The Kemper Matrix

A guitar processor capable of “copying” your whole setup of amp, stompboxes and built-in effects and speaker cabinet AND reproducing this setup as a preamp which you connect to your mixing board, or your active studio monitors, or headphones, or through an endstage to speakers or a PA system… How’s that for a paradigm change?
Such a wondrous box exists in the form of the Kemper Profiling amplifier.

Much More Than A Busking Amp

The little Roland Micro Cube almost buried amongst the paraphernalia of playing.

Between Christmas and New Year I‘m visiting with my parents. On previous visits, I‘ve brought a varying amount of guitar gear in order to use free time I have here for practising and also inflicting some new pieces I learned on my relatives. As I‘m seldom content with only one acoustic guitar, these transports almost invaribly turned me into my own roadie, not to speak of the limited space my Kia offers. So this time, I tried out a minuscule amp, the Roland Micro Cube. No worries in the packing department there. It is small and sturdily made and so light that people hang it from a guitar strap and go play for change on the High Street with it (it can be powered with 4 AA batteries). Once you hear that, it is a reasonable assumption that this is one of these little pseudo amps that seem to result from a generous application of shrink ray on your typical Marshall stack, Vox or Orange amp, loosing any pretention of tone or volume in the process. But this one is different. Firstly, it is plenty loud enough. Here in Germany, this has earned it the nickname „Brüllwürfel“ (shout cube). And about the tone: electronically it emulates

an acoustic guitar: this never works

a clean Jazz amp: very good for chordwork accompagnying folk songs etc.

a Fender Blackface: here you can dial in some overdrive with the gain pot

a Vox amp: another kind of overdrive on tap here

a Marshall stack: now it starts to sustain and sing

a Mesa Boogie amp: still more overdrive here for heavy work, but dial back the gain and you‘re in Texas Blues land

All these tones are eerily realistic. Of course, with a speaker as small as this, the bass frequencies don‘t carry so far, but if you sit in front of it you get a close approximation to the real thing. There are built-in effects, too, of which I like Chorus, Flanger, and Delay best. It takes external effects well, too. As you can see above, I put a tc electronic Hall of Fame Reverb in front of it. As you can‘t, I also used an Electro Hamonix Crying tone wah (that one warrants it‘s own post). And, believe it or not, that was enough to realistically imitate Hendrix‘ Woodstock version of the „Star-Spangled Banner“. Wouldn‘t have believed it myself.

The Marshall Plan, Carried Out

Ok, this is how deep the rabbit hole goes…

Spotlight on my new Marshall JVM410H

I feel like I’ve made a commitment to guitar playing by this investment. I’ve had a Marshall plan for a long time,

Tone vs. Cost

Fender Champion 600

This is rather embarrassing. You see, I got a very inexpensive tube amp by Fender called the Champion 600. Man, does it have tone!

For Tone

No surprises here; GAS hits again.

As a beginning guitar player, you can only practice so much before your fingertips begin to bleed. But when you’re finished with your scales, powerchords, hammer-ons and pull-offs for the day, you still can

Lil’ Train, Big Voice

Outer appearances will sometimes deceive. You’d think this little piece of chromed grating on a base of tube electronics with chicken head knobs would be no more than a lame excuse for an amp, but the real kick is the lil Night Train’s range of tones. It goes from jingly and rather clean to full-on tube crunch with a few obvious settings on the dials. I have mine wired up to the speaker in my Fender Super Champ XD combo amp. The amp section in that combo luckily is connected to the speaker “downstairs” by a proper speaker cable in a plug, accessible from the rear.

Dead-on Slogan

The box it came in on

I was wrong (again!) in thinking that one could do with a virtual guitar amp.