Kemper paired with Helix

There are more of them. 'Better' is down to personal taste. I have a Helix connected to my Kemper - the Helix drives work very well with Kemper if you have them in the FX loop.

The helix drives are great. However development of drives has already been floated as in the future for the KPA. I you’re already using the KpA without external overdrives, you might just want to wait it out. Though if I had to guess, it would be a full year before a release with drives would be available, given that it’s typically taken six months for even betas to be released of the demoed new features at Namm.

To me adding such an additional pedal has its pluses and minuses. An extra power supply and patch cables. Increased latency. An additional potential for noise. More set up time. More programing in the KpA if you want it to trigger midi patches in the external unit. On the positive side, you have more options and the drive independence to where you can adjust your external drives on the fly without thinking about your Kempers organization of rigs.

Since there’s an endless number of profiles of every sort of amp, cab at various settings and with various drive pedals baked in, it all comes down to whether it makes more sense to get a variety of gain stages using different profiles and the current limit of internal drive and boost options vs picking a cleanish go to profile and hitting it with a variety of drive pedals, or something like the helix.

Keep in mind the huge audio gap between presets in all the helix products and be sure that you’ll be content organizing using their snap shot feature, as you can’t musically switch presets in the middle of a song. I personally hated this limitation of the helix. Yes, I loved the ability to create mammoth presets with loads of options. The issue was that I always have a handful of go to sounds I want instant access to. These are best organized by having them on their own preset, vs copying and pasting each of the components that I used for a go to sound into each and every new preset I create. This requires going back and and forth copying/pasting/saving multiple times. repeat for each new preset I want to have access to that go to sound. Would be much easier to simply change presets, but you can’t mid song because of the audio gap. Also keep in mind that you can’t as conveniently change midi patches on the Kemper as you can toggle on and off internal effects. You can send a midi message to the helix in a change of rig, but you can’t send messages with a toggle switch, though you can open and close the effects loop.