I was brought ( after having just about everything man has invented) to BLUECAT`S AXIOM … and am so glad for my purpose at least. I have the hardware and they provided the software . Its mind boggling to me how good it is. I also had the Kemper at the inception but it never made the correct toast for me so I got rid of it. Just my tuppence.
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That’s some insane wizardry there!
Hey Muso! Since you have written that you have bias fX 2 rig that means you have an ios rig. There is a super affordable version of the kemper now (And i had a kemper for 4 years to compare it to)-THU Overloud has rig Libraries that work similar to profiles. And they sound just as good on a budget. For real. You can’t profile your own rigs (which is what i did for a while) but the sounds are really killer. You can buy all the effect for 23 dollars and they are really high class, and get a set of profiles somewhere in the 20 dollar range and be happy for a long long time… don’t know if that helps. Check them out.
If you want amp in the room experience I’d say get an amp. I’ve tried AxeFX and Kemper and they are not like real amps, that are like miked amps in the monitors in the studio. They are great for recording. I play a Suhr PT-100 with a 2x12 and it sounds great at any volume. Better louder of course 
I recently bought an Apollo interface. I picked up the PT-100 plug-in for $49 and it’s incredible. The plug-in sounds and feels like the real thing. Definitely better than my Axe or Kemper experience. I’m still amazed at the tones I get from that plug-in. Again though, it’s more like monitoring in the studio than playing an amp in the room. The Apollo Quad and the plug-in were cheaper than an Axe or a Kemper assuming you have monitors already, and now you also have a nice start at a home studio if you want to record.
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One thing Ive found, for what it’s worth, is if you take an AxeFX (or presumably a Kemper, I’ve never tried this myself) and bypass all the mic/cab sim and any post-processing beyond what would normally happen in the FX loop, then run it into a clean poweramp and a cab, it suddenly sounds and feels a LOT more amp-like.
But yeah, I play through a Mark V into a 4x12, and have no trouble getting it to sound awesome at late-night-jamming levels.
Hi, I’ve actually tried the overloud and couldn’t get a good sound out of it.
I haven’t followed the whole thread but I’d say that with almost all present-day Amp Simulators [E,g, stuff from Overloud, Audio Assault, Neural DSP, Nembrini Audio etc. etc.] it should be possible to obtain a good sound.
By “good sound” I mean something that you could put in a professional recording and would be 99% indistinguishable from a “real” amp - even to the ears of professional guitar players.
I’m saying this because I suspect your bottleneck could be one of these:
- too much / not enough gain at the interface input
- wrong impedance at the interface input
- low quality interface
- incorrect “pickup sensitivity” settings within the amp simulation software
then again, you may have all the tech set up correctly and still not like the sound - but it’s worth checking considering amp simulators are about 10% the price of a kemper, and can get you roughly the same sound quality
Hi again,
I’m sure you are right, it’s my inability to dial in a sound I like. I managed to use the tonecloud on biasfx 2 to get a sound I liked someone else had made. This is kind of the reason for looking at a kemper, there is a huge userbase and pro profiles which you can just plug your guitar in and play.
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Bigfoot!
Awesome tone! Very authentic. Love it.
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Thanks brother, much appreciated!
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I hear you - the danger of endless tone chasing is very real, especially with software stuff where you have millions of options - I myself am guilty of speding too long tweaking settings instead of just plyaing the damn thing
Ain’t that the truth, this is another reason why if you have the right amp, life is just much much simpler.
You don’t need to get a 100 watt beast, you can get a 1 watt plexi and still have all it’s benefits for the bed room. When I need to play I just put the amp on, plug in the guitar and I’m there, no profile/patch surfing, second guessing etc.
Between all the zillion plugins, eqs, effects, and IR hell, it’s utter choice paralysis, without the feel of an all analogue signal path. These digital things sound “good”, but they will never feel right, not yet anyways. There is a certain truth about the feel, transients etc where you don’t have to second guess like with digital.
edit: Once again I’ll say this, if your a practicing bedroom guitar player, the feel is more important than tone.
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Man, this sounds GREAT to me. But what’s an RR100?
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Well this Kemper can’t be too bad
For work (
) I’ve been watching this interesting series of videos from Paul Gilbert and only halfway through I noticed the Kemper sitting there on the desk. Otherwise I’d have thought this was a real amp
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It really depends on what profiles you get. I find the ones you get pre loaded not the best. I know a producer who’s been recording and mixing for a few decades now and has a great selection of amps/cab’s/mics/outboard eq etc. He makes profiles of his amps with great blends of mic’s and through different cabs. He also often uses an API eq, which you can knock in and out in the fx section. With his experience and ear, he can make amazing profiles! I have however watched videos of random people on YouTube making a profile and they just stuck a 57 dead centre to the cone 
The results… Fizz!!!
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Its great. So is the AxeFX. So is the Helix. You really can’t miss.
If you are an FX guy and like twiddling patches get a Fractal.
If you have amps and really love the way they sound or don’t want to take them out live get the Kemper
if you want to sound good at a gig and don’t want to dump 2+ thousand on a rig get a Helix
if you want a incredible all in one, DIY box that sounds great and is really convenient get an HX Stomp
So many awesome options for guitarists these days.
Just my opinion based on my experience of playing modelers / simulators over the past 12 or so years.
-Jorma
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Hi everyone, so I finally bit the bullet and bought a brand new Kemper and I’ve had it for nearly two weeks now and I’m sending it back.
It just doesn’t sound that good, I’ve tried loads of different profiles including the highly rated professional ones and it just sounds no better than the plug ins I’ve been using.
I was expecting to just plug in and be blown away but that never happened, what happened was spending ages trying to find a profile I liked out of the hundreds loaded into the profiler of which I couldn’t find anything. So I watched all the tutorial videos and really learned how to use it but still no joy. Then I got some profiles from the user sharing cloud and the bought a few but nothing really stuck out to me. I then thought I was going mad and started comping with the amp sims on my pc and decided the amp sims sounded better to me.
The Kemper feels overly complicated and I didn’t find the community very helpful when I reached out for help, pretty weird experience all in all.
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if you aren’t a pro i would say no. get a monoprice stage right 15 watt tube amp. the one with the series effects loop, attenuation, and spring reverb. however if you want to spend the dough go the synergy route, and just start collecting modules. these will resell one day probably for much more than a kemper system.
What are you monitoring through? Speaker cab, or studio monitors?
If the former, this is maybe stating the obvious, but make sure any cab emulation is off. 
If the latter… Honestly, the sound of a great amp, through a great mic, through a great mic pre, and through a great set of studio monitors is VERY different from a great amp in the room. If you’re listening to the former and expecting the later, you’re going to be dissapointed.
I’m squarely in the “tube amp” camp, and own a killer amp and some really, really nice mics, mic pres, mic EQs, compressors, etc, and am very into the process of working analog right up to the point of printing a tone to disc… but, also, the first time I played an AxeFX through a clean power amp and a Recto 2x12 cab was the first time I “got” modelling. This was one of Cliff’s own, actually, and after hearing me play through it for a couple, he flipped me over to some sort of a blackface preset and, well, if I hadn’t know it was a modeler I was playing through, I would have wanted to know WTF it was, because it sounded great.
Through a set of studio speakers, it sounded like a great recorded tone, and it was a really effective tool… but through a cab in the room, THAT’s when it “felt” like an amp. I’m sure the Kemper is no different.
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