Welcome to the Kramer Forum

This weekend, I pickup an Atomic Amplifire off CL. I've been hearing some great things about it for years, and the price was right, so I jumped on it.

http://atomicamps.com/amplifire-pedal/




I have an Eleven Rack, and was planning on making a comparison between the 2 units and making a decision on which to keep.

The stock patches suck ass. But, that's exactly what I thought about the Eleven Rack, which has been my mainstay for years now. The thing that made me realize the potential of the Eleven Rack was the singtall patches. I bought them, and used some of those patches as a base to create my own sounds.

I downloaded the singtall demo sounds for the Atomic Amplifire, and was incredibly unimpressed with them. The patches that were based on the 11R patches I use weren't even close to sounding as good as the 11R patches. I grew concerned.

But after checking out some other demo patches, I'm sure I'll be able to dial in some sounds that I really like.

The software that comes with the unit is very well done. It displays the incredible depth of the options in this unit. The number of options is staggering.

After a little learning curve, I'll be doing some comparisons, and posting the results.

LIKES:

Sounds
Size of the unit (about the size of 3 or 4 pedals)
The depth of the parameter tweaking
The software

DISLIKES:

No power button
USB Connection is a little slow. Took almost a half hour to update the firmware, and another to make a full backup of the patches.

_________________
"Women and music...I'm always amazed at other people's choices" - David Lee Roth

After a couple of weeks with the AA3, I am all in. The IR Cabinet functionality put me over the edge. I can't believe I haven't used them before getting the AA3.

I recently watched a few hours of tutorials on creating Guitar Tone Matches IR Cabinets. There's a nice learning curve to doing it correctly. There are a lot of steps involved, but when you do it correctly, you have the EXACT tone from the record.

Without going into too much detail, I used an isolated guitar track of Dokken's In My Dreams. I used a patch that I created that gave me the sound that was "in the ballpark" of Lynch's tone, but not exact. I used the isolated track, and a track of me playing the lead using my patch into my daw, and did an EQ match.

After that, I was able to create a IR cabinet that transformed my existing tone to match Lynch's tone exactly (from that lead). After creating the IR cabinet, I imported it into the AA3, then applied that cabinet to the patch that I used for the match. It gave me the exact tone from the record.

I'm still in the learning stage, where there are times when I have a problem creating the correct sound. But each time I screw up, I learn what NOT to do. :)

The whole IR cabinet creation, in itself, is like jumping into the rabbit hole. Once you create one, you want to create one for every song you play. It doesn't take long to create (barring mistakes, like mine), and the results are fantastic.

The more I play with the AA3, the more I like it. The whole IR cabinet thing puts this pedal into a whole new class from the Eleven Rack.

I seem to use the Eleven Rack now, only to see what tones I want to move into the AA3. Everything I've read about the AA are exactly correct. It is in the class with the AxeFx, et al.

I absolutely love it.

_________________
"Women and music...I'm always amazed at other people's choices" - David Lee Roth

Just a note on my findings from yesterday:

I found one (fixable) problem when doing matching EQ IRs. You are matching the guitar sound from the finished, mastered recording, which has been EQ'd to make each instrument stand out.

Last night, I made a preset of George Lynch's solo from Dokken's - The Hunter, which has a great guitar sound.....in the mix. I got the exact tone. When I played the lead with it, it was the exact tone, but sounded a little thin. I then played the preset with the backing track, and it sounded perfect (other than my playing, I mean). It fit perfectly and it was the tone from the song.

The problem was that the patch was great for leads with a backing track, but was basically unusable for anything else. I started playing around with the patch's EQs, and the amp settings, and was able to make it a usable patch for normal playing without a backing track (or band).

So, even though the EQ IR matching is an incredibly powerful tool, it is not a perfect solution. You will still need to tweak the preset afterwards.

_________________
"Women and music...I'm always amazed at other people's choices" - David Lee Roth

As much as I loved the Amplifire, I sold it. The offer price was good enough to cover the difference of what I had in my guitar gear stash for a Kemper.

Kemper review coming soon.

_________________
"Women and music...I'm always amazed at other people's choices" - David Lee Roth