Display MoreI thought that the supposed advanced signal routing on the Helix would be great, but found it to be more trouble than it's worth. And the comparison of having 8 snapshots per preset to the Kemper's 2 morph states is fallacious.
The comparison is a bit apples and oranges. Consider: Instead of comparing Kemper Rigs to Helix presets, compare Kemper PERFORMANCES to Helix Presets. On the Kemper you have 5 Rigs in a performance with spillover between them and instant switching without any sort of drop off that would mar your playing to switch between song, whereas there's a terribly overt audio gap between Helix presets and zero spillover. However on the Kemper, If you've tweaked one Rig in a performance, you can copy and paste and save it to the other 4 slots in the performance in about 20 seconds without even using rig manager. From there you could tweak each one to taste, giving you the essentially same flexibility of having 5 Snapshots.
Not only that, but if you wanted to, you could swap out the amp profile and individual effects for each Rig in the performance. If you wanted to you could have 8 unique effects using the 8 pre and post effect slots and even unique amps and cabs in each of those 5 Rigs. That's equivalent to having 50 modules in the Helix, which is more than double the DSP limit of a single Helix Preset. Plus, each Rig in the performance can send midi messages to two different devices. Then if that's not enough, each of those five rigs in that performance can have two morph states which can either be instantaneous or all the inbetweens using a expression pedal or even gradual based on a number of seconds of your choice with a single stomp.
The Helix lover would reply, yeah but the Helix gives you banks of 4 or 8 presets. But these additional presets have a terrible audio gap between and no spillover. On the Kemper, if having 5 rigs in a performance times 2 morph states isn't enough, with the two midi messsages per rig isn't enough, you can always hit one button (Bank up or Down) to access the next or previous performance, but without the poor audio gap like between Helix presets.
In other words, if you'd use a single preset for a song on the Helix, you could do just as much and in fact more using a single Kemper performance for a song. (Not to discount the Helix advantage of midi messages than one could possibly need and the additional external effects loops:) If you play a set of songs using the Helix and you need to switch presets even between songs, you may run into issues if you ever do two songs seamlessly because of the audio gap. You could live in one Kemper performance for an entire set easier than you could in a single Helix preset.
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.