Kemper beats Helix hands down.


  • Hey mate, in general i guess you are right though your math had some weakpoints. ;)
    With the Kemper you have indeed a huge variety of sound options within a single performance and maybe more than everyone of us might really need.
    Same with the Helix. You could set up a single preset to do a ton of different states and sound compositions because the snapshots enable you to do
    lots of smaller and bigger adjustments. But this all gets to much into Fanboying ^^ Btw i never had any issues or gaps changing presets. Although the Helix
    can't be configured to switch presets or snapshots in a way i want them to you named it with the spillover issues and there are lots of issues still in the system.
    I send many feature requests to Line 6 via their ideascale platform.
    I guess in the end its more a convenience thing which platform suits you more. I guess the Kemper alone could easily do most of the stuff i need with some restrictions.




    I based my Helix VS. Kemper on sound alone. The Helix has a metric ton of cool features and bells and whistles; but if I can't get the tone where I want it to be; who cares? Kemper all day everday. I will echo my statements from TGP that a HelixFX (especially with updated verbs) would be AMAZING in conjunction with the Kemper as outboard FX and midi controller. The Helix drives are great and most of the other fx are good as well. I just don't like the amp modeling (and probably more specifically; their cab block as a whole). I don't like the way the Helix handles the cab portion. Whether it is included cabs or external IRs. There is a muddiness and a bluntness to it I found. I will leave the usual "user error" disclaimer in place, but that was my experience twice with the Helix.


    This was basically the decision to buy me a Kemper. I spend at least 2-3 whole weeks dialing in a tone. Using the Helix Mark IV model witch at least 40 different impulse responses.
    But whats the point if I want a Mark V amp sound ;) So for me the Helix wasn't enough to get what I needed. But I think the Helix IR blocks are pretty good and overlooked by many.
    You can set up millions of ways to dial in your IRs its not the plug'n'play approach. You definitely spend time with that part.
    And if you compare those IR blocks with the Kempers cab sim the Kemper is losing this battle.


    Because in my opinion the Kemper does a horrible job in differentiating the amp section from the cab section. And thats ok because how could the Kemper ever know what the amp
    sounds like and what the cab adds to the mix. But thats where the DI profiles step in. Luckily because turning off cab sim is basically useless in my opinion. You always have
    lots of cab character left in the mix.


    The nice thing you can do with both units is to take a DI profile of an amp and run it through IRs on the Helix. I tried this and came to the decision to just stick to plain Amp+Cab profiles.
    These sound pretty realistic although hard to dial to your individual likings. Thats an issue the Kemper definitely needs to address for upcoming generations.
    The big problem with the Kemper is that it profiles a single state of the amp. And you might be able to add some lows mids or heights to the mix but this doesn't really sound good or realistic.
    The Kemper should profile the EQ section of an amp as well so you can realistically dial in the amp tone. I tried so many Mark V profiles but they all sound kinda not right.


    Don't get me wrong they sound good but its just like 95% good these last 5% is were you would need to profile the Amp yourself.

  • The final deal breaker for the Helix was that the first weekend I was planning to use it, after creating several song-specific presets, I realized that I couldn't get from one song to the next because I needed two of the songs to flow together with no place for me to stop playing between. So I started editing the preset of the first song in order to add the blocks needed for the second song (with the thought of using additional snapshots) and ran out of DSP before I could add them. This is because I had built my song specific presets of base master presets that have lots of effects I'll use here and there, such as an auto swell, some ambient sounds etc. Since I often do things differently each time I use a song and may be the only guitarist, I leave my spice rack of favorites bypassed in my song presets so that I could quickly access them if I want to. Long story short, but the Helix simply couldn't organize the way I wanted to and forced me to organize in a different way than I would have wanted to. As a result, the Kemper was just simpler and keeps me more organized.

  • The final deal breaker for the Helix was that the first weekend I was planning to use it, after creating several song-specific presets, I realized that I couldn't get from one song to the next because I needed two of the songs to flow together with no place for me to stop playing between. So I started editing the preset of the first song in order to add the blocks needed for the second song (with the thought of using additional snapshots) and ran out of DSP before I could add them. This is because I had built my song specific presets of base master presets that have lots of effects I'll use here and there, such as an auto swell, some ambient sounds etc. Since I often do things differently each time I use a song and may be the only guitarist, I leave my spice rack of favorites bypassed in my song presets so that I could quickly access them if I want to. Long story short, but the Helix simply couldn't organize the way I wanted to and forced me to organize in a different way than I would have wanted to. As a result, the Kemper was just simpler and keeps me more organized.

    Hey i guess you needed a lot of effects there. In that case the kemper might be indeed a viable choice.
    The Helix has alot of effect blocks but i can agree with you that you run out of dsp very fast. This is one of the big disappointments i had too.
    Helix has a lot of power but if you do all the tone creation in the Helix itself this is often a limitating factor.


    The Kemper might be more capable in creating amp sounds and still be able to do lots of effects.


    Before going with the kemper for amp sounds i needed some serious DSP heavy sound modeling. with an amp block and various IRs with dedicated EQs etc.
    This gets complex very fast so i often ended up using half of the effects block space only for the amp modelling itself without any other additional effects.


    I used pretty basic effects routing back then so i just got it all done without running out of DSP but if you build very complex presets especially multi song presets the
    Helix will let you down pretty fast. Thats a real issue with this system. So this should always be one of the biggest criteria. Make sure you can add everything you need.


    Today I' only able to use everything in the Helix i need because the amp sound comes from the Kemper all ready to modulate n stuff.
    If i had to model my amp in the helix too i wouldn't be able to achive this. My presets are that fully packed.


    So yeah this goes to the Kemper no question.

  • I'm assuming that they way DSP works, if you can quickly switch presets and have spillover, it's because you've dedicated a significant amount of DSP to make this possible, since the other potential presets need to be able to be recalled before the preset you were playing is left. Kemper seems to give you less DSP in a single Rig (one amp/cab and 8 effect blocks) compared with a single Helix preset. However, since Kemper doesn't give you 37 different slots for effect/amp blocks, it has the DSP to do quick switching and spillover. Conversely the Helix is able to give you such a large number of blocks because they don't save any DSP for quick switching or Spillover.
    So it really comes down to the way you like to organize. For me, it's the Kemper, which is really win-win since I also prefer it tonally.