selig wrote: ↑17 May 2018
amcjen wrote:
Just curious if you’ve tried a Kemper yet? It’s the first one that has actually fooled me—everything else fell short. (And by “fooled” I mean it sounds so good it has inspired me to play more often.)
Kempers are great if you approach guitar from a synth player perspective, e.g. you need more than one sound on a regular basis.
OTOH, if you approach guitar from a piano player’s perspective, then there is one tone, period. All others are sacrilege, and no sample can ever come close to how the “real deal” feels, now or in any foreseeable future. [emoji6]
Horses for courses, as always.
Sent from some crappy device using Tapatalk
You managed to explain it in far less words and perfectly concise. Well done. So I'll apologize in advance for the following wall of text.
I'd like to explain my position a little more just because I'm quite unorthodox in just about everything I do and often my take on things tend to get confused or lumped into the common misconceptions because people don't usually understand where I'm coming from, so they revert to popular opinion for some context into my perspective. But I quite often go in the
opposite direction of popular opinion because I do independent research and I generally disregard what's popular unless my own personal research/taste agrees.
I don't base my sound on this or that artist. I'm very picky and I know exactly what I want. Putting it in words is near impossible but my ears know when they hear it. Now there are certain albums that to my mind stand out from a mixing standpoint, there's certain albums that stand out to me from a guitar tone standpoint. And those same artists with the same mixing engineers produce an audibly different tone from one album to the next. I've no loyalty to any one band/guitarists tone.
I want my tone to make my ears feel a certain way. My amp is not a very popular one and is discontinued. People online tend to bash it for not sounding like the other more popular models that the company produced.
The masses want clones. They want JCM 800 tone. They want Marshall tone because they want to sound like so and so. If you put out something new and different that doesn't sound like what people are used to, they go nuts. Hive mind forum echo chamber ensues.
I simply want what pleases my ears. Nothing more nothing less. If a digital plastic box made in China pleases my ears, then I'm sold.
In this regard, I've procured the type of guitar that I thought would help me achieve this. I've installed specific pickups to this end. My amp was chosen and I was 90% there. Then I replaced the speakers and now my tone pleases me 100%. It's not based on anyone else's sound, it's based on what my ears want. I'm not a purist for this or that type of amp technology. In fact, my amp is not even a tube amp (!). I do have a tube amp that I love the sound of, but it's not quite as good to my ears.
My only loyalty is to my ears.
I don't need different amp sounds because my volume knob and my amps channel section effectively alters the sound. When I want the full on face melting distortion, my volume knob is 100% and it's fucking glorious. When I want a more dialed back Jimi Hendrix type of tone, I dial back the volume knob to about 75% and switch to the crunch channel and voila! Fucking nails the sound I want. From modern sounding, pure distortion with pleasing harmonic overtones to the more classic sounding warm retro vibe ala Jimi Hendrix, my rig achieves the change through nothing but the volume knob on my guitar. Granted, the other parts of my signal chain get credit for this as well.
My point is that
people tend to get too hung up on the gear itself. Wanting to sound like this or that amp/guitar combo because this or that artist used it. When most of the time I'd be willing to bet that the artist in question would have used a totally different setup if it had been available at the time. It just so happens that's what was used. But people idolize it. Zealous fanaticism hive mind ensues.
My approach has been to buy the most high quality individual components I can get my hands on. They may be viewed as one-trick ponies in and of themselves, but their high audio quality actually makes them incredibly versatile, more so than one would think. This goes against well established rules of guitar tone that internet forums will convince you are unbreakable.
A Kemper is surely incredibly versatile and fun. If I wanted huge variety of very specific popular tones, then I could buy a Kemper or I could buy a huge variety of popular amps. But I can achieve all the variety of sounds that my ears want through the rig that I have intentionally assembled for the singular purpose of pleasing my ears. It took a little trial and error but I have achieved what I set out to do.