Owning a Kemper, longing for real amplifiers but end up buying a Fractal Axe FX III
In December 2021, after a long period of using plugins, I made the mistake of listening to some old recordings and thought that “I just cannot achieve those tones/sounds without some of my old gear.” That’s the trap I set myself every time, maybe you’ve said the same thing? Told yourself things to justify the cost of purchasing a new piece of gear, or as in my case, justify the purchase of a piece of gear I once let go for, well, reasons.
Kemper.
I had a Kemper Profiling Amplifier from 2018 to 2019, before returning to real amplifiers. I loved it, I wrote a few things with it, but they were mostly snippets of songs, demo’s at best and always unfinished. [Nothing ever gets finished, and that the problem.]
I have these recordings here, on cloud storage, they’re my go-to things to listen to when I need to fire myself up to be creative again. Almost in a way that says “come on, you’ve done this before, listen, it’s great. Now finish it, or do it again.” The issue always arises when I try to tone match. I couldn’t replicate any of it with my plugins or amp simulators.
So I purchased my first piece of hardware in almost a year, another Kemper, just two years after selling my previous one. In fairness, I sold that because I wanted amps and the amps aren’t here any more because I HAD to sell them, not because I got fed up with them. More on my relationship with amps later.
It arrived and I loved it. I instantly relocated all my old favourite ‘profiles’ and had a blast for a few weeks, rediscovering old tones like they were old friends I’d not spoken to for a while. However, at no point in time in the entire year I had the Kemper was I even slightly inclined to record things with it. In fact, the only things I did record with it were snippets, demo’s and unfinished things. Why?! Why go through this again?!
Blocked.
Why? Very early on, I realised that the Kemper just didn’t sound as good as I thought it did. Those tones I’d used on recordings weren’t very good and they no longer inspired me to create with them. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I didn’t have confidence in the Kemper to record anything with it because I felt that in time I would come to regret committing the sounds to ‘tape’. I might have even wanted to reamp the D.I. signal later on. So it felt a bit of a waste of time doing any recording with it.
I did, however, keep the unit for a year.
Means to an end
Within months, I was back to my usual trick of trying to recreate sounds of old…I even went through a phase of trying to replicate the tone of the Victory Copper and Mezzabarba amps I’d owned for very short amounts of time. It was all futile, of course, and ultimately was a waste of time. I couldn’t replicate them.
I decided that the lack of money to invest in anything else meant that I could use the Kemper to build a solid base of pedals and would aim to purchase a clean amplifier, a “pedal platform” in 2022. So I used my trusty Laney Lionheart profile and started amassing a small but potent mix of nice pedals. My favourite of which were the Origin Effects Cali 76 Compact Deluxe and the 1981 Inventions DRV, alongside a couple of Strymon delays and some rarer Magnetic Effects fuzz and overdrive pedals, which I really liked.
I loved what I’d done and I’d given purpose to owning the Kemper. It felt good to have something to work towards. But the trouble was that I wasn’t creating, I was just buying again, amassing things to no real creative end…just indulging in my passion for nice gear, with the faint hope that I’d one day use these tools to actually produce a song with them.
Blocked. Again.
This brought me back full circle. I was once again contemplating a Laney Lionheart amplifier and the 1981 DRV was serving such a strong position in my pedal lineup, offering me such versatility, that I considered ditching high gain amps in favour of a clean platform with high gain pedals. Something I’d tried and failed to achieve before.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Inevitably, I bought the Laney and a Suhr Reactive Load, and put my pedals to the test.
It failed miserably.
The pedals sounded okay, the amp sounded lovely, but ultimately, there was something special about that specific Kemper profile that gave a sheen to whatever the pedals put out. The same could not be said for the amp and the 1981 DRV sounded far too aggressive and gritty. I’d lost the love of it and was put off by the whole thing. The amp was bulky, the idea of having valves that would die on me and this overhanging fear within the community that valves might somehow become a thing of the past, I just didn’t feel comfortable owning a valve amplifier, the whole purchase didn’t feel right to me, it felt uncomfortable and forced. I had to send them back.
I was at the end of my tether with it all and fed up of going through the motions of chasing the elusive tone I had in my head by spending so much on gear that ultimately, I’d churn and turn it into some other piece of gear. It started to become genuinely upsetting.
Spoiled, entitled and privileged.
I put the notion of being fed up with the “gear chase” and being unable to move on creatively without recording with the exact tones I’d used to create the demo’s of said songs, to the fretboard forum. The advice given to me was that “perfect is the enemy of good” and that I should place less emphasis on tones than I should on getting the job done, and output the things that occupy the space in my head, the creations, the songs.
Someone quite rightly pointed out that in putting this into words made me sound “petulant”. I agree.
It’s not lost on me that I’m very fortunate to have owned such incredible pieces of gear and that I’ve gone through them like water trickles through fingers. It makes me very sad that I’m dismissing gear whilst I write about it, giving the illusion that I’ve spared no thought to how lucky I am that I’ve been able to try some of these things. In part, that’s exactly why I’m writing about it. To share my experiences with you and with regards to this specific story, to share my hope that it might be the last time that I buy or dismiss gear and opt for something else.
The conversation lead me to rethink my strategy, the strategy I’ve pled alliegance with for years, the strategy that has lead to nothing but gear purchase after gear purchase, with no real attempt to just finish a song, but serves only to crave the next big thing in the hope that it’ll inspire a new creation and might one day be used on a recording.
Axe FX again.
I toyed with the idea of returning to plugins, tried a few out with the Black Friday deals, they still sound great to my ears, but they always left a question mark over whether they were the best I could get for approximations of the tones I really sought. I doubted that and with that doubt, I knew I’d never truly be happy with using them.
A friend mentioned an Axe FX and it got me thinking. I’d read accounts over the last two years, since I last owned one, about how the amps had become somewhat indistinguishable from the real thing in regard to tone. My only bugbear was the constant hunt for the appropriate IR’s to match with them, something I’ve always struggled with. But I recall owning the Axe FX II XL, it was one of my favourite and creative periods in my time as a guitarist, and I remembered that I only sold it to buy an Axe III which never arrived.
I found a way, by selling the Kemper and the pedals, to get the money together for one last roll of the dice with a Fractal.
Mindset.
It arrived on December 1 2022. After some initial IR problems and tail chasing, I spent the day working on a JCM 800 and Les Paul tone I had craved since I sold my JCM 800 back in 2020, I’d not been able to find that on anything else since I sold that amp. But within hours, I found that tone and feel I’d been missing and I really think that I’m happy. I’d be happy to gig with that sound, and I’d be happy to record with that sound. I’ve not been able to honestly admit that for a long time.
That initial experience, gratification of finding the tone in my head, that gave me the confidence that this could well be the thing that helps me achieve the tone and feel I so loved with my amps, but it allows for so much more due to the extra control over parameters. The ability to turn that JCM 800 into a modded JCM 800 at a click of a switch, for example.
I am already writing new things and playing new things, and that’s the sign of a good piece of gear. Not that it’s better or worse than what someone else has, or what I’ve owned previously, but that it lights a fire inside and inspires creativity.
For me, this is the start of a new journey, due in no small part to a mindset change. Yes, this is an expensive piece of equipment that I’ve been spoiled and priveleged enough to own, but without a willingness to call time on the ‘chase’, there can be no closure. So there’s a genuine willingness for this to be the final thing that I settle with.
