kemper turned to an entirely different problem: how to faithfully capture the sound of a real tube guitar amp. The result of that work, unveiled at the NAMM Show in 2011, was the Profiler — a device that works on an entirely different principle from classic modelers. Instead of relying on emulations pre-programmed by an engineer, the Profiler sends a series of white-noise test signals into a real amplifier, records its response through a microphone placed at the cabinet, and analyzes the result to create a digital „fingerprint" of that exact amp-cabinet-microphone combination. Its distinctive toaster-shaped chassis is no accident either — Kemper wanted a unit that would sit comfortably on top of a guitar cabinet just as well as on a home-studio desk. At Wired Tunes we carry the full Kemper Profiler lineup — from the head and rack formats, to the floorboard Profiler Stage, to the compact stompbox Profiler Player. With a library of over 1,400 ready-made profiles and the latest Liquid Profiling technology, which blends profiling with modeling, this is gear for guitarists who want the sound of an entire amp arsenal in a single case — without having to drag it on tour.