Are Kemper profiles overpriced?

[abt]

Firstly, this thread is not directed at anybody in particular, it's just a discussion. Also, you can't point the finger at me for cheaping out on profiles, I've spent a lot of money on profiles, some of them good, some not so good. I've bought many profile packs from Sneapsters purely out of support alone. I also think some profile packs are great value.

I understand that if you make profiles you have a right to ask whatever price you want for them and the consumer has to decide if they are willing to pay that. I appreciate the work that goes into them.

Maybe I'm completely wrong, but when I compare them to say making a drum sample pack I start to think that a lot of Kemper packs are just too expensive for what they are. There's so much work in making Drums samples, I won't go into them here, you know the drill, cutting up samples, making all the different formats, gogs, tci, wav, etc, getting the sound in the first place, vs making a Kemper profile, which in comparison seems easy.

 

[JeffTD]

I think for me it depends on the profiles themselves. Very few have been anywhere near worth the asking price, though.

And those packs of 50+ profiles, 4 per amp channel and all... useless. My go-to profiles are still my own and 3-4 I've swapped with friends.

 

[egan.]

All the best stuff I've gotten has been given to me or came from kemper themselves (the LL pack for example). To a certain extent I think this market will dry up or at least boil down in the next year. The fact is I keep seeing more and more profiles of DI pedals and such for sale which IMHO is over the top.
That said, there has historically been a market for plugin presets which seems far more ridiculous (again, IMHO).

 

[abt]

I agree with quality over quantity but I'm in two minds about it. Sometimes I've found things that I never would have thought would be useful. Other times I've gotten like ten profiles in a pack and thought their so close here, a few more variations probably would have nailed for me. Catch 22 I guess.

 

[abt]

All the best stuff I've gotten has been given to me or came from kemper themselves (the LL pack for example). To a certain extent I think this market will dry up or at least boil down in the next year. The fact is I keep seeing more and more profiles of DI pedals and such for sale which IMHO is over the top.
That said, there has historically been a market for plugin presets which seems far more ridiculous (again, IMHO).

Yeah, Lasse's pack is pretty great. I must admit I'm a bit of a plugin/preset whore!

I also should clarify that I'm not using the Kemper in it's original design intention. I can't run real amps, it's just not a possibility, so I have to rely of profiles others make. I think there's a lot of users like this. In comparison to having to use amp sims I really love it.

 

[ArthurD]

There's so much work in making Drums samples, I won't go into them here, you know the drill, cutting up samples, making all the different formats, gogs, tci, wav, etc, getting the sound in the first place, vs making a Kemper profile, which in comparison seems easy.

Actually making kemper profiles consumes more time than making drums samples (specially if you use tunebot and has all outboard gear pre-routed). chopping samples is really fast if you make it an automated process. The only thing that is a bit PITA is making gogs, IMO.
I don't sell my drum samples, but I'm always making them. Usually it takes only about 10 hours to make everything. (2-3 hours to change skins and tune the drums, 2 hours placing mics and fine tuning, 1 hour sampling, 2 hours mixing and exporting, 2 hours processing to gog, tci, kontakt).

Here are the last drums I sampled (sorry for the bad mix, I'm away from the studio and only have shitty beats headphones)

Drum session


About the profile pricing, I price my profiles based on the work I had.
For each amp I spend about about 2 days (16 hour day) to make about 50 profiles. Using different mic positions, combinations for different tastes, etc. Another day to choose the best, maybe 2 days as well. This and listening them into mixes, making "special request" profiles for the pack, etc.

And we have to make the clips, videos, produce the website, pay host, domain etc.

Sometimes I rent the amp as well.


For exemple, these cost about 13,42 USD (Its 30 Brazilian reais). There are 8 profiles included.

Give me some feedback on how much these should cost as a fair price, I'll consider that and apreciate (and also make them more reasonable for the customer).
Thanks for the input guys (If this is for me)
Cheers!

 

[heshian46]

I agree that some of these profile packs can be a bit on the pricey side, theres also some really great values out there (as well as some free packs that are just amazing). And I understand that a lot of time goes into making them, i've made quite a few myself.

But I think some people forget that the value of a profile, and the resulting price put on it, is not always proportionate to the amount of time spent making it. Expensive profiles/packs can still sound like ass.

 

[Mago]

I thought about that as well, but profiles and drum samples are a bit of a different workflow...
With samples the most time consuming part is chopping them up, making sure they phase is right on every sample, and then depending on how you work, to export them.

Setting up, tuning etc takes up about the same time for the guitar rig as it does for setting up/recoding the samples of the drumkit. If you profile various mic positions and different mics with the same rig.
Plus for me the QC takes a lot more time than with drum samples.
If you record various tunings of the same shell then the samples can end up taking more time though.

After looking around for pricing vs quality on other people, I just went with a rule of thumb for 50c per profile, with discounts on larger packs.
It really depends on the offer of the individual seller to determine if the price is over the top or not.
That also goes for the variation/amount of same'ish profiles in packs...with some guitars that might make the difference, for others not.
Hard to judge.

Egan, I can see why'd you think it looks weird to have packs of DI boxes. But for me the kemper makes those boxes even more usable than the unit by itself, with the ways you can tweak it within the kemper. I'd sell my BDDI, if it wasn't for the fact that my bass player uses it on occasion and that it's nice to have as backup for gigging.

I'm keen to see myself how that market will develop over the next year or so. After all it's the same as with drum samples: if theres something unique to offer it's worth getting, even if you already own a lot. Although I'm way more selective with profiles than I am with drum samples, meaning the amount of what I keep around.
But since you can't "frankestein" profiles in a way you can do with samples, it's handy to have around more than you need, to avoid always ending up using the same stuff.

 

[Gujukal]

Everyone wants to make easy & fast money, i agree that drum samples should be more expensive than a kemper profile pack most of the time. But it's not as bad as all these Pod Farm presets everyone is selling...

 

[EOC]

Well, is the profiles are good, paying 30 bucks for the sound of and amp worth 2000 is a big bang for the buck!
That being said, since i live in south america, 30 dollars for me is a lot of money heheh. I bought some profiles like TAF (metal pack) and tone vision pack..... worst invesment ever....

 

[Jordon]

I'm kinda going off a mix of how many profiles are in the pack, along with how many amps. I think one amp should be $10USD or less, but definitely not over. It does take some time to get everything together, but it's still nowhere near tracking, cutting and packaging even just one snare sample.

That being said, I've sent out far more profiles for free than I've sold (same with drum samples), and I don't look at it as a "quick buck" or anything close to another income stream. If someone wants to toss some cash my way for the, awesome, if not, no biggie.

 

[ArthurD]

I thought about that as well, but profiles and drum samples are a bit of a different workflow...
With samples the most time consuming part is chopping them up, making sure they phase is right on every sample, and then depending on how you work, to export them.

Mago, witch daw are you using? I use a totally automated process.
First I mix the samples with some backing track then export to a stereo track in a new project, for exemple, the snare (usually top + bottom + overheads + room).
In cubase I made some commands for creating and chopping on the transient and create a new track for each chopped sample.
Then I align every sample to be phase accurate and batch export each track. This takes only about 10-15 minutes.

After looking around for pricing vs quality on other people, I just went with a rule of thumb for 50c per profile, with discounts on larger packs.

50c is a bit cheap IMO, specially if you spend lots of days making the profiles. I went with 1 dollar(ish) the profile, watching other sellers (quantity X quality). But I'm rethinking that 12-13 USD for a amp might be too expensive. Maybe 50c to 1 dollar (max) would be the fair price, depending on the work.
For exemple, I wouldnt sell sansamp profiles for that price. I would sell for 50c. Just as old 5150 + mesa cab. But add 2 other cabs to that 5150, other mic technics people ask for, different tube screammers you end yourself making at least 50 profiles to choose 8 or 10. Then I think 1 usd is a fair price.

Well, is the profiles are good, paying 30 bucks for the sound of and amp worth 2000 is a big bang for the buck!
That being said, since i live in south america, 30 dollars for me is a lot of money heheh. I bought some profiles like TAF (metal pack) and tone vision pack..... worst invesment ever....

I bought that metal pack as well. I think Jeff was someway involved with that but Andy didn't take his advices.

I'm kinda going off a mix of how many profiles are in the pack, along with how many amps. I think one amp should be $10USD or less, but definitely not over. It does take some time to get everything together, but it's still nowhere near tracking, cutting and packaging even just one snare sample.

Thank you for the price input. Tracking drum samples are way more PITA than making a profile, but it is less time consuming IMO

 

[Mago]

Mago, witch daw are you using? I use a totally automated process.
First I mix the samples with some backing track then export to a stereo track in a new project, for exemple, the snare (usually top + bottom + overheads + room).
In cubase I made some commands for creating and chopping on the transient and create a new track for each chopped sample.
Then I align every sample to be phase accurate and batch export each track. This takes only about 10-15 minutes.

haha I was sure that there was a faster way around this than I used to do
Most of the samples I made where in Cubase, now I'm in PT.
So when they are mixed (If I pre mix them):
In CB I usually cut them up, look adjust the phase/do the fades (I do this manually, since I don't trust it will work for me).
Then I made a shortcut for exporting clips/blocks as wav. So I skipped through the blocks, hitting the shortcut, enter, right, shortcut, enter etc...

I haven't looked into a faster way to do this in PT. So in there I think I usually exported them with selecting the clip/consolidate (also works with stereo samples, but its one or 2 steps more for them, as PT will export them as split stereo with the normal consolidate)

50c is a bit cheap IMO, specially if you spend lots of days making the profiles. I went with 1 dollar(ish) the profile, watching ampfactory and soundside prices. But I'm rethinking that it might be too expensive. Maybe 50c to 1 dollar (max) would be the fair price, depending on the work.

I've seen both sides of what I was aiming for, so I just thought I'd hit the middle ground. My first bundle has quite a lot of profiles, so I wanted to keep the per profile price rather low.
Although I honestly feel like people don't care about the per profile price in the end, it's more about the overall pricing.
But I guess it's an individual thing, if you'd rather have lots of different profiles to go through, than having only a few for 3-4 times the price of what I go for per profile.
I can see why'd you think that that way there are a lots of fillers in there, even if I made sure that every single one is useable.
Different strokes and all I guess.

Edit:
Also I think that guitar tones are a lot more of a personal taste thing, compared to most kind of drum samples.
You can slap a drum sample on, and it will either fit the mix, or it won't.
But with profiles it depends a lot more on what is fed into the kemper, rather than just using a trigger signal to shoot from.

Edit #2: and oh, I meant euro-cent.

 

[Lasse Lammert]

I always charge at least the amount I'd charge for a reamping job, cause that's the money I'm losing (not making) by handing out a profile.
And the client can use the profile live, for all future projects etc.
Creating a custom one off profile also takes at least as much time as a reamping job.
So I actually think people are selling profiles for way too cheap.

 

[abt]

I always charge at least the amount I'd charge for a reamping job, cause that's the money I'm losing (not making) by handing out a profile.
And the client can use the profile live, for all future projects etc.
Creating a custom one off profile also takes at least as much time as a reamping job.
So I actually think people are selling profiles for way too cheap.

This make perfect sense if your creating a profile for one person but won't work if you're selling them.


P.S. Your free profile packs are still some of the best out there (maybe the best)