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Axe-Fx vs. Kemper

This section is going to be about the axe effects. Um, well, actually, and the camper but that's fact is what we're going to start with. I recorded a band, um, who used this? That I would like to show you in a second. But let's talk about the expects for a second. It simulates a range of vamps, like a plug it on steroids. Um, this, uh, that the axe effects is is a really, um, it's, kind of like a plug in, but it's more complicated because of the way that it processes, uh, the signal and, uh, well, actually talk a little bit more about that. Um, this is the reason I bought it. I wanted a la a bunch of really high quality amps without actually having to buy them. All the price of you, no one expects is much cheaper than, uh, buying a ton of vance and what's really cool is you can easily take it with you if you are playing life. And I know a lot of people that are recording themselves are also advance. So it makes sense. If you get a tone on there that you like, take it with you easily. I...

f you have a computer, you have to deal with all these weird boxes that were uh you know, figure out how to get rid of buzzes every day and stuff like that so that's why body go to fractal audio dot com to learn more about it? Maybe pick one up actually buying from them from their web site is the cheapest way to buy it don't go to ebay for some reason they cost more blew my mind um okay, so here is uh the water rose they're brand new band little baby band have it you guys haven't heard of him but I like the guys they're cool guys cool music they don't have an album cover anything yet so uh still waiting on that what we got here? Yeah, this guitar tone is all acts effects I really like how it came out I'm going to go over in detail about this tone, everything that you hear whenever I'm dealing with simms the axe effects, whatever it's going to be my impulse response my cabinet that I got, um from the mesa for twelve sharing with everyone so I'm just going to play a little bit of that song yeah, all right, cool. So, um the ok axe overt acts for the axe effects versus the kemper I get a lot of questions about this and one of the main I'll just say that it will go into detail in a second but one of the main differences between those two, these two and there are a lot of differences, but the ax effects goes through for instance, this is ah, the schematics, that schematic diagram of une vh fifty one. Fifty um and all these tiny little different points it and I'm not a guy that knows about a lot of this stuff, but they model every single circuit and tube and every component of the amp it's not it's like a three dimensional model of the amp basically. And you, khun mess with all this kind of stuff, you can basically build your own amps inside there. So it's very flexible. The kemper uh, the way it works is it kind of takes a snapshot of a tone that you've already gotten and on the camper and the axe effects, you can share tones, you know it if you like something, you can download him or whatever. So I haven't axe effects and we're gonna go into great detail about that and, uh and how it works and the things I really like about it. And, uh but keith has a temper, and I would really like for him to talk a bit about that and he's going to do a demo in a little bit sure, get a tone. Yeah, I get that question all the time as well almost every day now, you know, people say, you know, access axe effexor says camper, which one's better which ones this which ones? That and to me, they're not two separate camps, you know, they're they're kind of they're two different things, you know that the end result is you get guitar tone out of either of them, of course, but the way that you achieve that can be different with with both of them. So with the kemper, you know, basically you can either download amps that people have profiled in the studio or a home or wherever or if you have your own amps, you can set it up and, you know, using the methods like you demonstrated earlier, you can actually profile that exact sound and reuse it, you know, take it with you with the temper on dh then of course, you can still read it, change it around so it's to me, it's a little bit more personal, you know, because you khun you can get your exact sound that you want in the studio and actually save that so that's pretty cool. You know, if you if you have a tone that she used on an album and you want to use it again live or something like that you can do that. And of course you can also do that with the axe effects. You know, if you recorded in the studio with the axe effects and you take it live, you have the same tone. Um, you know, the difference is with the axe effect that's kind of a predetermined model, you know, that's your starting playing, then you tweak it to whatever you want. It does have tone matching and stuff like that, but I think the campers probably more robust when it comes to actually emulating the amp. You know the source amp. Alright, we'll show it here in a little while, but it gets it gets pretty much dead on. So yeah, and with the x effect axe effects is actually the way that I made my impulse response. And I want to share that with you guys after keith. Well, actually, it is now it would now be a cool timeto demo this, I think. Yeah, well, just one quick thing that you pointed out before and, you know, I don't actually have either these things, but a lot of my friends do have talked had this conversation many times considered buying one or both of these, so to me, and you correct me if I'm wrong on this one thing with the campers because it clones amps, you need to have access to a way of getting those tones to begin with you khun download profiles other people's profiles that they've made but in the same way as an impulse response captures the pre empt the mic and cabinet the kemper since he captures what you're playing through, the amp captures the pickup in guitar a cz well and I guess tell me what your experience is working with other people's profiles you've downloaded yeah, you know when you profile you know a rig with the kemper it's basically capturing everything that went into that um you know, so the pickup that you used that all plays a part in the in the overall tone so I found a lot of times if I were to download someone else's profile and use it for myself a home it doesn't always sound that great, you know? I'm using different pickups different guitar, different tuning you know, there's a lot of little factors there, so but you khun tweak them to sound pretty good, but I think the optimal weight it to use the camper is if you have a rig already that you really like um you know an amp and you get your sound dialed in and you can save that sound that's that's the best way for me to use it I've heard a lot of other people have really good results you know, downloading other people's towns and using him that way but I think the best way to get a good tone out of it is to set up your own rig and then save that yeah, and if you are in a studio and you get a lot of bands come in like I do, they're bringing in a bunch of different amps so if you really like that you can use it again, right? So that's what's cool about the camper if if you have that opportunity whereas that the axe effects again it simulates amps from scratch on it uses impulse response is a big part of that but the impulse response that does not include the guitar and the pickup so it's a little that ah ah small point of difference but from what I understand, it could make a pretty big difference and how usable those other people's profiles yeah, and another thing worth pointing out to is you can't profile, you know, complex effects delays in river bs and things like that it won't do that right it's basically just you know you could put a drive pedal in front of the amp and then you know my profile that whole signal chain but it won't do any complex effects or anything like that so it's mainly just raw guitar sound out of a cabinet but you can also profile modelers um you know things like that you can you can use software sam's you khun model software seems just routing it through your interface right? So make yourself a camper pod farm profile yeah be sweet grey beard okay, so can we show how to profile really quick? Sure, I just, uh I find this very interesting and I think the viewers will at home it makes all these yeah it's like this little alien jumps through the microphone and all the sudden it stole the soul out of the amp you know? And we're gonna be using the d ay from, uh from the song that we were just doing from a day to remember so you khun the song dead and buried so you can hear uh something just for the sake of time I mean, we'll just we'll just start right away. What you can do is if you just want to play the d ay so we can get an idea of how it's going to sound first through the reference sample okay and that came through home I assume they could hear the mic signal. Yeah, I think uh you're miked up right now they took it away from me. I was too loud or something on okay, okay, well, this is easy enough, okay, so basically on the kemper there's a profiling mode that you would switch too and you know it would probably take a long time to go into all the specific details and settings that you can do but basically we're going to show you what it does and we start with just I just picked an amp that was in the camper already that's our starting point and I switched into profile mode and we're going to send the signal through the amp which is going to be picked up by the mike and the campers actually going to store it so here's that weird alien thing we're talking about the ocean is beautiful it's a calm and soothing ocean breeze ok so basically what that wass is the camper sent its weird alien signal through the amp and it caught all the frequencies through the mic and basically stole the soul out of the emp which is awesome now what we can do is uh we can further refine the profile um just by hitting the refined button and then he's going to play the d I threw it and what that does is the temporal reading in real time and uh sort of adjust the parameters and the frequencies to get is close to the am pus possible so we'll try that now all right so basically we just ran it through there it reads it a little bit further with you know the actual guitar tone to get a little bit closer um I'm just going to save this one now we'll go back here I'm goingto run the d I threw it and he's going to play through the monitors and you'll be able to hear that it got it pretty close so you just put that on standby so I'll just run it through again, okay? So we can hear it in here to blow up my back that's basically it you could spend more time and get it even closer than that, you know, spend more time getting your mic placement right in your amp settings right? And you can adjust the game itself. Yeah, at that point you khun, go back through adjuster gain all your excuse, you can add effects to it. You can even put stop boxes. You know, virtual stop boxes like the tube screamer in front and really shape the tone that way. But basically, we just modeled this rig right here and what, five minutes? Yeah, so it's a pretty cool tool. Very cool. Alright, awesome. Thank you so much. So if you can see, uh, we didn't talk about this, but this is the there you see the guitar that's um you khun you could actually play the guitar yourself while you're doing that, yeah, we just used to die for the sake of saving time, right, and you guys are familiar with what that sound like through the amp in stuff yeah, I mean saying the d I threw it is basically the same thing is playing it so usually when I profile lamps I actually play because it helps me to dial it in and then when you refine you know it's really important oh go across the whole frequency range of the instrument you're using so you know you play high notes low notes hard palm mute soft notes you know, because you can get all the dynamics of the amp using that refined feature if you you know pretty much go over the whole spectrum of what you would normally be doing it'll um it'll get that amp standing really close. Yeah. So this is what we have the guitar which or die going into the kemper and then we also had the a microphone plugged into the kemper that was coming getting a signal from the amp so that's that's how it gets the sound of the amp you just have a microphone that's plugs straight into the camper um and then it goes out into the the inter pro tools and we listen to it and that's basically it simple. Okay, let's talk about the axe again because we're gonna be we're going to go over this in, uh, more detail here um okay, so why is the ax effects in a box and it's not just a plug in there are there are actually a lot of reasons for that um one of the one of the biggest advantages of having it in a box like that and I'm sure it's probably the same with the kemper they have a lot of excellent that pre amps inputs and outputs the that a lot of circuits are gold plated like they make sure that it's very low noise and like I said earlier, we have all these direct boxes and things to get rid of all these buzzes and stuff but you plug in straight through that and it's absolutely clean and you can take it with you if you're going to try to pull your computer and uses amps and live you're gonna have to deal with all that noise and try to figure out you know where it's coming from and rigged to rig you're going to have different problems that you've never had to deal with but we got one nice box where it's ologists in there and that's it um also well actually also the which this is not a bullet point but the ax effects has tons of insane effects built into it and I can't wait to show you guys a really awesome atmospheric tone that I got with with it using some pretty zany effects but uh pretty cool result um the simulation quality the first is if you had this as a plug it on your computer it would be eating up your cpu there are a lot of other plug ins that use outboard processing like the what is it that you have the you know the universal audio us stuff is a dedicated dsp card exactly exactly exactly hd same thing same idea basically this guy the expects has one powerful you know chips I don't know I don't know what they are a bunch of fancy chips in there that do the processing that you know would bring your computer to its knees so that's that's a big part of the reason why it needs to be in a box and it's virtually not exactly but it's virtually zero late and see which that's something if you're playing through an amps him through your computer you're gonna be dealing with a bit of latent see uh and if you're playing through this through this you're not really having to deal with that so it has that dedicated processor so it's super fast and it's not messing up your computer you can use it with a laptop even if it's not a very powerful computer um and like I said earlier you can take it with you you know any any uh tones that you're dialing you can take it with you to the stage keith I know that there are some people who use either the the lunchbox camper or the rack mount one on the road what have you heard about that? Um well, actually on both I have a wreck counted one as well and they're the same thing you know, there's no feature about a better different from the lunch box to the rack wanted just the form factor of it but you can get either of those with the power amp so you know if you wanted to use the camper live the power inversion might be a better option I would also say if you're going to use the camper live the rack mounted one is probably better, you know? So you could put it in the case lunch box one is you know, it's mobile but you know, you can't put really a case on it, you know? I mean sure, I'm sure you could find one but the rack mount one would be more convenient I think for that definitely his durability goes you know, if you hear good things about it I have a couple friends that toured with the lunchbox version and they had they had some problems you know, it's it's maybe not the most durable thing when it comes to, you know, throwing in the back of a trailer, you know? But um yeah, I mean it's, reliable and it's well built, you know, the axe effects though I think you could probably throw that thing off a building and it wouldn't hurt it you know so well, andrew, on the way here, you had you put your expects in the hands of the essay, which, you know, weaken after this. Maybe we can talk about whether that was a wise idea or not, but it's arrived. So, yes, there's that, yeah, I had to wrap it in a very thick yoga mat, and they, uh, they gave me a huge piece of wood to put in my suitcase. Tto help protected, scared. That thing has tones on it that I don't want to lose. But I have them backed up that expects comes with software, so you can easily put stuff on your computer and share it with a friend or an enemy.