New guy here - greetings!

Quote from Finally

Congrats and enjoy!

You should have a go at profiling your favorite Helix patch just for fun!

Ha - I was kind of surprised to see AxeFX and Helix profiles up on Rig Exchange. I thought that was hilarious! And an old Rockman, that brought back some memories.

I did naively try to profile my SY-300 with a very simple patch with a couple of oscillators running, but no effects or anything. It didn't work of course. I think the SY-300 needs a waveform of some type as it's input which it analyzes to find the fundamental frequency to apply to its oscillators. With the Kemper injecting what is essentially a noise source, there's nothing for the SY-300 to lock onto, and thus it can't set the oscillators to anything, and the resulting profile essentially just sounded like my dry guitar. Interesting, fun, and kind of obvious after I thought about it.

Quote from nightlight

Welcome to the club! Could you post some Helix vs Kemper comparisons? Maybe even profile the helix and post your results!

Glad to have you here!

Thanks, and will do. I've had my Helix for almost 2 years, though, so I think I should get some more experience with the Kemper so I know it as well as the Helix in order to do a more fair comparison.

My initial reaction is that the Kemper is *extremely* good at duplicating a particular setup - where so much depends on the quality of the mic'ing and of course the dialing in of the amp itself to where you want it. Kemper will duplicate that very precisely, I certainly can't tell the difference between the profile and the real thing.

Whereas the Helix is extremely good at modeling the full amp and all the interactions between its controls at a very deep level. And with the Helix, you don't have to worry too much about mic'ing especially if you use impulse responses which were done professionally. Conversely, you don't have much control over that aspect aside from selecting the right one out of many for the tone you're looking for.

Of course, the Kemper can utilize impulse responses, too - but my initial preference leans toward the actual cab used to make the profile vs substituting an impulse response. I'm just learning the Kemper and best practice, though, so all that may change as I get more experience with it.

I did get a chance to profile a custom one-off amp. This is my guitar teacher's amp, which started out life as a Sovtek Bassov Blues Boy bass amp. It was modified by Carr Amplification to have a clean channel, a drive channel, a lot of rewiring and tube work, and I don't know what else. This profile was made through a Marshall 4x12 cabinet with greenback speakers, as mic'd by my guitar teacher using an MD-421. I didn't know anything about this 100 Watt beast of a head, so I suggested he set it up like he would at a gig or something. You can probably get close to this (assuming you want a tone like this) with the Helix or Axe using one of the existing amps and dialing in the tone. But it wouldn't be the real thing.

When Carr modified the amp, I'm not sure if they named it or my guitar teacher did, but it has a plate on it - it's called the VodkaSonic. I love that name! Here's a little riff I did with it to try it out in a mix. The real amp is painfully loud. Fortunately, it was in an isolation booth when we profiled it.