Ol Pal, I've heard very nice things about Kemper and Axe FX. - But this is all I need:
 

 
If I feel like doing something a bit wilder, I'll throw in a second mic.
 
After all the time I've spent trying various emulations of various amps - some of which I was familiar with in real life, some of which I'd only heard on records, other which I'd never heard - at the end of the day, I'm a Marshall kind of guy. Besides one Fender amp, they're all I've ever played and recorded.
 
A Les Paul into a Marshall and I'm happy. Or a strat. But that's the crucial, core sound I need. I'll even take a solid-state Marshall before a model of a tube Marshall. 
 
For the rest, I can live w/ models. A tele-type of sound through a Vox-type of amp? I'd be happy w/ a Variax and a POD or JamVox. A strat through a Twin? Give me a Yamaha Pacifica and Amplitube or Guitar Rig and it'll be close enough for me. Point being that stuff like Kemper and Axe FX would be overkill for me, because these aren't my main thing, they're just like embellishments for me. A touch of this and that here and there.
 
The one other type of amp which I could maybe see myself agonize over would be a high gain amp, like a Rectifier. They aren't my main thing, but I certainly can use that kind of sound on some stuff, and that's one where models fail in most cases. I guess I'd simply borrow one or buy one if it became necessary.
 
Rimshot,
 
My feelings, exactly. First test I did was a quick thing using my cheap AKG condenser because I was anxious to get everything hooked up and that's the closest thing I had. That mic is far from ideal to record electric guitars - or anything for that matter. And yet, that mic shoved real quick in front of my smaller Marshall and I was already hearing something familiar. I didn't feel as clueless as I often do w/ amp sims. Real and and real mics react in a way that I can actually understand and the way I react to them actually works. It's not like starting from scratch every time you want to change a little thing.
 

The reason I'm usually so disagreeable about the amp sims is that I never stopped playing real amps.
 
Not only that but I bought a house and an out building in the country 20 years ago so we can play real amps here at any time of the day at any volume we want.
 
It's FUN!
 
I have spent the past 35 years figuring which amps I think sound great and which sound good.
 
Then I bought or built a collection of amps that sound great. I then went crazy and starting buying and commissioning the construction of custom built speakers so I have collection of speakers that represent the history of the voices of rock and roll, blues, and jazz. (oh yeah metal... in my feeble mind that's just a sub category of rock)
 
I also have all those cool analog pedals folks talk about.
 
Folks reading this surely think I'm crazy... or happen to hate what ever amp I happen to like etc. etc. Millions of dollars have been spent to sway peoples pre conceived opinions about amps etc.
 
My opinions were formed from having worked with 100s of bands at live shows and thus hearing many 100s of amps. Some were great some were not. All of them got their best shot of impressing me and I slowly experienced and became aware of the field of choice. That's why my opinions sometimes seem strong on the subject... I'm fairly well informed with first hand experience.
 
Having said that... I DO NOT DISCOUNT anyone else's experience... and in fact always have to humbly remind folks that I am fully aware that almost every one plays guitar better than I do. I drive amps with a guitar. That's sort of what I do. I just happen to know loads of fantastic guitarists. Many are here at the forum.
 
What happens at my place these days is that my guests bring over their gear, start playing mine, and then I have to wipe the drool off their chins. They know it as soon as they hear it.
 
It's really really FUN!
 
Then there are little things like facts. A few, well more than a few, of my amps, are Class A design. You will never get the sound of a Class A amp out of an amp with a different design. NEVER. 
 
What that means is that most modeling amps will never sound like a Class A amp... they sound like recordings of a Class A amp. Bummer.
 
Here is an opinion; Class A amps are the most fun to play because they don't have ANY cross over distortion and you get a full sweet sound. It's always easy to make it dirty and that sounds great too.
 
I'm sure that Kemper, or the next Kemper will eventually offer a Class A design option... it's inevitable that someone with the money will demand that sound. Class A is the most expensive part per watt design so it's unlikely that any price point modelers will ever offer it. Maybe someone will suggest a Class A preamp for direct recording. If it's not Class A start to finish... it doesn't sound Class A. It'll be useful to stay aware of that detail when the modeling amps start advertising Class A as a deluxe feature.
 
 
So any ways... I can imagine why a session cat in Nashville trying to work 3, 4 hour shifts a day at 3 different studios may want to drag a Kemper around. It is business and I pretty much agree with the idea that most of the important stuff is in your fingers. I don't imagine it's a fun as cutting loose on an actual guitar amp.
 
 
I think the fun part will keep people hungry for the best of the guitar amps (and speakers) for years to come.
 
 
Rock on!
 
:-)
 
best regards,
mike

At first glance I'm thinking..... I wonder what the cab driver thought about that...... then I came to reality..... a guitar cab-inet.... duhhhh.
 
So, back in the day, all we did on stage was hang the mic over the amp, and let it dangle in front of a speaker... that's OK if it's an omni directional mic... usually it wasn't..... if we had money, we actually had a mic stand and jammed it into a speaker as demonstrated in post #11. At least the mic and speaker were "on axis"......No consideration for the fact that it may or many not be in the sweet spot..... "can you hear it?" ..... was the only consideration. No wonder so many bands had horrible sounding guitars, live..... I used to dread listening to our "board tapes".....

I don't know jack about the electronics side of guitar amps.  Anymore than I know about current automotive technology.  So I can't gainsay Mike's contention regarding class A amps.  I wouldn't even begin to know how.  Dim bulb me.  But I do know that many of the amps that have been profiled with the Kemper have been class A and the users of those amps (guitarists, producers, engineers) in actual side by side comparisons at the time of the profiling could not tell the profiled amp from the real one.  A/B ing them real time side by side.  I do agree though that this is only the first "Kemper" and that technology will continue to evolve and improve.  And I'm also pretty sure it's always dangerous to use words like "never" when discussing technology.  It eventually comes back to bite you in the butt.
 

Yes, I remember back in 1982 when a guy at a guitar store told me with great confidence that I'd never be able to buy a new tube amp again.
 
I just smiled at him like I was a village idiot... and then kept looking for more tube stuff. :-)
 
all the best,
mike
 
 

I have just experienced working with a guitar amp and getting really great results. I have just completed producing four songs for a pop singer and I used electric guitars pretty heavily all over this. I was lucky to be able to hire a very talented and nice player who had a custom made amp built along the lines of a Fender Twin but modified to do more. It still had a powerful valve amp and twin speaker system. It sounded amazing in real life in conjunction with his pedal setup.
 
I have got this Shure PE75L vocal mike with quite a nice sound and when I put it on a guitar amp it just sounds great. I mic the cone on the edge pointing down toward the centre. The mic has a gentle rise in freq response from 1K to 5K and then a dip from 6-8K. It seems to marry well with close miced guitar speakers. Once a great guitar is plugged in and some decent sounding pedals I find it incredibly easy to get a great guitar sound printed to the DAW. The sound in front of the amp was deep, glassy, clean, fat just everything. The compression is already there, the crunch. the power, the effects etc all of it. If you set up a freq curve to offset the response of the mic in your DAW, an even warmer sound results. I find those tracks very easy to blend into a mix.
 
For rhythm parts I like to record two rhythm guitar parts playing the same part but just doubled. ie not exactly the same. This rocks when the timing of the player is very tight. Those two parts will sound like one but very wide. On the second overdub we changed the guitar amp settings, pedals and guitar in some cases. He was using a telecaster a lot which I like because of the versatility of the sounds that can come out of it. He also had a big Jazz guitar with humbuckers on it and that rocked being cranked in that amp as well.
 
We did clean rhythm guitars in pairs like this and also more crunchy ones and just some downright rude ones too! The distortion sounds coming out were huge as well. It is great when the guitarist knows how to create a great distortion sound feeding into such a clean system afterwards. It is great to record the amp very loud too. Another sound.
 
I also got him to record a third identical part but recorded that direct from the guitar into a DI. I ran this track often into an amp/cab sim and the one I like the most is Head Case that Danny Danzi had some involvement with the development of it. That VST sounds amazing. I can pull a killer sound out of it in seconds. It has got twin guitar amp heads and speakers so you can create a giant stereo setup too! I love it Danny! This third guitar from the guitar sim can be mixed in now at lower level with the other two forming a three pronged rhythm guitar part. This third part can be very stereo and wide if you want it to be as well. The total rhythm thing sounds huge and fat and wide. This guy could nail his own playing so perfectly too it was uncanny.
 
In the final mix I would send all three of those guitars to a bus for some final processing over the whole sound. (Pultec EQ perhaps and some final compression to keep things under control)

the problem for me, with the whole amp modeler and sim situation, is that they sound flat to me.
 
maybe not in the mix, but while tracking, or just practicing, something ALWAYS seems missing.
 
 
 
and
 
the biggest thing of all:
 
 
the interaction between the sim and the monitors and the guitar.
 
there isn't any.
 
there is a de-coupling there, that i simply cannot abide.
 
 
i want air pushing..... off of moving speakers...... and resonance from a cabinet, due to the acoustics of the box and proximity in the room...
 
i want a 3d effect...
 
and i want to feel air vibrate.
 
i want organic interaction between the sound waves coming off the rig, and the feel of those soundwaves hitting the body of the guitar, and the strings, the whole thing.
 
 
that
 
 
is where the magic is.
 
 
i NEVER feel that...... when i play a sim or modeler.
 
 

  
 One thing I have recently discovered through trial and error is that there needed to be some small boost between my POD and my interface. Even though I was putting the signal into the instrument inputs on my interface it wasn't enough.  I used a small pre amp I had laying around. Nothing high dollar. I can't wait to try it in my new stuff. The impedences match up pretty close. I only drove the pre slightly but it was enough to make a huge difference in the tone. The pre is designed to take a  signal from a standard mic cable. I used the pad switch on my HD500 to reduce the output to an acceptable level, fed it to the the pre in mono and the pre splits it to stereo because it has on board stereo effects. I simply took that output into my interface...what a difference it made.
 
 I am forced to record guitar the way I do basically because of the noise and the lack of a correct room to track an amp in unless I pull cables into other rooms. In my case the process is much easier to go from a thought to a finished track using simms. I undoubtedly loose some of the effect you get from playing a real amp. If pushed in a corner I can track  my amp but it isn't easy to do here. I don't think I loose anything at the end though, if I do it right which I haven't been. I'm not sure exactly how but I seem to get harmonic feedback when I play without a real amp. I am guessing that even digitally translated sound can be re introduced into the chain via the monitors,or maybe it's some slick programming that makes it feel that way. After doing things the wrong way for awhile I think I'm beginning  to sort out what I need to do and hopefully it will make a difference in the future.
  
 That Kemper seems like the thing to have for unlimited capability. A modeler no matter who makes it is simply the capture of a real amp crunched into numbers and then stored in a computer. The quality of the capture and the way the capture is replayed  has a lot to do with the outcome. All simms are not created equal. To me the best simms are the ones that not only sound like but BEHAVE like a real amp in a linear way. It is one thing to capture the sound and another to make the sound respond to the player the same way as the amp. I think that eventually we will come to the point where the model improves on the amp. This has already happened with keyboards. You can go further than you ever could with the hardware version. 
 
 Arguably you can do things with a simm that are next to impossible with a real amp. Maybe they aren't the things that matter to some and maybe they are. Noone with a laptop running Sonar and  GR5 and a pair of headphones will get the experience that can be had with a real amp. Like most things... Pros and Cons. Just as there can be weak links in running a total analog guitar setup there can be weak links in the simm chain, all the way from user to everything in between. Just my .00002
 
 

That's the thing about the Kemper...it seems to have cracked the code...it does push the air...it does behave like a regular amp...and now, with the new 600 watt power amp version, is an actual performance amp.  When player after player, producer after producer, engineer after engineer all are dumbstruck by it in realworld side by side comparisons using their own amps and setups...and most of these guys don't really want it to work...they are wary of "amp sims" at the least and hate them at the worst...but when time after time they have to admit they can't tell the difference it may be time to admit that a new paradigm has arrived.  If you have not watched any of the many Kemper video profiling sessions and demos on YouTube I'd suggest you do. 
 
To any gigging guitarist...especially touring bands who carry large complex rigs...the ability to have their whole night's setups in a light-weight box the size of a tackle box will be a godsend.  And it's definitely going to put a crimp in the cartage folks bottom line in Nashburg. 
 
And, it's only going to get better.
 
Penny Farthings, anyone??
 
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0SmSl1aS1w
 
here's one to get you started...there are a ton more.
 

The Kemper is a dynamic convolution processor that uses several IRs so as to represent a range of reactivity.
 
That is why it sounds less stale than convolution processors that only use a single IR.
 
Old fashioned analog circuits have an INFINITE number of IRs.
 
It is pretty darn simple.
 
best regards,
mike