I'm selling my Fractal AxeFX 2 XL+ tomorrow and buying my first Kemper... What should I expect?
I've been with Fractal ever since around 04 or 05 when they first released the Standard unit and now I'm selling the XL+ with FW quantum 7.2 and buying a Kemper.
I've never used a Kemper before, all I know is the sounds I've heard on youtube and on Profile sellers websites.
I plan to buy literally every single Profile that Mbrit, BigHairyProfiles, ChopTones, SinMix, TAF, Guidorist, TopJimi, STLtones, Tonehawkstudios, rigbusters and Stymphalian have available on their websites, literally, every one of them in the next few weeks!
Let me know if there's any other Profile sellers I should be checking out as well!
Those BigHairyProfiles impressed me the most from what I heard on the site, I watched every video with my Focal headphones, and they blew me Away! Especially the Profiles for the ADA MP pack and the Lee Jackson ones! Those nailed every tone I been struggling to find in the AxeFx's in the last 10 years and have never came as close to any of them as what I heard in those profiles. And Top Jimi was my 2nd fave with the EVH and Slash tones.
I use Adam A7X monitors and only use guitar to play at home and record.
I will be using the Kemper with a Suhr strat that has a Doug Aldrich humbucker in the bridge and a ML Single Coil in the neck. I use Mogami cables.
I am NOT a Tweaker.
I -Hate- tweaking the Axe, I absolutley -LOATHE- tweaking the axe.
I don't care much about effects, Reverb is extremely important to me, and I understand Kemper has better Reverb coming soon. I also like nice Delays, and a touch of Chorus on clean stuff, and I like to be able to do pitch stuff to get 5th and 3rd harmony licks when I want to, and I like to be able to use a Wah, hoping the Kemper has a Wah that sounds like the Bad Horsie.
On the Axe, yeah you can pretty much throw a good Ownhammer Cab together with a Marshall amp and it sounds good and real.... but that's not good enough for me, that leaves me very, very unsatisfied. I need what I heard in the samples on the BigHairyProfiles page, just listen to the ADA MP ones, he nailed all those famous players tones from the CDs, and especially the Lee Jackson samples he plays, he nailed Zakk Wyldes tone on Crazy Babies.... I think it's a lot to do with the fact that not only is he profiling the amp/cabinet and preamp, but he profiled all the effects etc, so when you use that Profile you are hearing the sum of all those parts.
When I try to make tones on the Axe they sound OK, but nowhere near as great as any of the profiles bighairy has, and when I am tweaking on the Axe I am always second guessing myself and before it's over I've had so many options and things that are tweakable that the tone I end up with is even worse than the tone I started out with.
I don't want to Tweak. I simply want to buy a profile that already sounds hopefully 95% of how I want it to and then maybe make a few basic simple fast adjustments on the Kemper panel that will compensate for my guitar/pickups to better match what I heard in the sample that made me buy the profile in the first place.
I do not care about "amp in the room" tone at all.
I do not even like amp in the room tone. I don't like the sound of live music.
I only like the way guitars sound on CD recordings.
And those are the tones I seek.
I don't wanna just sound like a Marshall. I wanna sound like the Marshall Randy Rhoads played through on the Tribute CD after it was mixed and mastered, as an example.
Almost every Profile example I listened to in the above Profile Packs made me go -WOW!- and I've never had that feeling ever in all the ten years owinging Fractal products. In fact, there's only one preset that I really like that came with the XL+ and that was the Mark Day preset. Other than that I like one good preset that I made myself, and even then I second guess that all the time and can't decide if the Mark Day preset actually sounds better than my preset or not. TWO good presets in my Fractal after all these years, I think that's PATHETIC, but I didn't think there was anything else as good or better out there, I thought Fractal was the best there was, because of the hype I guess and never bothereed really researching Kemper until recently.
With Kemper I feel like I'm going to end up with thousands of mind blowing awesome wow profiles/tones, and I will be able to focus on playing rather than always thinking that my tone is not as good as it could be or that it's what I want it to be.