I will say this, that whoever in this thread mentioned Kemper, annoyed me by thinking the Kemper was on the same level as the Fractal, so much so that it made me spend the last 12 hours today and about 5 hours yesterday just listening to more Kemper profiles, videos and reading more about it... It had been a few years since I listened to any clips of anyone demoing a Kemper.... And I wasn't impressed a few years ago with the few demos I heard of it and I didn't understand what advantages it had over the Fractal Axe Fx 2 XL+.
Well, I found out about
http://www.topjimi.com/
today! And I listend to litterally every sample on the website as well as every clip I could find elsewhere, and I'm blown away by the amount of great tones to be had in the huge number of all the profiles available on that site!
I'm also impressed with profiles I heard by the amp factory, sinmix, stltones, tone hawk studios, and mbrittprofiles!
I didn't hear a bad profile in any of the profiles by any of the above people that sell profiles. And wow they are inexpensive, I can buy ever profile on Top JImis site for only about $250.
And, you can get the Kemper Rack plus the floorboard controller for only $2,268 on sweetwater. I paid $2,250 for my Fractal XL+ and it didn't even come with a foot controller, you got to pay a extra $650 to get that. With the money a person could save on that you could almost have enough to buy every profile all of the above profilers offer for sale, which would probably be close to five thousand profiles, maybe even ten thousand profiles, haven't added them all up on those sites, but it's a lot of them, and I want them all.
Here's the thing that's really got me SOLD right now on selling my Fractal and getting the Kemper that I just realized today.... With the Kemper, you can just buy a profile that was already made by an expert, then slap a little reverb/delay on it to taste and you are DONE! And if you do wanna make a small adjustment here and there it's got knobs like a real amp.
And bottom line is, I'm not a fucking Tweaker, I hate Tweaking, I suck at tweaking tones, and I just want to fucking play guitar and have tones that sound fucking killer!
I'm sure the Fractal is capable of getting the tones in the Kemper -IF- you know how to tweak the motherfucker and want to waste all that fucking time tweaking. Fuck that bullshit. I don't want to know how to cook my own food, I want to pay a fucking master chef to prepare my dinners you know what I'm saying. I just wanna plug my guitar into something and fucikin be set, sound killer through a bad ass amp profile, then turn the knob and have another bad ass profile etc. I wanna focus on playing music not fucking tweaking.
And Godamn Fractal keeps releasing all these stupid FW updates to where everyone has to redo everything and if you go on axeexchange presets that were made on old FW won't even sound good anymore on new FW. Where with the Kemper profiles will sound the same even when new FW comes out.
I wasted about $300 buying a lot of the Ownhammer and Fractal Cab Packs, and man that was a headache, having all those different options and combinations available, never knowing which combinations I would like best, always second guessing myself, and I'd take a preset that seemed to have potential, and I'd start tweaking the fucker and would think I had it sounding pretty good after about 15 minutes and then tweak some more and think it was even better, and then I'd switch back over to my favorite preset the Fractal comes with which is Mark Days HBE and realize the preset I made sucked. I even tried to use the Mark Day preset as a starting point for making my own presets and in the end they always turned to shit compared to the original preset I started with.
And really the fucking Mark Day Preset is the only fucking preset I've ever taken a real liking to in the Fractal.
So to me that's real limiting to not know how to create a awesome sounding preset without tweaking it so much you fuck it all up, and I'm real bad about fucking with the EQ and boosting the 4k by about 4 or 5 DB and boosting the 2k too.... it sounds good at the moment but then when I compare to what I like that I hear others doing then I realize how what I made sounds like shit.
I fucking hate tweaking.
I've been buying Fractal racks since they first came out around 2005, and I've tried and fuckin tried, watched all the goddamn tutorials and read every forum post over the years and still I'm sitting here thinking how nice it'd be just to Pay Mark Day or someone like that to fly to my house and tweak me a couple hundred killer presets!
So what I'm saying is this shit is just a fucking waste for anyone that don't want to have to tweak to get the tones they want.
Also a couple very minor things I noticed, yeah the Fractal is very quiet, but still the Kemper is even more quiet becaue it don't even use cooling fans, and, the Kemper controller has spillover so you can switch seamless through presets, and the Fractal don't, yeah you could program it in there, but that'd be a bitch.
And from what I heard today, with the latest Kemper FW their delays and reverbs are on par with Styman, which I always thought Stryman was bettwer than the Fractal. And it appears that Kempers pitch effects walks all over Fractals.
I had thought about keeping the Fractal and just using it for effects and using the Kemper for the amps, but after all the research the last two days, I feel confident with Kempers effects.
The top Jimmy fuckin nails AFD tone as well as VH tone, and that Lee Jackson pack sounds badass, especially the Crazy Babies riffs, and they got so many more amps than Fractal such as the ENGL Ritchie Blackmore, YJM100, and Steve Stevens custom amp. They got every amp Fractal has and then even more!
So, I'm glad this discussion came up in this thread because it triggered me to do more research into Kemper and I think I'm gonna be a lot more satisfied with Kemper than the Fracatl I have.
Cool thing about most of the demos of top jimi and the other companies is, most of them are just showing just the profile loaded into the kemper direct into a daw, with no post processing added, and no shitty compressed audio or effects or anything. So you know you are gonna pretty much get the same tone you hear in the demo as long as you are using a similar pickup/combination, meaning humbucker/singlecoil. So there's no trickery in it.
I feel at this point that Kemper is superior to the Fractal, unless you just like tweaking shit.
Top Jimi and them other sites already done all the damn tweaking for me, I hear those tones and am just already fantasizing about how I will use them.
I tried a lot of the presets from axe exchange in the past, and they were never that fucking great, not as great as what I hear from the Kemper.
I don't wanna buy Cab Packs and have to create my own presets from the ground up, I just wanna buy profiles and be done with it and just fucking play. I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to tones. I just wanna be able to get all my favorite tones from my favorite CDs.
And Fractals Tone Match sucks, it only matches eq, and its near impossible to find good recordings of bare guitar other than the few guitar hero stems etc to tone match too.
Kemper has just won me the fuck over.
Back in the day I used to use a Rocktron Voodu Valve the year they first came out and thought it was awesome how I could just turn the dial to a new preset and get another badass guitar tone (for its time) and I thought this would be what owning a FRactal would turn into except that Fractal would sound even better, yeah the bare amps in the Fractal sound real and great, and the cabs sound great and real, but there's more to getting tones I like than just pairing the perfect amp with the perfect IR! And I don't wanna have to do all that work. I like simple. I like pretty much plug and play.
I like all the things I heard in the Kemper today and all the things I learned about Kemper.
I think Fractal has much of it's community brainwashed like a cult at this point. I'm glad I was finally able to break free and escape this Fractology bullshit!!!!!!!!!!!!!