New user from Mexico!

  • Hi, already did my first post on another thread .. haha


    I'm a musician, producer, sound engineer but mainly a guitar player. I have my band (

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    ) here in Mexico and I was always atracted to guitar processors "have it all" so i wouldn't carry my whole pedalboard and amp, and guitars (the money sum is already to big!). Also i was always familiar with the guitar sound micd, having lived in an apartment i could NEVER use a Head with a real cab there, only in rehearsal rooms, venues and studios.


    I owned and tried almost everything, even a Zoom G1X when i bought my first guitar. My first big was Boss GT10 when i was 14 as a gift from my mother. It had all, but it sounded digital, lifeless, "mosquito" distortion and was an extreme pain in the ass to edit or create sounds so i choose one patch and kept returning to it. I sold it two years later.

    Then i bought an amp, a Fender Frontman that became my main amp for almost everything in recording to live, it just sounded great directly to the amp, with maybe a Big muff and maybe a delay in front.


    Then I began using 7 string guitars and my fenders wasnt able to bring me the oomph that i needed in the low range, so i Got the Native Instruments Guitar Rig with the RigKontrol, which was also an audio interface. I loved it, even tho i knew they were emulations they were cool, also it cemented to me that if NIN was using them live, they worked, and it did. The only problem was that now i had to carry on the computer .. so now it was: guitar, computer, rigkontrol and amp. It sounded great but my back started to hurt and every show without my bands engineer was a pain in the ass, just to try to give them a DI signal of my guitar, they couldn't understand.


    Then i got an ipad for college and decided to try out Bias. Oh man, what a gimmick. It didn't sound cool, but it looked cool, so i constantly kept outmatched my another guys rig because i didn't knew how to monitor back in the day the app, i remember there was no idea of what kind of monitors would help and my other guitar friends didn't knew what to do, but it was the new thing and everybody and their mothers were jumping towards that. After that i kept using the Bias for practice at home, the NI Guitar Rig Live but it wasn't exactly right, neither of them felt "real" at the end of the day.


    The next years I spent my time and money searching for the right plugin, failed. I tried to forget my "tone dream" and then said to myself that in order to sound like i wanted I needed more real pedals, so it began again, buying stomps and getting myself a big 1x2.5m pedalboard that i would carry on for every gig and just use the amps in the venues. But i forgot the nasty part, EVERY AMP IN EVERY VENUE IS SHIT. All backline amps are trash and have all kinds of malfunctions. So .. my big 3 grand stomps didn't have a purpose if my main source of sound was shit.


    A friend of mine who is a very big drummer in Mexico talked to me to try out the Yamaha catalogue, and they had adquired Line 6 back in the day, so I got to try the Helix. It was great, nice effects, nice OS, nice view, but it lacked dynamics in my book. Recently i tried the new helix rack and hx and they are better, but for the time it wasn't what i needed. They got me a week but i returned it, since i wouldn't really be happy with it. Nice effects, they really know their game there, but the distortions are so like Spider Counterparts, even tho i Own a Line 6 DH50 head that i love for clean and distorted tones, they couldn't get the Helix to sound as close to that.


    Then the Axe Fx happened, a guy who is a very big pop punk singer here was producing a metal band in my studio, so for the guitars he brought his Axe Fx II and we compared them to the amps that we have in the studio: ENGL powerball, ENGL Invader, Diezel, Bogner, Marshall JCM 800 and 900, Mesaboogie Triaxis and 2.Ninety and it sounded cool, not quite there or as raw as the real amps miced, but it was great enough to use them to record some solos or clean guitars, the fx are great. I bought a FX II XL+ and use it for about 6 months in tour until i realized that it didn't make me go "yeah", even tho i bought so many presets i kept going just with one amp for clean, one for dist, one for solos and my digital pedals for everything else. Then i noticed some minimal latency in the Axe Fx so it kept me bugging till i sold it and a friend of mine recommended me the Amplifire, which i loved it!! Minimal space, had EVERYTHING minus whammy and other rare effects, so i could use a smaller pedalboard and be ready to go. I was happy, till I just realized that i was playing with everyother person interpretation of what that amp (say mesa, say fender, etc) should sound, not what the actual amp shpuld sound, they were all algorythms of interpretations. So i didn't sell my amplifire but then tried to search for the ultimate weapon, my last effort to find THE ONE. In the process I got again through plugins, IRs, Headrush, Mooer, again Bias for one last try and then i happed to hear and try the Kemper Powered in the studio.


    It was AMAZING, no latency, had all the "effects" that i used, whammy included and when i fully understood what it does it got to profile my own collection of amps and being able to compare and actually refine and having "my sound" captured for the road, blew me away. If i thought AxeFx was 80% for me, Kemper is 97%, the remaining 3% is the little of low end and mid definition that is lost when profiling my EVH and Diezel, but i real then that their gain staging was complicated for the kemper to fully replicate it, but it doesn't lack dynamics even, my volume knob became part of my playing again and then also shook me that even that MBritt is a genius for tone, I would never sound like him or his demos. My guitars are different, my monitors, my pickups, cables, so i began profiling every amp in every possible way that i could use it and it improved my way of thinking sound even.


    I am thrilled to be part of this community in which the creator have an amazing relation ship and is willing to improve where no other company has and also stick to the Mark I model, it blows my mind. Also i have never sounded so good live, now i even get comments from sound guys and other guitars like "whoa, what do you got there?" so it DOES make a difference against the other processors. Also the thing is really built like a tank and the remote as well, so they are definitely the most rewarding purchase guitar-wise that i have done EVER. I cannot emphasize enough that all before was money poorly spent. Even the Gear Syndrome went away, i got everything in this box (aside a Talkbox/Vocoder and Sequencer, but maybe one day). I don't even need an Editor because the thing is so well thought that I never had a more cool experience learning to use a piece of high end technology and also its very intuitive, so i really don't get many posts regarding that.


    Now i can have my live sound like the record truly and being able to really automate is bless.


    So, if you get to read this, thank you for reading and being an amazing community!

    Cheers!

    Kemper White

    Apogee Ensemble Thunderbolt

    MOTU Ultralite MK2

    ELAM 251 Handmade